If I Could Do It All Again I Would Devote to Children
The Idea in Brief
Anyone who believes that women in the U.s. tin have high-powered careers and families should consider these sobering statistics from economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett'south January 2001 survey:
- 49% of ultra-achieving career women (earning more $100,000) ages 41–55 are childless.
- 33% of high-achieving career women (earning $55,000–$66,000) ages 41–55 are childless; 57% are single.
- By contrast, the more successful a man is, the more than likely he has a spouse and children. Only xix% of ultra-achieving men are childless and 17% single.
Clearly, women don't have it all—while men plainly do. And it's not because successful executive women don't want kids; most yearn for them. But the brutal demands of aggressive careers, the asymmetries of male-female person relationships, and tardily-in-life child-bearing difficulties conspire against them.
These realities take an obvious personal price. But companies and the overall economy too pay a significant price. U.South. manufacture cannot afford to have a quarter of the female talent pool forced out of their jobs when they accept children. However in 2000—at the height of the U.S. labor crunch—22% of women with professional person degrees were not working. And in Hewlett's more contempo survey, 66% of "high potential" women—highly qualified women not part of the workforce—would similar to render to full-time jobs.
How to avoid this waste material of expensively educated talent? Business leaders and federal lawmakers can establish new policies that support working parents. And young women tin exist more deliberate almost career and family choices. Greater work-life residual is possible. It's also essential—for women, their organizations, and U.S. business overall.
The Idea in Exercise
The Challenge to Business Leaders
Employers tin provide more meaningful piece of work-life policies, in detail, by giving the "gift of fourth dimension" to loftier-achieving working mothers. These women need reduced-hr jobs, careers that tin can be interrupted—and the ability to use such benefits without suffering long-term career damage.
To address this situation—and win the intense loyalty of their professional women—companies must arrive easier for workers to go off conventional career ladders and to get back on. Examples include:
- a fourth dimension bank of paid parenting leave: three months of paid leave that parents can take, as needed, until children plow 18
- restructured retirement plans: programs without penalties for career interruptions
- career breaks: job assurance after (up to) iii-year, unpaid leaves
- reduced-hr careers: positions that offering promotion possibilities and reduced workloads
- active condition for old employees: helping women on get out stay in the loop by paying their professional association dues and certification fees, and tapping them for communication
The Claiming to Women
Young women themselves must also actively aggrandize their life choices. Nigh important, they cannot assume that, every bit they pursue their careers, their personal lives volition simply fall into place—or that medical science will extend their childbearing years into their 40s. Past existence more than deliberate about career and family merchandise-offs, they have a vital first footstep toward having it all—or at least having what men have.
There is a secret out there—a painful, well-kept underground: At midlife, betwixt a third and a half of all successful career women in the U.s.a. do non have children. In fact, 33% of such women (business executives, doctors, lawyers, academics, and the similar) in the 41-to-55 age subclass are childless—and that effigy rises to 42% in corporate America. These women have non chosen to remain childless. The vast majority, in fact, yearn for children. Indeed, some have gone to extraordinary lengths to bring a baby into their lives. They subject themselves to circuitous medical procedures, shell out tens of thousands of dollars, and derail their careers—mostly to no avail, because these efforts come besides late. In the words of ane senior director, the typical loftier-achieving woman childless at midlife has non made a selection but a "creeping nonchoice."
Why has the age-old business of having babies become then hard for today'due south high-achieving women? In Jan 2001, in partnership with the market research company Harris Interactive and the National Parenting Clan, I conducted a nationwide survey designed to explore the professional and individual lives of highly educated, high-earning women. The survey results are featured in my new book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children.
In this survey, I target the top 10% of women—measured in terms of earning power—and focus on two age groups: an older generation, ages 41 to 55, and their younger peers, ages 28 to 40, as divers for survey purposes. I distinguish between high achievers (those who are earning more than $55,000 in the younger group, $65,000 in the older one) and ultra-achievers (those who are earning more than $100,000). I include a sample of loftier-potential women—highly qualified women who have left their careers, mainly for family unit reasons. In addition, I include a small sample of men.
