Being a working mother is a challenge. But it has gotten a little easier in today’s corporate environment.

Companies are increasingly embracing ways to recruit and keep women in the workplace, including offering flexible work arrangements and networking opportunities, assisting with child care, and providing mothers’ lounges.

Cynthia Ingols, Ph.D., an associate professor at the Simmons School of Management, says companies realize that getting and keeping talented women requires recognition that they remain the primary family caregivers, a fact that makes balancing work and home life a complex challenge.

“Certainly it’s my impression that the notion of offering flexibility to accommodate women and the complexities of their lives is more widespread today than it was 5 or 10 years ago,” says Ingols, who is part of a team at Simmons conducting research on women in the workforce.

Carol Evans, president of Working Mother Media Inc., publisher of Working Mother magazine, points out that women now make up half of the workforce. Some 72 percent of mothers work outside the home, she says.

“If a company doesn’t really take care of its women employees, it’s going to have a much tougher time recruiting talent,” Evans says.

Forces for flexibility

Workplace flexibility is a major tool that working mothers rely on to help them thrive and succeed in the workplace. Ingols and Evans cite a confluence of factors that have contributed to its widespread acceptance in the corporate world in the last five years.

They say technology has been the key driver in allowing employees to work from home and keep varied hours. Evolving technology brought a “huge” shift toward flexibility, Evans says, as it became easier to set up home offices with in-office capabilities. She credits the advent of the BlackBerry device with creating a turning point for telecommuting.

High-technology companies tend to be ahead of the curve in offering flexible work strategies, Evans says. But all types and sizes of companies have found it a good strategy.

The globalization of business, with the need to accommodate different geographies and time zones, has also boosted the move toward flexible work schedules and environments. Face-to-face meetings are much less a part of today’s business world, Ingols says.

“That’s the thing about the world we live in now,” she adds. “You can work any time, any place.”

Demographics have also been a motivator for companies to offer women more flexibility. Before the recent downturn, companies worried about an expected labor shortage in which women would be a crucial asset, Ingols says. Even in the midst of the current downturn, she notes, men are reportedly being laid off at a higher rate than women. And the projected labor shortage still looms in the wake of the retiring baby-boomer generation.

Finally, fluctuating gasoline prices and companies’ quest to be more environmentally friendly have further fueled the flexibility trend.

Making the connection

Companies are also realizing that encouraging women to stay connected is crucial to helping them succeed and be happy in the workplace.

“Networking is incredibly important,” Evans says. “Particularly because women still feel left out of the old-boy network.”

Over the past five years, many companies have set up resource or “affinity” groups for women, Ingols says. Such groups generally focus on networking as well as raising the profile of women in the company.

“Women really want to hear from women who’ve made it and gotten ahead,” Evans says. “Sometimes they just want to hear that it’s possible.”

That is the most important thing that Natalie Corridan-Gregg, principal product manager and working mother at EMC Corp., gets from EMC’s Women’s Leadership Forum. “For me,” she says, “it’s being able to see someone accomplish what I want to accomplish and be able to ask, ‘How did you do that?”

Corridan-Gregg is a longtime member of WLF, serving as its president for six years. The group was founded in 2000 by four women and has grown to 3,000 members worldwide. It sponsors seminars and programs on professional development and EMC businesses. Women also share advice on everything from flextime to how to be seen as thought leaders.

“This is the new village,” Corridan-Gregg says, adding, “Connecting women is one of the keys to keeping them.”

EMC recently took that connection one step further. It published a book entitled The Working Mother Experience, which stemmed from a grass-roots effort led by Corridan-Gregg. Itcontains the perspectives of 95 working mothers (and one dad) about their experiences in today’s fast-paced business world.

Erin Motameni, senior vice president of Human Resources at EMC, herself a working mother for 20 years, says the book provides “best practices of sorts” for women. The book and the WLF, she says, help women put in perspective the choices they make around career and family.

EMC, Motameni says, has long supported employees’ flexible work schedules but recently formalized the process. Employees in eligible roles can work with their managers to set up a part-time schedule or a job-sharing situation, as well as a flexible full-time schedule that includes working from home. She says about 10 percent of EMC’s employees in certain organizations have expressed interest in it.

EMC is also striving to tailor employees’ career paths to their individual stages in life, Motameni says. These programs aren’t specifically for women, she says, but are part of a global “strategy of inclusion.”

Though the workplace is still evolving to accommodate women, such programs have brought about a striking change from decades past, Evans notes. “In the 1980s, women were wearing bow ties to be like men. We don’t have to do that any more. We can be ourselves.”