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Describes a survey of international City/County Management Association female members in professional, mid‐level management, and upperlevel management positions to determine the factors they see as important to their career success. The questionnaire contained measures of three models (human capital, socio‐psychological, systemic) which are cited as explanatory of the success achieved by women. The majority of women, regardless of position in the organization, attribute their success to variables that are within their purview. These include self‐confidence, education, intelligence, competence on the job, hard work, and motivation. Assistance from others such as mentors was seen as important but not a significant factor in career advancement. Measures representing distribution of power and distribution of opportunity (systemic model indicators) were not viewed as being as important to career success as measures representing the human capital and socio‐psychological models. The absence of a perceived importance of measures of the systemic model suggests that the socialization and education of women needs to stress the importance of these indicators in an overall strategy to achieve career goals.

Discrimination matters Volume 22 Number 2 of Health Manpower Management contains an article with this title by Catherine M. Prest, which outlines the changes in legal restrictions on the eligibility of dismissed employees to pursue unfair dismissal claims. Includes a discussion of recent decisions in this area and assesses the impact of these decisions on personnel practice and disciplinary procedures.

An important theme for a twenty-first century employee is a desire for work and family balance which is devoid of conflict. Drawing on detailed empirical research, the purpose of this paper is to examine the multi-faceted causes and consequences of work-family conflict (WFC) in a non-Western context (Nigeria).

The paper uses qualitative data gleaned from the semi-structured interviews of 88 employees (44 university lecturers and 44 medical doctors) in cities in the six geo-political zones of Nigeria.

The findings showed that work pressure, heavy familial duties, poor infrastructural facilities, and a lack of suitable and practicable work-family balance policies are the main causes of WFC in Nigeria. Juvenile delinquencies, broken marriages/families, and an unhappy workforce are among the grave consequences of WFC among Nigerian employees.

This paper suggests that the availability of basic infrastructural facilities, more governmental support, practicable work-family policies, inter alia, will reduce the level of WFC for Nigerian employees and will also results in positive spill-over from the work domain to the family domain and vice-versa.