The University of St Gallen stands out as one of the first Business Schools in German-Speaking countries to establish a gender and diversity study program. As this program has become a key part of St Gallen's Curriculum, we could draw the preliminary conclusion that our integration of gender and diversity topics into management education has been successful. However, this is not the full story. As the program is positioned as "contextual studies", it is not seen as a core management issue and does not yet have a major effect on how we teach strategy, finance, leadership or human resource management. This chapter not only provides an overview of the Gender and Diversity Study Program and its achievements to date, but also discusses the challenges of "mainstreaming" gender and diversity issues into management education. Our conclusion points out the need to deal with the balancing act of being integrated and excluded at the same time.
In this paper we focus on the consequences that emerge for organizations when they attempt to implement value-laden concepts such as "family friendliness". Such new concepts are often taken on board without realising how fundamentally the structure of the organization will be questioned if they are taken seriously.
Family friendliness is a concept aimed at balancing work and family demands in organizations, allowing one person to raise children as well as to have a demanding career. To achieve this aim, programs such as job sharing or child care centres are increasingly introduced. Contrary to expectations, employees do not seem to take advantage of these as often as one might expect. How can we understand this? Although women no longer question their active role in work life, still they are seen as responsible for the reproductive work, while men are the breadwinners. The dichotomy between paid and reproductive work is yet evident. Obviously underlying discourses from the times of industrialization are still at work in the age of globalization.
In order to bring family friendliness to life in organizations one has to tackle the issue of resolving the described dichotomy. This would for example mean questioning the traditional career paths, which today are designed for the role of the breadwinner. One will have to make concerted attempts to rewrite these discourses. Consequently a new trend like family friendliness poses a far greater challenge to organizations than the simple introduction of job sharing or child care centers.
