Working Mothers, Careers and Ambivalence: What Else is New?
by How appropriate. Here I am with my first post as a mid-life blogger and the wonderful, wise Morra Aarons, a CE herself, offers a report that tells us that "The 2009 National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW),
which polls 3500 U.S workers across all professional levels, shows that
"for the first time, young women want just as much to advance to jobs
with more responsibility as young men. Moreover, being a mother does
not significantly change young women's career ambitions.
I wonder, though, what lies beneath. Aftere at all, was unthinkable. For professionals it was bad for advancement and image; for hourly workers it was impossible.
I know a report is a report, but I suspect there's less than meets the eye. I sent Morra's post to a thirty-something friend expecting her third child. Here's what she said:
I still think women have to make harder choices with larger implications when they decide to have a family and begin the precariouis baolancing act of working and having a family. I think it really depends. am not sure how I think this study coincides with reality. Maybe women who have kids and who have intense jobs are more secure about their decisions now, especially in this economy.
It's just different when you're doing it. The blogosphere has been popping about this generally, mostly from younger women. But those of us who've raised our kids have plenty to say about the compromises we faced. Marcia Yerman expands the issue from caring for kids to the entire spectrum of care that so often falls to women in the "sandwich generation." Former Planned Parenthood chief Gloria Feldt goes further, arguing that if the parity these young women perceive is really emerging, we need to fight even more intensely for politicies that enable effective parenting in working families. This is backed up in a scholar's perspective by a University of Chicago Post Doctoral fellow (fancy, huh?) that concludes: Put more strongly, our results suggest that improved work-family
policies or changes to social norms could drive labour force
participation rates of highly educated women closer to parity with men.
Professor Joan C Williams of the law school at UC Berkeley says, on Moms Rising, that at some companies the economy threatens the policies, like telecommuting and flexible hours that have developed to help moms work and stay sane. Encouragingly, others seem to find these accommodations more valuable now. I know what it would have meant to me, as the first woman in the CBS Newsroom to have a baby, to have had any flexibility at all. Just a little, even.
OH, and here's a really interesting, contemplative post from Peggy Drexler about the daily choices working moms, and really, all moms, have to make between responsiblities in one sector and another. In this case, it was split loyalties within her own family.
Finally, my friend Kristina Chew, BlogHer and blogger at Autism Vox, writes about the additional work-family pressures that come when a child has special needs.
So. We'll have to wait and see if the perspectives of the women in this report are borne out, if they will be able to push for enough change to ease their way.
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Comments
Pushing for change
Cynthia, welcome and congrats on your first CE post!
As for pushing for change, I wish that would be all that we'd need to do, because I don't think it would take long. I wonder what we have to do to get the "establishment" to realize that flex time and telecommuting are not perks that get cut in tight economic times, but are really essentials of the new workplace -- for men and women? Without that "aha" moment by employers, I fear that our daughters and granddaughters will still be banging their heads on that glass ceiling.
Joanne Bamberger, aka PunditMom
BlogHer News & Politics Contributing Editor
Also at The Huffington Post & MOMocrats
Aspirations and reality...
I am hesitant to walk into this, because we damn well should not be in the business of discouraging or making cynical.
That said, what our young state as aspiration is forward thinking, before running into the reality that young women on balance put more thought into how to balance family and career than do young men, and also run into the reality that on balance, they will do more in the home than do their partners (at least in hetero relationships.)
We as a society stack the cards against young women all along the way. Look at how the aspirations of a 12 year old girl often evolves into very changed aspirations at 17. That... is such a critical period of time in a life. The changes come via the pressures of socialisation, who push them in directions that are often opposite their wishes when younger.
I get annoyed at the NY Times twice a year, because they seem to run stories twice a year talking about the flight of women from work to home. With allies like that, who needs enemies?
I've watched friends deal with their careers... he as owner of a business, she as spec ed instructor. He would show up at nine o'clock at night, pissed at her because she fields a call from a parent wishing to discuss their child. And by the way, where's my supper?
I suspect that sort of arrangement plays out all too often.
The equal aspiration of the young women is wonderful... but we fail them on giving them the societal framework they need to succeed. The ability is there, the framework... is not.
llhaesa
Amazing commemts
thanks to Nelle and Joanne on wise and thoughtful comments. Of course, you are both correct. We still have a long journey and it's too bad. I do also think though that how we view the issue once the children are no longer theoretical, but our own, is so different from the "concept" of parenting. Just adds to the complications I guess.
Cynthia Samuels, Partner
Cobblestone Associates, LLP
Blog and Media Strategies and Content Development Online and on Television Don’t
Gel Too Soon
GenYWomen@work
Cynthia,
As you know, Baby Boomer women have been trailblazers in the work world to pre-pave a smoother career highway for their daughters. Today, the daughters of boomers are young, college-educated women living in places like Manhattan and other major cities and earning more than their male counterparts.