The findings are startling—and troubling. They make it clear that, for many women, the brutal demands of ambitious careers, the asymmetries of male-female relationships, and the difficulties of bearing children tardily in life conspire to crowd out the possibility of having children. In this article, I lay out the issues underlying this state of affairs, identify the heavy costs involved, and advise some remedies, however preliminary and modest. The facts and figures I relate are dour. But I think that they can too be liberating, if they spur activity. My promise is that this information will generate workplace policies that recognize the huge costs to businesses of losing highly educated women when they outset their families. I also hope that it will galvanize immature women to make newly urgent demands of their partners, employers, and policy makers and thus create more than generous life choices for themselves.
The Continuing Inequity
When information technology comes to career and fatherhood, high-achieving men don't have to bargain with hard trade-offs: 79% of the men I surveyed report wanting children—and 75% have them. The inquiry shows that, generally speaking, the more than successful the human being, the more likely he will find a spouse and become a father. The contrary holds truthful for women, and the disparity is particularly hit among corporate ultra-achievers. In fact, 49% of these women are childless. Merely a mere 19% of their male colleagues are. These figures underscore the depth and scope of the persisting, painful inequities between the sexes. Women face all the challenges that men do in working long hours and withstanding the up-or-out pressures of high-altitude careers. But they also face challenges all their own.
Slim Pickings in Partners.
Let's get-go with the fact that professional women discover it challenging even to be married—for nigh, a necessary precondition for childbearing. But lx% of high-achieving women in the older age group are married, and this figure falls to 57% in corporate America. By dissimilarity, 76% of older men are married, and this figure rises to 83% among ultra-achievers.
Consider Tamara Adler, 43, a former managing director of Deutsche Bank in London. She gave her take on these agonizing realities when I interviewed her for the written report. Adler was the bank'due south most senior adult female, and her highly successful career had left no room for family. She mentioned the obvious reasons—long hours and travel—but she also spoke eloquently about how ambitious careers discriminate against women: "In the rarified upper reaches of high-altitude careers where the air is sparse…men accept a much easier fourth dimension finding oxygen. They find oxygen in the course of younger, less driven women who volition coddle their egos." She went on to conclude, "The difficult fact is that near successful men are not interested in acquiring an ambitious peer as a partner."
Information technology's a conclusion backed up by my data: Merely 39% of loftier-achieving men are married to women who are employed full time, and 40% of these spouses earn less than $35,000 a yr. Meanwhile, nine out of 10 married women in the high-achieving category accept husbands who are employed full fourth dimension or cocky-employed, and a quarter are married to men who earn more than than $100,000 a year. Clearly, successful women professionals have slim pickings in the matrimony department—especially every bit they age. Professional men seeking to marry typically attain into a large pool of younger women, while professional person women are express to a shrinking pool of eligible peers. Co-ordinate to U. S. Census Bureau data, at historic period 28 in that location are four higher-educated, single men for every three college-educated, unmarried women. A decade later, the situation is radically changed. At historic period 38, in that location is one human for every three women.
The Fourth dimension Crunch.
Now add to that scarcity of matrimony candidates a scarcity of fourth dimension to spend nurturing those relationships. My survey results prove that women are dealing with long and lengthening workweeks. Twenty-9 percent of loftier achievers and 34% of ultra-achievers work more than than 50 hours a week, and a significant proportion of these women are on the job 10 to 20 more hours a week than they were 5 years agone. Among ultra-achievers, a quarter are abroad on business at least five nights every three months. Co-ordinate to research by sociologists Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson, the percentage of women working at least l hours a week is now higher in the United States than in any other state.
Retrieve of what a 55-hour week means in terms of work-life residual. If you assume an hour lunch and a 45-minute round-trip commute (the national average), the workday stretches to almost 13 hours. Even without "extras" (out-of-town trips, client dinners, work functions), this kind of schedule makes it extremely difficult for any professional to maintain a relationship. Take Sue Palmer, 49, manager of Grant Thornton, the London-based global accounting firm, and the only adult female on its management commission. "Ten years ago," she said, "an assistant of mine told me at the end of a particularly grueling seventy-hour week, 'You know, Sue, y'all couldn't have a torrid love affair if you wanted to.' And I shot back, 'I couldn't have a tepid beloved affair if I wanted to.'"
