found that mothers felt more committed to their work than fathers (Wallace, 2008). However, this commitment was often not recognised in the organisation with one respondent saying “I work only four days, so they assume you’re less committed…I called from the labour room three times the last time I was there to make sure they could contact my clients and reschedule my appointments.” (ibid, p.491). For HRM to be successful in achieving diversity at work the view of what constitutes as a committed worker must change. In the workplace, the time spent at work is still regarded as a representation of productivity (Lewis, 1997). However, this is an insufficient way to measure productivity and in turn a committed worker. A better representation of an individual’s productivity would be to measure the quality of their output and it is important for an organisation to recognise this difference.

Flexibility

Due to the marketplace now becoming highly competitive there is a need for businesses to be able to adapt and respond to market pressures. This leads to the requirement of employees to be temporal, numerical and functionally flexible for them to be able to adapt and respond to changes efficiently and gain competitive advantage (Walsh, 1990). Therefore, organisations view flexible working arrangements as a way to meet organisational needs, such as; to reduce costs and adapt to variations in supply and demand, rather than to meet the needs of their employees (Dickens, 1997).

Adopting flexible working arrangements challenges the expectation that the “right” employee works full-time and long hours. However, in reality flexibility has not fully challenged this expectation and has not been able to ensure equality at work. Functional flexibility does not often meet the multiskilling of jobs but instead increases the workload of similar tasks but in a short timespan (Kirton and Greene, 2010). Even though there are several flexible wor