1 
 
Marjut Jyrkinen, University of Helsinki, Finland; marjut.jyrkinen@helsinki.fi  
 
Charlotta Niemistö, Hanken School of Economics, Finland; charlotta.niemisto@hanken.fi 
 
Jeff Hearn, Hanken School of Economics, Finland; Örebro University, Sweden; and 
University of Huddersfield, UK, jeff.hearn@hanken.fi 
 
 
Career, Care and Time: 
Women top managers in the intersections of age, gender, and work/family 
 
Abstract: This chapter addresses the intersections of age, gender, and work/family relations, 
and how these intersections relate to careers, care, and the structuring of time more generally 
in the lives of women in high managerial positions. We examine how women top managers in 
different ages perceive their work/care relations. These questions closely relate to individual 
life stages and phases of career and care responsibilities, as well as the aged/gendered societal 
and organisational expectations of the “ideal worker” and the “ideal carer”. We draw the 
analysis from three sets of interview data in order to examine the perceptions of care 
responsibilities as well as aged/gendered managerial work in the context of work/non-work 
and long term career prospects. 
 
Introduction  
The focus of this chapteri is on the intersections of age, gender, and work/family relations, and 
how these intersections relate to careers, care, and the structuring of time more generally in the 
lives of women in high managerial positions. Age, age-related issues, and their intersections 
with other social divisions are central in working life, and in how work, careers, organisations 
in and around work are constructed. Yet they still remain relatively neglected in studies of 
work, and even more so in studies of organisations (Niemistö et. al. 2016). Age, as biological 
or chronological, or indeed social, is something everyone seems to ‘possess’, but the social 
experience and perception of age is constantly changing and intersecting with other social 
divisions and experiences. Age has also been analysed as cognitive age based on subjective 
feelings of age (Barak and Schiffman 1980), or as socially constructed cultural age that impacts 
on consuming and marketing (Suokannas 2011). Fineman argues (2011: 2) that age is an 
essential element and dimension of organising, even a powerful ‘master discourse’. Moore 
(2009: 656) highlights that age is socially, historically and culturally specific and impacts on 
(older) women’s working life experiences and career development. 
The intersection of age and care can be significant in the construction of shifting life situations 
and life stages, and their understanding. The gendering of care also means that these situations 
and stages are often doubly anchored in the experience of both work (as career stage) and home 
in lives of women, both on a day-to-day basis, and over the life course. More specifically, in 
this chapter we address how women top managers experience different life stages through time 
and care demands in their aged and gendered career phases. The trends towards and culture of 
long-hours, ‘presenteeism’ (Cooper 1998), demanding and ‘greedy’ organisations (Coser 
1974), and relative inflexible work patterns are all crucial parts of the dominant western(ised) 
or globalized work culture in managerial positions.  
Furthermore, the well-established, and still persisting, career models of management positions 
are built on (masculine) assumptions of an ‘ideal worker’ or ‘ideal manager’ (Whyte 1956; 
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Kanter 1977; Acker 1990; Collinson and Hearn 1994; Wajcman 1998; Williams 2000; Tienari 
et al. 2010). This can easily negatively affect the career development of womenii, in part 
because of these perceptions, but also because women still take care of the majority of care 
responsibilities in households (Hearn et al. 2008; Hearn and Niemistö 2012; Jyrkinen and 
McKie 2012). For example, according to a large study by Statistics Finland 2009-2010 on time 
used for work and housework in Finland, a country ranked as less gender unequal than 
most, women’s whole working hours (work and housework) per week was 41 hours, and that 
of men 38 hours. Women use 3.5 hours and men 2.5 hours per day to housework; women in 
particular for care of children, cooking and dishes and washing (68%); men for maintenance 
and repair at home (63%) (Pääkkönen 2013). Significant greater gender differences are to be 
found elsewhere in many European countries (The Role of Men in Gender Equality 2013). The 
nature of the support of the possible partner and other family members, as well as various close 
friends, is still key to women in management positions (Heikkinen et al. 2014; Heikkinen 
2015). It is in this social context that we are interested in how women in top management 
experience their work and ‘non-work’ in their careers, and the blurring of the boundaries 
between work and non-work through variable gendered control of time and care 
responsibilities.  
In making sense of the individual stories of women managers and the emerging patterns across 
countries, we have found it useful to locate their managerial careers as embedded within several 
broad social fields or ‘scapes’. Thus the analysis of individual women’s managerial experiences 
of work and life builds on theoretical frameworks of scapes, as developed by Arjun Appadurai 
(1996) to grasp the new global cultural economy. Such “scapes” (emphasising fluidity of and 
across spaces) include ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, ideoscapes, and 
mediascapes. In this paper, we focus on three further scapes, namely, careerscapes, 
organisational carescapes, and timescapes, which we now introduce.    
Career and careerscapes 
Conceptualisations of career have often been limited in their assumptions about work, gender 