Of course, long hours aren't unique to women. They're a fact of life in corporate America, where management is under intense pressure level to utilize its professional person workforce for every bit many hours a week equally possible. The reasons for this go back to 1938 when Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which institutionalized the 40-hour work-week and required employers to pay overtime for additional hours worked. Ane provision, however, exempted managers and professionals and still does. For those workers, extra hours carry no marginal costs to employers. The temptation for companies to take advantage of that provision might not have been so problematic dorsum in 1938 when merely xv% of employees were exempt, and most of them were men with stay-at-dwelling spouses. But it produces significant overload today when close to 30% of employees are in the exempt category, many of them women who rarely have the luxury of a spouse at home tending to domestic responsibilities.
In January 2001, in partnership with Harris Interactive and the National Parenting Association, I conducted a nationwide survey targeting the top ten% of women—measured in terms of earning power—and a small sample of men for comparative purposes. Responding were 1,168 high-achieving career women ages 28 to 55; 479 high-achieving, noncareer women ages 28 to 55; and 472 loftier-achieving men ages 28 to 55. (The grouping of ultra-achieving men was not large enough to disaggregate.) The sample was drawn from the Harris Poll on-line database of cooperative respondents. Data were weighted for key demographic variables to reflect each sample's national population. My analysis delineated an older generation, 41 to 55, and that group'south younger peers, 28 to 40. I also distinguished betwixt high achievers (those earning more than $65,000 or $55,000, depending on historic period), ultra-achievers (those earning more than than $100,000), and loftier-potential women—highly qualified women who have left their careers, mainly for family reasons. Corporate women were defined as working in companies with more than than five,000 employees. The two charts below comprise some of the startling—and sobering—findings.
The survey was carried out past Harris Interactive nether the auspices of the National Parenting Association, a nonprofit research organization. Funding for the survey and the associated research was provided by Ernst & Young, Merck, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. For more about the methodology and findings, become to www.parentsunite.org.
An Unforgiving Decade.
Women pay an fifty-fifty greater price for those long hours considering the early on years of career edifice overlap—almost perfectly—the prime years of childbearing. It'due south very hard to throttle back during that stage of a career and expect to catch upward afterward. As policy analyst Nancy Rankin points out, the career highway has all kinds of off-ramps only few on-ramps.
In fact, the persistent wage gap between men and women is due mainly to the penalties women incur when they interrupt their careers to accept children. In a contempo study, economists Susan Harkness and Jane Waldfogel compared that wage gap beyond vii industrialized countries and found it was peculiarly broad in the United States. For instance, in France, women earn 81% of the male wage, in Sweden 84%, and in Australia 88%, while in the United States, women continue to earn a mere 78% of the male wage. These days, only a small portion of this wage gap can exist attributed to discrimination (getting paid less for doing the aforementioned task or being denied access to jobs, pedagogy, or capital based on sex). According to contempo studies, an increasingly big part of the wage gap can now be explained by childbearing and kid rearing, which interrupt women'southward—but non men's—careers, permanently depressing their earning ability. If the gap between what men and women earn in this country is wider than elsewhere, information technology isn't because this country has washed an inferior job combating bigotry. It is because it has failed to develop policies—in the workplace and in order every bit a whole—that support working mothers.
Ironically, this policy failure is to some extent the fault of the women'south movement in the U.s.. Going back to the mid-nineteenth century, feminists in this country have channeled much of their free energy into the struggle to win formal equality with men. More recently, the National Organization for Women has spent 35 years fighting for a broad array of equal rights, ranging from educational and job opportunities to equal pay and access to credit. The idea is that once all the legislation that discriminates confronting women is dismantled, the playing field becomes level and women can assume a free and equal identify in lodge by simply cloning the male competitive model.
