Laine Caspi, CEO of Parents of Invention, begins her morning at 6:30 a.m., when she reads

E-mail. Then she gets her 7-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter ready for school. Both kids are out the door by 9 a.m., and then Caspi puts in an additional three hours of company time. Caspi picks up the kids between noon and 3 p.m. and spends the rest of the day dealing with cell-phone calls and mothering chores(家务杂事) like helping the children with homework. She's usually still answering E-mail after the kids go to bed.

This is the world of the working mother today, where "work-life balance" has evolved to mean something drastically different from what it did just five years ago. Increasingly, work and life are barely separate—they're fluid. One flows into the other as growing legions of mothers who are entrepreneurs, or "mompreneurs", work to tear down barriers and redefine the workplace.

The number of women in the U.S. workforce has doubled since 1970. But until the past few years, the vast majority who worked had little choice but to leave their children at day-care centers or with caregivers and join the 9-to-5 compartmentalized workplace. However, women also continued to take many roles at all hours and still handle 75% of the housework.

Technological advances—chief among them, the Internet and cell phones—have helped alter that dynamic. Another factor is changing attitudes, especially among women of Generation X in their late 20s and 30s. As they launch their careers and prepare to have children, they're demanding—and often getting—radically different work arrangements from those their mothers did. "Generation Xers are willing to take a stand and are more interested in flexibility and making it work for their families, rather than the security of having a job like their predecessors," says Susan Seitel, president of Work & Family Connection, a human resources consulting group. Working mothers who can't get employers to offer flexible working arrangements are striking out on their own. Women are starting businesses at twice the rate of all businesses. From 1997 to 2004, employment at female-owned companies grew by 24.2%, more than twice the rate of the 11.6% logged by all businesses, and the pace of revenue increase was also higher—39% vs. 33.5%.

Reshaped workdays aren't just the preserve of women who have started their own businesses. With the jobless rate below 5.5%, competition for skilled employees is forcing many companies to offer working mothers arrangements unheard of a decade ago. At management consulting firm Bain & Co., employees are allowed to choose flexible options that fit their working style. Sometimes, that means shifting schedules according to the needs of the family.

In a typical day of Laine Caspi, she spends most of her time ________.

A．outside her working place

B．in replying cells phones and E-mails

C．in looking after her children

D．in dealing with housework