and time (Hearn, 1977). The linear, strongly upwards directing and uninterrupted career model 
has been widely criticised by gender scholars, partly because many women’s career paths do 
not often follow this pattern (see Hall 2002; Mainiero and Sullivan 2005; Burke 2007). Cohen 
et al. (2004, p. 409) assert that:   
a career is not conceptualised as a form or structure that an individual temporarily 
inhabits, constraining or enabling her in her journey. Rather, it is constituted by the 
actor herself, in interaction with others, as she moves through time and space. However, 
this is not to suggest that individuals have a free rein as to how they enact their careers 
... It is an iterative and on-going process, involving at times the reproduction of existing 
structures and at times their transformation.   
Careers, in this context women’s careers, can be usefully elucidated through the concept of 
‘careerscapes’ (McKie et al. 2013). Careerscapes refer to changing landscapes of women’s 
careers through time and different responsibilities of care; the concept of careerscapes 
highlights broad temporal and spatial dimensions, patterns and rhythms in women’s careers. It 
offers an analytical framework to examine gendered structures and processes in people’s lives, 
and how people move through these experiences, drawing upon memories, experiences and 
speculations about working life and work-life interfaces. These are not linear processes, but 
multi-faceted and interlinked to rhythms of personal, family and care dimensions that change 
with age. Careerscapes build on the understanding that our imaginary landscapes are, above 
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all, gendered, but also permeated with other differences and inequalities including social class, 
ethnicity and age.  
Care and organisation carescapes  
Care is highly gendered (Tronto 1993; McKie et al. 2008). As already mentioned, women still 
carry the majority of care responsibilities in households. Although women in top positions tend 
to have fewer children than their men counterparts (Hearn et al. 2008), they easily carry the 
‘double-burden’ (see, for instance, Still and Timms 1998; Bittman and Wajcman 2000), as they 
in different life stages care for children but also for their own parents and those of the spouse, 
maybe even other elderly relatives, friends, own spouse, and grandchildren.  
The social relations of care, home and work represent some of the most fundamental aspects 
of gender relations in the society (Orloff 1993; Hearn et al. 2006: 117). There is often a gap 
between research on macro-level policies for work and care, and policies and practices at the 
organisational level (Lewis 2006: 387). Even if our study does not include an analysis of 
‘contrasts of contexts’ (Esping-Andersen 2009), we acknowledge some differences in care 
ideologies between the (Western) countries that our case respondents come from, and these 
affect the way individual women and men perceive their ability to ‘do gender’ in their careers 
and at home. In examining these issues, ‘organisation carescapes’ is an analytical tool for ‘the 
identification and critical exploration of the topic of ‘care’ in a range of work place and related 
contexts’ (McKie et al. 2008: 8). Within different organisation carescapes there are multiple 
and multi-faceted ways in which employee policies and practices can support and/or control 
workers.  
Time and timescapes 
There are many forms of time and temporal forms: time ticks remorselessly for us all, everyday 
and through every moment. Time passes by, and at times one might feel that issues in the past 
should have been done differently, or one should have done more. What do I do at the moment 
– or should I be doing something else? Time is precious, and in some senses limited. Time is 
central in the intersections of work and non-work, as well as in the balancing act between these 
spheres, still often presented as separate from each other (Nippert-Eng 1996). Often, discourses 
around the balancing act are gender-blind, and construct it as taking place at the individual 
level, focusing on ‘individual choice’ to allocate time and effort from work to something else, 
such as care responsibilities or ‘life’ in general, and thus neglecting gendered and other 
organisational constraints (Lewis et al. 2006: 363-366). The concept of ‘timescapes’ (Adam 
1998) broadens common understandings of time as linear, clock-time and calendar time 
towards the time experienced when we reflect on past, present and future at one and the same 
time; our time perspectives are gendered and marked by, amongst other things, our age, 
relationship, familial status, and social situation and characteristics.   
Method 
Our data consists of eight interviews with women in top management positions in Australia, 
Finland, Ireland, and the UK/Scotland. Our sample is gathered from three different data sets 
from research projects that examined the work-life balance of knowledge workers and 
managers in large B2B-organisationsiii, work/family reconciliation policies in organisationsiv, 
and age and gender in women managers’ careersv. We revisit these data sets of interview data 
in order to examine the perceptions of care responsibilities, as well as aged/gendered 
managerial work in the context of work/non-work and long term career prospects. The 
interviews have included very similar themes, yet the exact questions have been somewhat 
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different. When choosing to include cases from different countries, our aim has not been to do 
a comparison between the countries, but rather to elaborate the chosen data – eight case studies 
– through existing knowledge on gender and leadership. We introduce these women more in 
detail in Table 1 (attached in the end of this article version). All the names are pseudonyms.  
 
