Fast Company sends out daily emails with links to stories that I read occasionally. In the latest one, there was a link to an article about workaholicism. I really try hard to create balance in my life. I don’t always do a very good job partly because I share his compulsion to check his email and I think about work and replay conversations and issues in my head to see if I could have done it differently or with better results. Here’s the link if you’d like to read it: My name is Tony, and I’m a workaholic.

Once I read the above, I started to think about a post I’d read in Worthwhile: Give Me a Break. Halley notes that Ann Fudge, head of the advertising agency Young & Rubicam, was criticized recently in a Yahoo News article because she took a sabbatical. Halley thinks it’s a backlash against women executives. She goes on to say:

It’s part of a wave of women changing the corporate workplace and a lot of senior male executives do NOT like women rewriting the rules. Rewriting the rules and winning by those new rules.

From a male point of view I can understand they feel they’ve been killing themselves all these years, why should women waltz in and get top jobs without the same sacrifice. But GUYS, don’t you hear what I’m saying — you’ve been killing yourselves, LITERALLY — and we don’t want you to! We want you all to stay alive, stay with us, work with us, have fun with us and take a page from our book of life balance. Men need the changes women are bringing to the workplace even more than women!

From a big picture perspective, my question is generally, are women really rewriting the rules? And are they winning? Is it expected that we check email after hours and on vacation and put in extra ‘visible’ late hours at the workplace if we want to advance to leadership positions? I’m guessing yes at most places, but I could be wrong. I want to believe that it’s possible to rewrite the rules.