ACCORDING TO THE Harvard Business Review, more women are managing, in their words, to actually “have it all.” Maybe I missed the memo, but I thought we had all agreed to agree that having it all is actually impossible.
The HBR puts a happy spin on a recent Pew Research Center study that showed that more women with advanced degrees (master’s and beyond) are having children.
This is true, though the overall finding of the study is actually that many fewer women are having children today:
“Nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s. While childlessness has risen for all racial and ethnic groups, and most education levels, it has fallen over the past decade for women with advanced degrees.”
Well, yes–but highly educated women are still the least likely to become mothers: Over all, 18% of women never have children, but for those of us with advanced degrees, number is higher: 24%.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think you have to be a mother to be happy and fulfilled. But I do have some, uh, lingering resentment and disappointment in the American work culture, and its failure to acknowledge that someone, somehow, has to care for the future workers of America.
The HBR’s analysis of the Pew study concludes that women are doing more planning in order to have it all, and that employers are doing more to support their female employees who become mothers…but the article offers no evidence of either of those claims. And I wonder: what do you all see, anecdotally? What do your experiences tell you about the state of the American workplace? Is it better out there for working moms? Or just as wrenching and hard as it was nearly seven years ago, when I, as the pundits like to put it, “opted out”?
Chime in, sisters.
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Hmmm…I wonder how many working moms there are at the HBR. I do not think there has been much change in the past seven years. Personally, I have evolved to be more at peace with mediocrity. I will win no prizes for being the most dedicated in my profession nor the best mom, but gosh darn it, I’m doing the best I can. And I actually think my kids realize this. in response to my apology that I could not come to my son’s last day of first grade party from 11:15am – 11:45am that I learned about 48 hours before its occurrence, he said, “Mom, it’s no big deal. I know you have to work,” very matter-of-factly, and I tried not to read more into it and add more guilt to my life. It was a little harder to dismiss my daughter’s comment several months ago at the dinner table, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a babysitter so I can be with my kids all day long.” But last night, she said, “when I grow up, I want to be a doctor” so I’m glad she perceives no limits at this early stage of her life.
Absolutely crucial essentials to any mom’s sanity who works outside the home:
1. reliable, trustworthy childcare
2. husband who pitches in at least 50% (and in my case loves to grocery shop and cook!)
3. outsourcing what you can afford to (i.e housecleaning)
I am just so thankful that my youngest two children will graduate from college next year (say a cheer) May 2011 because I am soooo darn tired.
I’m 35 and work at a small start-up that implemented a maternity leave policy last year when one of my co-workers (and friend) became pregnant. My friend was one of the company’s first – and arguably favorite – employee. The owners of the company, two easygoing guys younger than my friend and me, offered her two weeks paid leave. Hoping for something closer to eight, she took the two paid weeks, and then four more unpaid. Six weeks later when her leave was up, she requested to return to work part-time. The owners said no. Not wanting to leave her six-week-old infant home with a nanny five days a week, nine hours a day, she resigned. This is a ‘cool’ company that has virtually no employee turnover. I was shocked to see the owners didn’t value my friend enough to keep her as a part-time employee so she could balance motherhood with a job she enjoyed (not to mention needed). I can only imagine how the scenario will play out when it’s ‘my turn’.
All of my girlfriends with children have had to make conscious decisions about whether to opt out of working and stay home, or hire a nanny. They agonize over this decision, regardless of which way they go, both before and after they have made it. It is not possible to have it all, despite what the academics and research statistics are telling us.