The 8 interviewees cover different ages/generations of women managers: in their 30s, 40s, 50s 
and 60s.We have chosen two female top managers from each age/generation group, and these 
‘pairs’ are always from different countries. The work they do is relatively similar – managing 
and leading as knowledge intensive work – although the sectors of their work vary from service 
sector to accounting, banking and B2B. We wanted to include women with no children and up 
to even three children, the latter which is relatively atypical for women managers in any 
country. We develop our method of analysis from earlier work (Jyrkinen and McKie 2012) 
using Crompton’s (2001) approach to comparative research with biographical matching. 
Instead of generalisations on, or even stereotyping of, countries, their legislation, policies, and 
‘contrasts of contexts’ (Esping-Andersen 2009), we consider the similarities between women 
in top management through their individual stories. We focus our analysis on the hurdles and 
opportunities, seen within the contexts of power relations that are embedded in the lives and 
careers of the interviewees, with examinations of: first, age, careers, and care; and then the 
relations of time, work, and ‘non-work’.  
Care, careers, and age  
Issues around age, time and care are much present in women managers’ everyday life as well 
as in their actual working life activities and duties. Women in top managerial jobs tend to have 
less children than their men colleagues. For instance, in a study on women and men top 
managers by Hearn et al. (2008) men had ‘average sized’ families or bigger families. In that 
Finnish study where most worked in international companies, men top managers often had 
‘housewives’ or their spouses worked only part-time (Hearn et al. 2016). The situation was the 
same for male top managers in the project examining work-life balance of knowledge workers 
and managers in large B2B-organisations, from which some data is used in this chapter (ibid.). 
Women top managers were more often single or divorced and had often only one child or no 
children (Hearn et al. 2008). Interestingly, in our dataset, we have female managers with more 
than one child – two of eight respondents had 3 children, which can be considered a fairly large 
family. On the other hand, the female top managers in our data that had children also had, at 
least a relatively supportive, spouse, even if the spouses also pursue a career. Thus, these 
women could be thought of as ‘mother-managers’, with particular responsibilities and 
demands, in something of a contrast to ‘father managers’ who tend not to participate much in 
care (Hearn and Niemistö 2012). 
The women managers interviewed told us about day-to-day scheduling, but also about their 
planning for a longer-term career steps that often interlinked with aspects of care. Timing is 
key in both. For example, in an Irish dual-career family, day-to-day balancing was resolved by 
dividing parental shifts with children and having a nanny. This meant that the mother, Diane, 
a top manager in her 40s, left to work early, before the children wake up. The father ate 
breakfast with them, but he came home late in the evening, after the children had gone to bed. 
Diane came home from work in time to spend a couple of hours with the children, and 
continued working after the children had gone to sleep. “I’ll be a mom for a few hours”, she 
said. 
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Care responsibilities can often lead to situations when one needs to work over evenings and 
weekends. Women managers with children often have their share of care work and they might, 
for example, need to pick up their children from day-care at a certain time but then continue 
working again later in the evening as well as putting in hours from weekends, holidays and 
other supposedly leisure times. This juggling with time between care and work is relatively 
present in our data set. A Finnish top manager, Fiona, reflected back upon a time when her 
children were small, some 15-20 years ago. In order to leave work early enough to pick them 
up from day-care and spend time with them, she needed to work evenings and weekends to 
‘keep up’ and avoid being ‘mummy tracked’ (Benschop and Dooreward 1998). She explained 
that she needed to work extra hard, not to give anyone any excuses for to not to consider her 
‘manager material’. Fiona justified her way of living up less to the dominant corporate 
‘presenteeism’ (Cooper 1998) by stating: “Surely, surely I did as much as they did”. And, 
finally, she did end up being a top manager, with two adult children today. 
Care responsibilities do not really end after the few first years of a child; children grow older 
but they still need care and attention, something that takes time every day. Special situations, 
like illness or a crisis of some kind, can happen at any time, both for young children and little 
older ones. And other close one grow older and might need more care and attention. For 
