商务英语综合课程 (7).pdf

Work-life Balance1In the spring of 2000,Elizabeth Stoeber,an ambitious 32-year-old investment banker atMorgan Stanley,flew to California to visit a client in the throes of a multibillion-dollar stockdeal.The technology boom was under way,and Ms.Stoeber was on a roll;she was working on ahigh-profile deal in a profession she adored.With her in first class was her 9-month-old son;incoach sat her German nanny.By Ms.Stoebers account,it was an ideal time.During the day,she visited investors;at night,she used a company car to cruise around Beverly Hillswith her son.“I thought I was making itwork,”Ms.Stoeber,now 39,recalls.She had a successful career in the cut-throat,male-dominated world of banking,a happy family,a good marriage and a supportive boss.Within a year,things had fallen out of balance.Resenting handing her sons childhood over tonannies,she accepted a job as chief operating officer within Morgan Stanleys media bankinggroup,an administrative post that allowed her to work part time.That plan fizzled.“Off”daysended up as afternoons in the park doing business on her cellphone while her son begged her toplay.When the tech bubble burst in 2000,Morgan Stanley cut her job.To stay,she would have hadto reconsider full-time work.Yet three days a week was already a struggle.In 2001,Ms.Stoeberleft Wall Street.Since then,she has started a consulting firm and now works for a boutiqueinvestment bank.“I was absolutely determined to stay professionally attractive,”she said.Now she wants to rejoin bankings major leagues.And her timing should be perfect:WallStreet says it is looking at women like Ms.Stoeber with new interest,hoping to rehire those wholeft for personal reasons while continuing to woo new female recruits.But getting back on track on Wall Street has proven more difficult than Ms.Stoeber,or thebanks seeking her services,might have imagined.Although banks are doing much more thanpaying lip service to the notion of retaining women or enticing them back to work,executives saylong-term success means fundamentally changing the way Wall Street works.Women remain theminority sex on the Street and many young recruits say they have grown more circumspect abouta career there.The Street says it wants to change all of this,not simply because it is socially expedient butbecause the financial world needs a diverse work force to make money and court clients especially when clients themselves are not homogeneous.“You cant build a great companywithout great people,and great people are not just white,straight men aged 25 to 40,”said JoeGregory,president of Lehman Brothers.Womens aversion to intersecting with Wall Street appears to be mounting.Bank executivessay fewer female M.B.A.s are choosing careers on the Street,and the banks also say they havehad limited success stanching the flow of women who leave midcareer.Of course,not all womenleave to raise a family.Some elect to care for parents who are aging or ill;others seek alternativecareers with more manageable hours.Investment banks and brokerage firms typically lose women when they are in their 30s,executives say.Expected to ramp up to reach coveted managing director jobs,many women feel1This text is adapted from“Wall Streets Women Face a Fork in the Road”,The New York Times,August 6,2006.that midlevel jobs offer them little while demanding a lot.Pulled to have children and pushed by aless-than-rewarding workplace and often uninspired midlevel management,they leave.For their part,female financiers have become more aggressive about demanding fulfillingcareers and family lives,and they say they are willing to walk away from firms that fail to meetthose needs.And like Ms.Stoeber,some of them want to return to the Street.Sitting in her comfortable home in South Orange,N.J.,Ms.Stoeber,blonde and blue-eyed,reminisces about investment banking with all the lan and nostalgia of an athlete recallingOlympic victories.She proudly trots out two awards bankers win for successful deals anddisplays them on her coffee table as she explains her days on the Street.“I loved my job,beingaround these incredibly intelligent people,the incredible level of responsibility.It was a realprivilege,”she recalls.“It was all-encompassing.”And after seven years of marriage,she and her husband were contemplating having children.“I had this little voice that kept saying,If you dont have children,you will always regret it,”shesaid.“I worked for the most incredible firms and with some of the best minds in finance,but thevoice was getting louder.”A headhunter invited her to interview at Morgan Stanley for an investment-banking job.Sheliked the team and could travel less while working on big deals.She took the job.Five monthslater,she was pregnant,which she said delighted her colleagues.“It was such an exciting time in the markets and everyone was excited for me,”she said.“Ifelt I became a real person in the senior bankers eyes,a more substantial person.I wasnt part ofthe sea of single people marching through.”Ms.Stoeber traveled throughout her pregnancy,including a trip to Germany in her finaltrimester when her ankles were so swollen she had to waddle to the baggage claim.It nevercrossed her mind to stop working.But then her children grew older,she became uncomfortablyreliant on her nannies,and her priorities shifted.Today,Ms.Stoeber hopes that banks are serious about recruiting women like her.But,for allof Wall Streets best intentions when it comes to recruiting women,the structure of the businessoften appears to drive the sexual diversity of its work force.While many women look to flexibleschedules and part-time work to overcome Wall Streets grind,those ideas do not often meld wellwith around-the-clock client service.Women are not the only ones seeking balance.Students and executives say that men thebedrock of the Streets work force are also increasingly shunning 80-hour workweeks,even ifthey love and are devoted to banking careers.Speaking to Harvard Business Schools graduatingclass this spring,Henry M.Paulson Jr.,then the chief executive of Goldman Sachs and now theTreasury secretary,asserted that work-life balance should be an important element in everyindividuals life.It remains to be seen if the banks will succeed in finding ways to integrate women like Ms.Stoeber,whose enthusiasm and patience derive from her uniquely positive experience on theStreet.For the armies of women who faced discrimination,overt or discreet,Wall Street hasalready lost the battle.Finding a place for even Ms.Stoeber has proved challenging.She and one of her partners atTobin Advisors,the North Carolina investment banking boutique where she now works,haveproposed an arrangement to a number of banks that reflects the kind of flexibility that banks saythey embrace:she and her partner will share a full-time job at a bank and then split theirresponsibilities.So far,no banks have accepted her proposal.“Firms say they love it,but its hard for them tosay,Well do it,”she said.“They say,We have a full-time job.”Many banks have arrangements similar to the one Ms.Stoeber is proposing,but they grantthem to senior female executives usually managing directors who have the tenure,clients andrevenue to justify special treatment.And Ms.Stoeber is aware that she is not in that category.Early one recent afternoon in South Orange,Ms.Stoebers nanny returned home with herson,who eagerly showed off his Lex Luthor cards.She gave him a hug and checked to see if hehad remembered to bring his backpack home from camp.When he left,she continued to talk about her choices in life.She savored details about hertwo kids,the rewards of banking,and the split personality she sometimes feels working part timeas she shifts from the sandbox to the boardroom.She said she was happy with her priorities.“The travel,the places Ive been,the people Ive worked with I wouldnt trade it foranything,”she said.“The only question is whether I can have it again.”(Total Words:1368)Notes to the Text1Morgan Stanleyis an American multinational financial services corporation headquarteredin the Morgan Stanley Building,Midtown Manhattan,New York City.2Beverly Hills is one of the most affluent cities in the world,and is located in the western partof LosAngeles County,California,United States.3Wall Street is a street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan,New York City.The term“Wall Street”is now used a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole,the American financial sector(even if financial firms are not physically located there),or NewYork-based financial interests.4Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.was a global financial services firm.Before declaringbankruptcy in 2008,Lehman was the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States(behind Goldman Sachs,Morgan Stanley,and Merrill Lynch).5South Orange,officially the Township of South Orange Village,is a suburban township inEssex County,New Jersey,United States.