But have our workplace attitudes caught up and is a more collaborative approach needed from employee and employer?
It is time workplace attitudes changed to recognise the massive changes that have taken place in family practices in the 21st century".
Women have to return to work, and yet workplace attitudes and practices have not shifted adequately enough to accommodate the new needs of families.
Michael Rennie, a McKinsey director, says the firm is using sophisticated statistical and polling methods to track both shifts in workplace attitudes like loyalty and feeling part of a team and gauges of corporate performance, like output.
At the beginning of the 70s, Powellism was still a force in workplace attitudes, but the Post Office was more or less a multiracial enclave where there were black supervisors and union officials.
Saucedo, Leticia M. and Morales, Maria Cristina (2012) "Voices without Law: The Border Crossing Stories and Workplace Attitudes of Immigrants," Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy: Vol. 21 : Iss. 3, Article 5.
In one of the book's most arresting examples, she cites a comparison of workplace attitudes, behavior and standards in a county where judges "routinely punished defendants and attorneys for bringing a case to trial and a county where they did not".
Beyond causing headaches for their employers, the lawsuits are serving notice that the battle over "family values" is no longer just about gay marriage and abortion: it's also about workplace attitudes that some advocates believe do significantly more to undermine family life than those controversial practices do.
However, as recent research has shown, workplace attitudes towards working mothers have been slow to change, with the result that even now, some 38 years after sex discrimination legislation was first introduced in the UK, alarmingly high numbers of working mothers report having experienced discrimination at work.