instance, the Finnish care leave system is relatively well developed in comparison to the other 
countries represented in our study. However, the Finnish system concentrates on the very first 
years of a child. These parental leaves are stipulated in the national legislation, which has led 
to work organisations being relatively passive and reactive in creating organisation level 
flexibilities for employees in later work/care reconciliation needs of different kinds (Niemistö 
2011). 
Timing is not limited only to the work tasks and duties. If and when to have children and raise 
a family is a major issue, as Diane stated:   
So they make it to partner [in the company] when they’re maybe 30, and then 
they have their children. I didn’t. I had all my children first, and then I came back 
in, and now I’m looking to make it to partnership and now I’m finding it very 
difficult and I’m competing against 30-year-old men, for the same job. So it’s 
very different [laugh] (…) It’s interesting ‘cause I think that it’s easier to be 
successful before you have children. So I think if I was to look back again, at 
when I was 21, I would say I should have, if you’re very ambitious and you want 
to get to the top, I would say you have to work really really really hard, as fast as 
you can, and wait to have your children, and then have your children, then you 
stay on the platform. For a while, until you get your feet, and until you’re ready 
to take off again…  (Diane, 40s, Ireland) 
Being pressed with time while balancing between care and career can also lead to physical and 
mental symptoms. Our Australian respondent, Emma, was in her 40s and had one child. She 
worked in the highest management level in a big knowledge-intensive business, and had 
struggled with severe symptoms of burnout especially in the phases when her career 
development intensified and she climbed up into the highest managerial ladder. To her 
disappointment, Emma then found out how the hierarchies also on the top took place. She felt  
difficult to impact on issues that she felt important: “I am a tiny little flea on the back of a 
beast.” She wanted to make a change in her stressful and time-consuming career phase, but for 
economic reasons she felt that it was not possible yet.  
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Four years from now, because when I, in four years’ time my daughter will finish 
school, and so, (since), (…) then my financial obligations, ‘cause she goes to an 
expensive school, (will) (…), and so then I have bandwidth to make different 
financial decisions. (Emma, 40s, Australia) 
In Emma’s case, her careerscape had shifted from earlier smaller business leadership to a more 
intensive phase, which she found relatively frustrating and too stressful. But, as she had 
financial obligations because of her daughter’s schooling, she planned to make the change in 
her career after a couple of years. Thus her caring responsibilities impacted strongly on her 
own career, even on her own well-being. Emma suffered even from physical symptoms caused 
by stress – she stated that she survived burnout, at least for a moment, through taking time for 
a holiday.  
Now it is chronic stress, but at that moment it was at a peak. (...)  I’m just keeping 
my head above water, I don’t have an appetite to change the system, and I don’t, 
I see limited capacity to do so. (…) Changing the structure of work, (…) (a bit), 
there’s nothing I can do now to change the target that I haven’t already done. I’ve 
already changed, don’t pay me any more, here’s my target. But now I just have 
to meet that target, and the only way to meet that target is to be very focused and, 
very, on the whole time. (Emma, 40s, Australia) 
Ageing of parents and other significant people brought care responsibilities for many women’s 
careerscapes in our data. A Scottish interviewee Rose who was in her 30’s, married but did not 
have children, took up the care responsibilities of elderly family members in working life 
contexts:  
I think the equal responsibilities – and that is equal consideration by organisations 
as there is preference of achievement to it – is considered to much more 
appropriate to be flexible if you have children I suppose to if you have elderly. 
(…) And I think it is part of ageism in society. We have the disregard for older 
people, which is unpleasant actually. (Rose, 30s, Scotland) 
Rose highlighted the question of care of elderly family members, which is often not visibly 
present in organisations as day-to-day practices and employees’ need for flexibilities more than 
established formal policies allow. Our sample’s second interviewee in her 30s, Cecilia, had 
dramatically just before the interview received serious news on her father who had a major 
attack of illness and at that time was in hospital in intensive care. Cecilia was understandably 
very upset, but had decided to continue working, as she, on one hand, felt that there is not much 
that she can do for her father at the moment, and, on the other hand, she was uncomfortable not 