In Europe, various groups of social feminists have viewed the problem for women quite differently. For them, it is not woman'southward lack of legal rights that constitutes her primary handicap, or even her lack of reproductive freedom. Rather, it is her dual burden—taking intendance of a home and family unit as well as property down a job—that leads to her second-class condition.
The 2d Shift.
The problem with the notion that American women should exist able to successfully clone the male competitive model is that husbands accept non picked upwardly a meaning share of women's traditional responsibilities on the home forepart. Even high-achieving women who are married continue to comport the panthera leo's share of domestic responsibilities. (See the exhibit "Principal Child Intendance and Household Responsibilities.") Only 9% of their husbands assume primary responsibleness for meal preparation, 10% for the laundry, and five% for cleaning the house. When it comes to children, husbands don't do much better. Only 9% of them take time off from work when a child is sick, 9% take the lead in helping children with homework, and 3% organize activities such as play dates and summer camp.
Primary Child Care and Household Responsibilities Loftier-achieving Men and Women Source: National Parenting Association
Yes, these percentages have grown over the years—just not much. At the end of the day, the partitioning of labor at domicile boils downward to 1 startling fact: 43% of the older, high-achieving women and 37% of the younger, high-achieving women experience that their husbands really create more household work for them than they contribute. (Thirty-nine percent of ultra-achieving women also feel this mode, despite the fact that one-half of them are married to men who earn less than they do.)
Stubborn Biology.
So this is the hard position in which women discover themselves. According to Lisa Benenson, former editor of Working Woman and Working Mother magazines, "The signals are very clear. Young women are told that a serious person needs to commit to her career in her 20s and devote all her energies to her chore for at least ten years if she is to be successful." Only the fact is, if yous take this advice you might well exist on the wrong side of 35 before you have time to draw breath and contemplate having a child—exactly the bespeak in life when infertility tin—and overwhelmingly does—become an consequence.
Media hype most advances in reproductive science only exacerbates the problem, giving women the illusion that they can delay childbearing until their careers are well established. My survey tells united states of america that 89% of young, high-achieving women believe that they will be able to become pregnant deep into their 40s. Just sadly, new reproductive technologies have not solved fertility problems for older women. The research shows that only 3% to 5% of women who attempt in vitro fertilization in their 40s really succeed in bearing a child. This kind of information is difficult to come by because the infertility industry in this country likes to tout the good news—with dire consequences. Too many career women put their private lives on the dorsum burner, bold that children volition eventually happen for them courtesy of high-tech reproduction—only to discover thwarting and failure.
A Costly Imbalance
I can't tell you how many times over the course of this research the women I interviewed apologized for "wanting it all." Only it wasn't as though these women were looking for special treatment. They were quite prepared to shoulder more than their off-white share of the work involved in having both career and family unit. And so why on world shouldn't they experience entitled to rich, multidimensional lives? At the end of the twenty-four hour period, women simply desire the choices in love and work that men take for granted.
Instead, they operate in a society where motherhood carries enormous economic penalties. Two contempo studies lay out these penalties in very specific terms. In her written report, economist Waldfogel finds that mothers earn less than other women do even when you command for marital status, experience, and didactics. In fact, according to her enquiry, one child produces a "punishment" of 6% of earnings, while two children produce a wage penalty of 13%. In a more recent report, economists Michelle Budig and Paula England find that maternity results in a penalty of 7% per kid.
Given such a huge disincentive, why exercise women persist in trying to "have it all"? Because, as a large trunk of research demonstrates, women are happier when they take both career and family. In a series of books and manufactures that bridge more a decade, University of Michigan sociologist Lois Hoffmann has examined the value of children to parents and finds that, across cultures, parents meet children every bit enormously important in providing love and companionship and in warding off loneliness. Children also assistance parents deal with the questions of human existence: How do I notice purpose beyond the self? How practise I cope with mortality?
Thus, the fact that then many professional women are forced to sacrifice maternity is patently unfair, and it also has immense implications for American business concern, since it causes women intent on motherhood to cut brusk their careers. This is, of course, the flip side of the aforementioned coin. For if a big proportion of women who stay on rail in their careers are forced to give up family, an equally large proportion who opt for family unit are forced to give upwardly their careers. According to my survey, 66% of high-potential women would like to render to full-time jobs.
