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The blogger Well-heeled brought my attention to this new study with the stunning question: “Could the U.S.’s lack of policy mandating paid maternity leave actually help women’s careers?” I’m going to blame second wave feminism for the fact that we are even having this conversation- and having it over, and over again.
Well-heeled points to a new study discussed in the Times of London that found “American women hold the highest percentage of “managerial position” jobs at 42.7%, followed by Australia, another country without paid maternity leave, at 37.1%. British women hold more than 33% of managerial positions. In Sweden, 31.6% of managers are female.”
The Swedish authors of the study apparently claim “if there is too much job protection for mothers-to-be then firms avoid hiring women, who instead find jobs in the public sector.” So, driven, business-minded men rise to the top and their wives take jobs with gentler schedules. Or, women take short maternity leaves, spend a fortune on outsourced childcare to work the hours expected of them, and climb the ladder. Either trip is a lousy one, if you ask me.
Irritated new mother and Chicago Graduate School of Business student MaybeMBA asks, “Why should a significant portion of the world's "future leaders" be so ignorant/disdainful of one of life's most fundamental experiences”? Well, at B School or even in enlightened Scandinavia, the work world is currently crafted for “ideal workers,” and nowhere more so than in the US.
Like our current US health insurance system, current workplace norms are not sustainable. The US also has had more millionaires, more entrepreneurs, and general hegemony, cultural and economic, for decades. Many signs point to all of this shifting. If we don’t change things, they will change for us.
In an ideal worker norm, you work harder, you take less time away to raise your children, you rise faster. Joan Williams has written about the ideal worker myth and the ensuing maternal wall many women hit when nature forces them to become “unideal” workers. Williams, discussing the premise of her brilliant book, Unbending Gender notes on the blog MothersandMore,
Mainstream feminism asked women to perform like men. It did not start from where women are-caring for their children with a strong value system that dictates that desire. The movement for equality devalued mothers and the ideal of caregiving in our society. But it is also true that the push for work/family balance has come from within feminism. One of the things I do is critique full-commodification feminism, which is the sense that women's equality lies in performing as ideal workers along with men, and delegating childcare to outsiders.
As Cathleen Schine writes in her review of Gail Collins’ new book on the women’s movement of the 20th Century, When Everything Changed, one major thing hasn’t changed for American women: “The basic conflict between motherhood and career, like some sort of blotchy chronic dermatitis, keeps erupting in new unexpected patches.” I know so many women of my generation who, while grateful to the Women’s Movement for fighting for our rights to work hard, are so angry that now we simply must work hard, with no leeway to live the rest of our lives to their fullest.
It’s not enough to say that women shouldn’t take long maternity leaves. How many families can afford the level of childcare it takes for two full time working parents to manage? How many of us can handle the emotional stress? The only way things change is for the actual model of what we think makes a good worker to change.
The glimmer of hope I find is that major corporations will shift their model away from the ideal worker ladder into a “lattice” structure that allows women (and men) to rev up and down their careers depending on where they are in life. The other glimmer is that many companies do understand that women and men raise families and love their work. You can find examples of companies who try to make work “work” here.
But let’s go back to blaming feminism. It’s interesting that Naomi Wolf, exploring what she calls “The Achievement Myth” for women writes,
What if we in the West, by letting feminism be defined as always doing more, doing it better, and outdoing others, have failed to give our daughters a definition of success that sometimes simply lets them be? Unfortunately for us in the West, Second Wave feminism was articulated by ambitious, highly educated women who went to elite colleges and