to be present in her workplace. In fact, Cecilia was very thankful for the CEO for his positive 
attitude towards her visits to the intensive care – with visits of a maximum of 15 minutes – 
during the afternoons.    
At the moment he is lying there [in the intensive care]. We have such a lovely 
CEO that I have now agreed with him that I can visit there during the afternoons. 
… They said [in the hospital] that this is a long process, perhaps within a year we 
will know the end results if he survives that long. Thus these [issues on care of 
elderly] can be very timely, and that my care help will be needed more and more. 
(Cecilia, 30s, Finland) 
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Cecilia’s gratefulness for the CEO who allowed her to visit her father brings up the same 
aspects that Rose talked about: there are hierarchies also on the care for whom it is allowed to 
be given during one’s working life. It seems that work/life relations are – somewhat and 
hopefully increasingly – addressed in organisational level policies and practices when it is on 
small children. But there are (even) bigger omissions when the question of care needs is outside 
of the ‘nuclear family’, such as parents or relatives.  
A Finnish interviewee, Patricia who is in her 60s, also took up the question of care 
responsibilities that have impacted on her career in many phases. She told that when her parents 
were still alive, she needed to travel a lot to another city where they lived. In particular when 
her mother lived five years alone, Patricia needed to put a lot of priority on her care. Another 
aspect of care that Patricia needed then to balance her working life with was care of her adult 
son, who had been seriously injured a few years ago, and who constantly required a lot of 
attention:   
When my son was seriously injured [specification of the injury], there is a need 
to monitor his interests, whether be those issues related to medical care or aspects 
of social security. (Patricia, 60s, Finland)  
Care takes place also within organisations. Often women are also seen as natural caretakers 
within organisational life (Acker 1990; Hiillos 2008). This can mean a gendered division of 
labour within the organisation, or more informally, taking care of other, often younger or more 
junior, employees. Diane gave an example of this by telling about her availability even during 
holidays. For her, it was an unbearable thought that junior employees would feel stressed or 
uncertain while she is relaxing on vacation. She said: 
They get nurtured and cared for a lot more [by me], yeah. I don’t know if that’s 
the mother in me or female or just innate, but yeah, that’s not the culture. (Diane, 
40s, Ireland) 
For the women top managers, time and timing are much of the personal everyday struggle, 
which is embedded with ‘caring’ functions that can differ from that of men in corresponding 
positions. Gendered care outreaches often other family members and relatives from both sides 
of the relationship. This was the case also with Diane. After living and making a career abroad, 
Diane and her family returned home after her mother-in-law became terminally ill.  
From the examples above, we can see how, at different times, different care needs restrict and 
affect women’s careerscapes, their choices, advancements and the very concrete use of their 
time on a day-to-day basis. On the other hand, when the care needs shift, these women have 
developed their careers further, and actually reached the top positions, in spite of care 
responsibilities at certain times of their lives. In the lives of our respondents, care and careers 
have been temporarily intertwined in interesting and multi-faceted ways.   
Time, work, and ‘non-work life’  
The use of time for work in top management raises other questions than those specifically 
related to care. What counts as work itself is a core question with embedded gender dimensions. 
This is not only a matter of paid versus unpaid work, but also what counts as work within 
employed work settings, managerial or otherwise. Patricia Yancey Martin, in her study on 
gendering practices and practicing of gender at work, claims that “men’s superior power lets 
them claim that whatever they do is work”, whereas women with less power are discouraged 
to challenge this (Martin 2003, p. 257). Martin continues (p. 258):  
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Ironically, men in my study engaged in practices that are routinely attributed (as 
stereotypes) to women more than men—wasting time talking to coworkers, 
pretending to like people they dislike, making decisions based on affect rather 
than “objective” evidence, and ignoring rules in favor of particularistic 
sentiments. Such behavior is criticized when done by women. For women 
workers to interpret men’s similar behavior as evidence that men “act like 
women,” or practice femininities, is likely too heretical a notion for women to 
even consider. When women coworkers socialize, they waste time; when men 
coworkers socialize, they advance their careers (Lipman-Blumen 1976). 
 