The toll to corporations and to our economy becomes awe-inspiring in the aggregate. Our nation needs professional women to stay in the labor force; we can ill beget to accept a quarter of the female talent pool forced out of their jobs when they have children. But in 2000, at the meridian of the labor crunch, Census Agency data showed that fully 22% of all women with professional degrees (MBAs, MDs, PhDs, and so on) were not in the labor marketplace at all. What an boggling waste of expensively educated talent!
At the same time, nosotros need adults at all income levels to get committed, effective parents. When a parent devotes time, attention, and financial resources to help a kid get a well-adjusted person—i who succeeds in schoolhouse and graduates from higher—non only do parents feel securely fulfilled, only order, of grade, is graced with productive workers who boost the Gdp, obey the law, and pay their taxes. Thus, we are all stakeholders in parents' ability to come through for their children.
And when women come up to understand the value of parenthood to the wider customs, they can quit apologizing for wanting both a career and a family. A woman can agree her head high when she goes into her boss and asks for a schedule that fits her needs.
The Challenge to Business organization
The statistics I've laid out here would be bearable if they were purely historical—the painful simply isolated feel of a pioneering generation—only they are not. My survey shows that younger women are facing even more difficult trade-offs. (The sidebar "The Delusions of a Younger Generation" suggests that younger women may be more dangerously conceited than their elders.) Can we opposite these pernicious trends and finally create the possibility of truthful work-life remainder? I believe we can.
The first challenge is to employers, to arts and crafts more than meaningful piece of work-life policies. Professional women who want both family and career know that conventional do good packages are bereft. These women need reduced-hour jobs and careers that can be interrupted, neither of which is readily available yet. And more than anything, they demand to be able to partake of such benefits without suffering long-term impairment to their careers.
High-achieving women make it abundantly clear that what they desire most are work-life policies that confer on them what one adult female calls "the gift of time." Take Joanna, for example. At 39, Joanna had worked for five years equally an account executive for a Chicago head-hunter. She believed her company had great piece of work-life policies—until she adopted a child. "My principal problem," Joanna said, "is the number of hours I am expected to put in. I work 60 hours a calendar week 50 weeks of the yr, which leaves precious little time for anything else." Joanna asked for a reduced schedule, but it was a "no go. The firm didn't want to establish a precedent," she said. Joanna began looking for some other task.
According to my survey, some employers have family needs into business relationship: 12% offer paid parenting get out and 31% job sharing. Many more, yet, provide merely time flexibility: 69% allow staggered hours, and 48% accept work-at-habitation options. These less ambitious policies seem to exist of limited use to time-pressed, high-achieving women.
And so, what do professionals desire? The high-achieving career women who participated in my survey were asked to consider a list of policy options that would assist them accomplish balance in their lives over the long haul. They endorsed the following cluster of work-life policies that would make it much easier to become off conventional career ladders and somewhen become back on:
A Time Bank of Paid Parenting Exit. This would permit for three months of paid go out, which could be taken every bit needed, until the child turned eighteen.
Restructured Retirement Plans. In particular, survey respondents want to see the elimination of penalties for career interruptions.
Career Breaks. Such a leave of absence might span iii years—unpaid, of course, but with the assurance of a job when the fourth dimension came to return to work.
Reduced-Hour Careers. High-level jobs should be created that permit reduced hours and workloads on an ongoing basis but even so offer the possibility of promotion.
Alumni Status for Former Employees. Analogous to active retirement, alumni standing would help women who have left or are not agile in their careers stay in the loop. They might be tapped for advice and guidance, and the company would continue to pay their dues and certification fees so they could maintain professional person standing.
Policies like these are vital—though in themselves not plenty to solve the problem. In detail, companies must baby-sit confronting the perception that by taking advantage of such policies, a adult female volition tarnish her professional person image. Outside the fiction of man resource policies, a widespread belief in business is that a adult female who allows herself to be accommodated on the family front is no longer choosing to be a serious contender. Acme direction must work to banish this conventionalities from the corporate culture.
