ICWES16 Workshop “Let’s Talk about Work　Session2: Work-Life Balance”
Oct.23.2014.　11:00-11:55　LACC
Ryo KIMURA　

Good morning, everyone! Welcome and thank you for coming to our workshop titled “Let’s talk about working”.  I am Ryo KIMURA a head director of The Japan Society for Professional Engineers of Women. The name is too long, shorten it･･･please call us JSPEW.

JSPEW is a group of the few women engineers who have a national qualification called “Professional Engineer”. Within this qualification, women is 1.4%. We are a very much curiosity.  Like a coelacanth.

We started this series of workshop because we are interested in women engineers in other countries and wanted to know their true stories.

We are planning to hold a workshop in the series five times.  The first one was ” Introduction: express and share issues which women engineers face.” in the last ICWES. The second one, this workshop, is about “work-life balance”. Then we are planning to have three more. The third one will be about “gender free”, the forth one will be about “diversity” and then the last one will be about “harmony”.

Here we will have the second session. We are going to talk about “work-life balance”. We hope you enjoy this workshop and get something useful for you.　　Let’s get started!

Panelist 1 Dr. Marlene Kanga from Australia

In Australia there were many surveys for gender issue by the woman engineers, and Work-Life Balance is constantly a key issue for them, however it is quite difficult to find out the answer. Simply we can say there is no suitable answer or to say “Do what works for you”

By my experience, it was very tough work for me when I got children, especially when they are infants. But one day a certain woman told me that the bringing up a child is the expected of the mother. Many women quit their jobs after delivery the baby because of tough labour environment in Australia. However the wise say it takes a village to raise a child, so supporting networks are important.

And the partner must play an important role. Women have lots of roles such as mother, sisters, daughter, etc. We could not do those roles simultaneously, but we are better to do try to perform these roles during our lifetimes to be fulfilled in life. Finally, there is no single solution, we will take good actions through listening with our internal voices of hearts on what is best for ourselves and our families.