Time used for socialising – such as wining and dining of customers – can be evaluated as 
important, but caring-related communications – such as listening to a stressed colleague – 
might not have a similar kind of ‘strategic value’ in organisations. In Martin’s (2001) research, 
(some) men had a tendency to prolong meetings to ‘peacock’ or to build up friendship and 
alliances with other men. Thus women felt frustrated and did not want to waste time for these 
kinds of activities at work, but, instead, were keen to accomplish their work tasks as quickly as 
possible. Socialising after work can increase collegiality, but demands offering one’s leisure 
time. It is obviously possible that in more informal get-togethers with colleagues and customers 
contacts and networks are built up. At the same time this enhances the aspects of homosociality 
in business (Lipman-Blumen 1976; Holgersson 2003). The issue of ‘being present’, though not 
in terms of building up the necessary homosocial linkages and the understanding of the time 
and career possibilities, comes up by the British interviewee Bridget in her 50s:   
[laughs] No, it’s not equal. It’s, and you still see, people making hiring and 
promotion decisions, in their own image. Not saying these are bad people. And 
I’m sure they don’t even recognise what they’re doing but there is an unconscious 
bias, towards promoting or recruiting in your own image. Because it feels 
comfortable. There’s also an unconscious bias in terms of, giving people 
opportunities in the business. Stretch opportunities. […] Especially in urgent 
matters that you need to [react] really quickly. The human nature kicks in and it’s 
easier to reach for, the people that you've worked with time and time again. To 
deploy quickly. Rather than to think, well hang on a minute, do I need a better 
balance in the team than I’ve currently got and, let me pause and think about 
people that I perhaps haven’t worked with. And they will often be women. Who 
will be sitting on the sidelines, and thinking, oh my goodness, “Fred” got another 
one of these opportunities, what am I doing wrong that I’m not getting any of 
these opportunities? It’s definitely not a level playing field. (Bridget, 50s, UK) 
Time is precious and the sacrifices for career advancement are many. Bridget continued:    
Definitely [need to do sacrifices]. Everything from, interrupted holidays, 
cancelled holidays. Through to… cancelled concerts or, theatre tickets or, that 
sort of thing. Yeah definitely there’s been sacrifices. And those are sacrifices that 
we have both, both my partner and I have had to make. (Bridget, 50s, UK) 
Also Diane talked openly about the sacrifices she made in favour of work and, however lightly 
presented, how this affects her marriage: 
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[…] I don’t switch off during my holiday which is a problem. No, I’m on my 
email and my phone all the time on holidays. It’s grounds for divorce [laugh]. 
(Diane, 40s, Ireland) 
The second Scottish interviewee, Melanie, a top manager in her 60s, pondered on her previous 
position in a business organisation and how it compared with her current job. She felt that in 
her earlier job she did not have any other life than work, and now the current work still has a 
tendency to be a bit similar:   
I was going to be back to strategic decision, you know, policy, managing people 
and I really had to ask myself, do I want to do that. Because my role in the 
[company] naturally was really, really stressful … And I remember [thinking 
about] that I would leave the [company] as much as I loved, I loved working for 
the [company], but I had no life outside … I was working seven days a week, I 
was working on evenings… And I said to myself, what am I doing, what has my 
life become? (Melanie, 60s, Scotland)  
Melanie continued about time that she spent to support her junior staff members, which she 
found to be important but also bringing a lot of satisfaction:  
 