The good news is that, where top direction supports them, piece of work-life policies like the ones I've listed exercise pay off. My survey data evidence that companies offering a rich array of work-life policies are much more likely to hang on to their professional women than companies that don't. Loftier-achieving mothers who have been able to stay in their careers tend to work for companies that allow them admission to generous benefits: flextime, telecommuting, paid parenting leave, and compressed workweeks. In contrast, high-achieving mothers who accept been forced out of their careers tended to work for companies with inadequate work-life benefits.
I heard a wonderful example of the loyalty these kinds of policies engender when I spoke with Amy, 41, a marketing executive for IBM. Her son had but turned three, and Amy was newly back at work. "People don't believe me when I tell them that my company offers a three-year personal exit of absence," she said. Equally she described the policy, information technology applies not just to mothers; others have used it to care for elderly parents or to return to school. The exit is unpaid only provides continuation of benefits and a chore-back guarantee. "IBM gave me this souvenir," she said, "and I will always be grateful." Clearly, in the aggregate, business leaders hold the power to make of import and effective alter.
Considering companies can't be expected to craft all the policies that will brand a deviation in women's lives, government should too accept action. I have urged policy makers at the national level, for instance, to extend the Family and Medical Leave Act to workers in small companies and plough it into paid leave. State and federal governments could likewise achieve much by providing taxation incentives to companies that offer employees flextime and various reduced-hour options. And we should promote legislation that eliminates perverse incentives for companies to subject their employees to long-hour weeks.
The Challenge to Women
My book focuses on what women themselves tin do to expand their life choices. In a nutshell, if yous're a young adult female who wants both career and family unit, you should consider doing the following:
Figure out what you desire your life to look like at 45. If you desire children (and between 86% and 89% of high-achieving women do), yous need to become highly intentional—and take action at present.
Give urgent priority to finding a partner. My survey data advise that loftier-achieving women have an easier fourth dimension finding partners in their 20s and early 30s.
Accept your get-go child before 35. The occasional phenomenon nonetheless, tardily-in-life childbearing is fraught with risk and failure. Even if you manage to go ane child "under the wire," y'all may fail to take a second. This, also, can trigger enormous regret.
Choose a career that will give you the gift of fourth dimension. Certain careers provide more flexibility and are more forgiving of interruptions. Female entrepreneurs, for case, do better than female person lawyers in combining career and family—and both do better than corporate women. The key is to avert professions with rigid career trajectories.
Cull a visitor that volition assist you lot achieve work-life balance. Await for such policies as reduced-hr schedules and job-protected go out.
That's an easy list to compile, but I take no illusions that it will change the world, considering identifying what each women can do is simply half the battle. The other half is disarming women that they are entitled to both a career and children. Somehow the perception persists that a woman isn't a woman unless her life is riddled with cede.
An End to Self-Sacrifice
In Feb 2001, I conducted an informal focus group with young professionals at iii consulting firms in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During that session, a young woman named Natalie commented, "This is the third consulting business firm I've worked for, and I've yet to see an older, more senior adult female whose life I would actually desire."
Natalie'south colleague Rachel was shocked and asked her to explicate. She responded, "I know a few hard-driving women who are climbing the ladder at consulting firms, but they are unmarried or divorced and seem pretty isolated. And I know a scattering of working mothers who are trying to do the half-fourth dimension thing or the two-thirds—time thing. They work reduced hours so they can see their kids, but they don't get the good projects, they don't become the bonuses, and they as well get whispered about behind their backs. Y'all know, comments like, 'If she'southward not prepared to piece of work the client's hours, she has no business being in the profession.'"
This is the harsh reality backside the myth of having it all. Even in organizations whose policies support women, prevailing attitudes and unrelenting chore pressures undermine them. Women'due south lives have expanded. Only the grudging attitudes of most corporate cultures counterbalance down and constrain what individual women feel is possible.
A version of this article appeared in the April 2002 issue of Harvard Business concern Review.
Source: https://hbr.org/2002/04/executive-women-and-the-myth-of-having-it-all
0 Response to "If I Could Do It All Again I Would Devote to Children"
Post a Comment