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Government Leader home > November 2005 issue
November 2005; Vol. 1 No. 4
OMB’s Family Business: As women gain clout, a key power center finds balance
By Stephen Barr
Beth Robinson is the first woman to head the Office of Budget Review at the Office of Management and Budget. Kathleen Peroff is OMB’s deputy associate director for national security. Kathy Stack is OMB’s deputy associate director for education and human resources.
More than half of the employee
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| | | OMB leaders, from left, Beth Robinson, Lauren Wright, Kathy Peroff and Kathy Stack. | |
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s at OMB are women, and as Robinson’s promotion in September shows, many have moved into the highest echelons at one of Washington’s most exclusive power centers.
It’s not an old boys’ network anymore. “It may have been that years ago, but it is certainly not that now,” Peroff said.
OMB, famously known as a place where employees put in long work hours and put up with the whims of the West Wing, has tried to become more sensitive to work-life balance in the last decade.
“A lot of our employees are in two-income families,” said Lauren Wright, OMB’s deputy assistant director for administration. “We basically have needed to change as the workforce has changed. We’ve had to keep up with the needs of new people coming into the workforce. We have both men and women who are young parents with new families. ... I just see much more emphasis on family.”
Still, work-life balance, as it’s called in Washington jargon, is not easy. OMB runs at a fast pace and a crisis or two seems to pop up almost every day. Robinson has two children, aged 11 and 14, and said “there would be no way” she could serve as budget director, working next door to the White House, without the support of her husband and children.
Stack, who has two teenagers, has worked part time and full time at OMB. She believes the culture has changed over the years to make it more acceptable for women and men to leave work for soccer games, school and family events. Stack has tried to foster a “team approach” in her office so that more than one person knows an issue and can handle it when someone is away for family reasons or a vacation.
The rise of women in government has been under way for some time. Women make up 45 percent of the total federal civilian workforce, and they hold 27 percent of the positions in the Senior Executive Service, the government’s elite cadre of managers, scientists and technicians. Most federal managers have learned to help employees juggle work and family priorities as the government has tried to become a model employer.
For OMB, its more flexible management approach paid off recently when it was ranked one of the “best places to work” in government (see Page 7). OMB was ranked as the best place to work by women and took second place as the choice of men, edged out by the National Science Foundation.
“The classic attribute that OMB has going for it is that it is a meritocracy,” said Robinson, who, like the others, is a career employee. “You do the work, you do it well, you are going to succeed here at OMB. They really don’t look past that. ... In that sense, it is very comforting as a woman to know that you are going to be viewed through the proper lens.”
Peroff agreed. “It really is a meritocracy. You get rewarded for your contributions.”
Wright also thinks OMB’s size works to its advantage—about 470 employees who all get to know one another—and there are ample opportunities for people to shift jobs and work assignments. “It is the issues,” she said. “You have one person who is the expert on any given issue. That is very empowering, especially for people coming out of graduate school and young women.”
Peroff and Stack said they have worked, as managers, to permit women to work part time, adjusted schedules and tweaked job assignments. Good leaders, Stack suggested, restructure jobs in order to retain institutional knowledge and to encourage experienced employees to stay on part time as mentors to younger employees.
Technology has helped with flexibility. Employees can load software into their home PCs to work at home, and many carry cell phones and BlackBerrys so that they can be reached easily outside the office.
Working in the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House also carries some clout at home, Robinson said. “You can tell your kids what you are working on—the high-level issues, and they can understand that. They really like that I’m in the Old EOB.”
Stephen Barr writes the Federal Diary column at the Washington Post. He also hosts an online discussion, “Federal Diary Live,” each week at www.washingtonpost.com.
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| "The classic attribute that OMB has going for it is that it is a meritocracy."
—OMB’s Beth Robinson
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