People need support, [and] if you dare to support then they are going to be there 
for you and they will give you more than just an obedience. (…) If I can help you 
with that problem you’ve got at home by taking some pressure off you. It is not 
always possible, but even just to know that if you need some time off that’s fine, 
you can do that in confidence. Just finding ways to help people, because we have 
all got personal situations that we’ll have to deal. (Melanie, 60s, Scotland) 
 
Also Patricia brought up the importance of support of younger generation women, as she had 
noticed how easily one “hits one’s head on the glass ceiling”. Patricia, who had had many 
positions on corporate boards, took up the perspective of time and changes over time. She had 
given up from many positions in order to give space for younger talented people, but also to 
move on to other aspects of life in her current career phase.  
 
Even though it is a relief to leave some tasks behind you, on the other hand one 
would never give up the experiences. And I find it extremely educating that one 
learns to give up some tasks, because when one has gotten used to use power and 
carry the responsibilities that are linked to it, then one needs to remember that 
hold on, this is not my position any more. Do not interfere too much, let people 
do their job in peace. (Patricia, 60s, Finland) 
 
At the same time, younger women managers appreciated the time and support from their more 
senior colleagues or mentors. Rose explained enthusiastically about the motivation and 
knowledge creation that she had experienced to gain from networking with older women:  
 
And what I enjoy is having access to alder women in a network, because a lot of 
these women have children, but their children are older so they are not 
encountering those burdens of responsibility of looking after young children. And 
they’ve got experience of balancing their work and their life. They’ve had 
families, they are older now and they’ve got the business experience. (…) Women 
10 
 
who are a bit older and families are grown out, it is much more of what they can 
give and what they give back. (Rose, 30s, Scotland) 
 
For Cecilia women mentors and senior colleagues had offered priceless support during her 
career:  
 
Cecilia: I have gotten support from these colleagues, and I have to say that 
through their help I have been able to proceed to where I am now.  
Interviewer: Have they been like mentors to you, unofficial or official?  
Cecilia: Yes, mentor is a good word, and I just thought that there have been 
several during this journey. I had one person in [earlier job] and she has been 
certainly the most important mentor during 4-5 years. But there are also others 
who have been important to enable place for discussions and getting to know 
better what the tasks include, what is required and if one is read to move on to 
such positions. (…) They have been all older [women], each and every one, 
between 50 to 60 years of age. (Cecilia, 30s, Finland) 
 
To summarise, time is certainly precious for women top managers because of the manifold 
caring roles at work and at home. In our eight interviews, women told about their multifaceted 
care roles that changed in different phases of their careers. Thus the careerscapes of these top 
managerial women are fluid, and reflect not only their own ambitions and wishes, but also often 
their family and non-work situations. In particular younger women managers appreciated 
highly the support and advice from other more senior women through times. On the other hand, 
women in more senior career phases were keen to support others, and at the same time there 
was a realisation that the passing of power and responsibility to others enables new paths of 
life for oneself and possibilities for more junior women.   
 
Discussion 
In this chapter we have highlighted some key intersections of age, gender, and work/family 
relations, in relation to care, careers, and the structuring of time more generally of women in 
high managerial positions. In spite of different contexts, nationalities and ethnicities, the 
striking similarity in our data is the interconnections of careers, life stages, care demands, and 
time. These following features were represented in the women’s accounts as interconnecting 
with being in a top management position:   
 the demanding responsibilities of management;   
 limited control of one’s own time;   
 experience of lack of time for the work itself;  
 fear of not keeping up with others in the competition;  
 lack of time for life outside of work; and 
 care responsibilities as a central part of life in different times and life stages.   
All of these processes have taken place across time, throughout the years while climbing the 
corporate ladder, and indeed with ageing and changing age positionings. On the other hand, 
these women have also experienced strong societal demands and expectations related to the 
gendered views on aged womanhood, motherhood and care, and have also experienced the 
pressure from care demands outside of work – sometimes strongly affecting their career choices 
or life choices. Care, often invisibly, takes substantial chunks of time. This makes a 
combination, which adds to the workload and invisible stressing factors for many women top 
managers.  
11 
 
The interconnections of work and care can be understood and organised very differently, 
depending on the societal and organisational contexts, macro level care ideologies and welfare 
systems, and gender contracts. Thereby, it is crucial to address also organisational level policies 
and practices of more formal care responsibilities as well as the informal caring roles 
undertaken by many women. This can be seen as broader landscapes of care taking place both 
inside and outside of the organisation, as organisation carescapes, and also in individuals’ 
relations to care. 
The shifting times and places for care partly define and partly depend on, the careers of women. 
Societal expectations targeted towards women still expect them to carry the main 
responsibilities for care, even with significant variations in collective provision, time-use, and 
everyday practice across countries. On the other hand, the women studied have all 
accomplished a very successful career. The shifting times of intense care responsibilities and 
devoted career developments appear to construct the life stages of these women, for example, 
for some with the double demands of teenager children and ageing parents. Despite critiques 
of the notion and content of given ‘life stages’, in our data the life stages do not seem to depend 
so much on context, but seem to follow similar kinds of paths in the different countries, through 
the interrelations of careerscapes, carescapes and timescapes.    
These questions and analyses are important for both theory and practice in at least five main 
ways. First, they add to our knowledge of how gendered age and aged gender affect 
organisations and organisational structures, processes and experiences. Second, they address 
the intersections of age, work-life, care, and careers of women managers, actual and potential. 
Third, these intersections affect how different aged groups of managers, in the pipeline for 
management positions, perceive their career prospects, and on the other hand, family prospects, 
as well as questions around work/family reconciliation. Fourth, intersections of age and gender 
themselves impact on how the care responsibilities for older people in working life are 
encountered, or avoided. Fifth, these questions closely relate to individual life-stages and 
phases of career and care responsibilities, as well as the aged/gendered societal and 
organisational expectations of the “ideal worker”, the “ideal carer”, and the “ideal manager”. 
More broadly still, we see these matters as part of the development of theory and theorising on 
intersectional gender relations in and around organisations. In many instances, the current 
tendencies towards intersectional orientation in organisational theory, policy and practice has 
been focused on class, ethnicity, gender, and racialisation, and much less on age, ageing, and 
generation, less alone disability.  
 
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15 
 
 
 
i This paper has been developed in the WeAll research project (No. 292883) which is funded by the Strategic 
Research Council at the Academy of Finland. 
 
ii We are aware that the categories of “woman” and “men” have their limitations – further genders exist too. The 
paper does not address questions of sexuality and heteronormativity (for instance, Butler 1990). Moreover, 
“leadership” and “top management”, at least in the country contexts studied, often embed whiteness, and a 
particular (western) tone. Intersectionality (see, for example, McCall 2005) of age, gender, ethnicity, social class 
and other social categories and positions is increasingly relevant in research on work, organisations and 
management and leadership. In building up our argument(s) and analysis, we have kept in mind these issues 
implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, although these are not the main focus of this article.  
 
iii The data is from the project “Age, Generation, and Changing Work-Life Balance and Boundaries: An 
Intersectional and Interactive Ethnographic Study” 2012-2014, led by Jeff Hearn and funded by the Academy 
of Finland. The data was gathered by postdoctoral researchers Charlotta Niemistö and Mira Karjalainen.   
 
iv The data was gathered in 2009 by Charlotta Niemistö (2011) for her doctoral dissertation.  
 
v The data is from Marjut Jyrkinen’s Academy of Finland funded postdoctoral research 2008-2010 that 
examined the impact of gender and age in women managers’ careers.  
 
 
 
Table 1.  Interviewees 
Name Country Position Age Marital status 
Rose Scotland/UK senior manager in business 30s married 
Cecilia Finland HR manager in business 30s co-habiting 
Diane Ireland senior manager in business 40s married 
Emma Australia top manager in business 40s married 
Bridget UK top manager in business 50s co-habiting 
Fiona Finland top manager in business 50s married 
Melanie Scotland/UK top manager; CEO of NGO, 
earlier in business 
60s single (divorced) 
Patricia Finland manager of own business; ex-
leader of a company 
60s (re)married