A report by Andrew A. Beveridge, entitled "Women of New York City" and published online by the Citizens Union Foundation at its Gotham Gazette site, www.GothamGazette.com, found female New York City residents ages 21 to 30, coming from all educational backgrounds and working full-time, earned 117 percent of men's wages. In Dallas, they earned 120 percent. According to Census figures, 53% of women in their 20s working in New York City graduated from college, compared to 38% of men in the same age group.
Women want to work, but many businesses don't allow them to work the way they want to or can.
Yet, today the Internet allows smart and creative women to live where and how they wish but come together to make good money working on a project...similar to the way a movie is made. Over the past two decades, the number of women-owned businesses has exploded. The Center for Women's Business Research in Washington, DC reports that there are now 7.7 million firms in the U.S. that are majority-owned by women, a 42% increase over the past decade. These companies provide 7.1 million workers and generate sales of $1.1 trillion annually.
However, a number of young educated women are having their children early and then focusing on their business careers when their kids are in school...or...waiting to have children after they achieve the success they seek.
Women Executives and Work-Life Balance Issues
Successful women executives are impatient with all the "women stuff," and will interrogate a speaker on purely business issues. The drones prefer to whine on about discrimination or work-life balance.
As politically incorrect as it may have been, and even more so now, is that if you want to be a big player in this game of business, your job has to be the primary focus of your life. Successful women have been told, or signaled:
The bottom line for women executives: companies that overindulge in work-life balance are going to be undercompetitive.
John
Attempting to replicate...
what I wrote in response to you yesterday, it was inadvertently lost in clean up.
You miss the point, John.
We do not need men to guide us on how to navigate the waters of professional life, we've got that part sussed quite nicely.
What many of us wish to do is not find our place within the rules as they are currently written, we wish to obliterate those rules and rewrite them.
Work is but one part of life. We are most often the homekeepers, the childkeepers, in addition to our professional incarnations. See the endless line of stories about balancing home life and work? There is a reason these stories and discussions exist.
It isn't for someone to tell us we have to work eighty hours a week - we already do that - and some of it is at home, tending to that aspect of life. Been there, done that.
What we need to see, and not only on BlogHer, but across the internet, are men talking on balancing home and work, talking on what they will do at home, with the home, with children.
Many men do, do well, and it improves, but not enough, not nearly enough.
There has to be societal balance in gender at home and at work. Yeah, any given workplace might be skewed toward one gender or the other, but hopefully those reading grasp I mean the overall workplace, societal level.
Men have to worry about rearranging their work so they stay home with the sick child, just as we do. They have to worry over how they will get the place clean for guests two nights from now, when all these work projects need completing. They have to worry on what to feed the kids tonight.
Anyway, it isn't about us stepping up to emulate men and what exists now. I, and many others, wish to start tearing up workplace culture and rewrite the rules on a broader, across life scale.
What we need to see isn't what you think we should know or need to know, it is what *men* need to know, respond to, and address in their lives. What is ironic here is you seem to believe you can guide us, but I suspect it should be working the other way around.
llhaesa
Evergreen but ever interesting
Great first topic and smart move as usual by BlogHer to bring you on to write about this topic!
Technically I'm in the boomer generation but I do think these issues impact women of younger ages too. It's a societal temperament that requires a full frontal approach on all levels - not just one place, one action. My hope? That overtime, as the actions accumulate, change does come about. Meanwhile, we have to keep acting one at a time and together, as best we can.
Jill Writes Like She Talks
"Younger" woman here
Congrats on your first post, Cynthia! You picked a great topic.
I guess I qualify as one of those "younger" women, at 36, but I'm already disillusioned. I've left my career at a bricks and mortar law firm and work at home now. Before I had children, I would have answered just as the study indicated. But now I work at home and it works out much better for me and my family. The downside is that I've definitely lost earning potential in order to be able to simply take care of sick children.
Many of the women I went to law school with have either left the law completely or started their own firms. Those that have started their own firms are thriving. I see businesses that stress quality of life as forward thinking *not* undercompetitive. (John's multiple spam comments.) They keep quality people, they make money and they fill a need that's only going to keep growing.
Lawyer Mama
http://lawyermama.com
http://momocrats.typepad.com
http://dcmetromoms.com
Having children did change my aspirations
Having children certainly changed my aspirations. I am 32 and have two little ones, so I'm still pretty young. I continue to work as an engineer just as I did before my first child was born, but I moved from full-time work to part-time, including working from home some of those days. The workplace flexibility has been a huge boon to me, and I'm grateful that I have it.
I still sometimes struggle with the choice I've made to slow-track myself, at least for now. But I think my husband faces the same issues. He's certainly made career concessions in order to be more present in the lives of our children. And I suppose that's the mark of equality - I'm not entirely happy taking the hit, but neither is he. However we both recognize that if we want a good work-life balance with two little ones, concessions may have to be made.
~ Amber
www.strocel.com
Where are the men?
This is what kills me when I hear people talking about work-life balance only as it applies to women...where are the men? You know, the other person it took to get that little baby to Planet Earth? Why is it that as soon as baby comes, I'm the one expected to sacrifice my career, cut my work hours, be the one to stay home with sick babies and go to doctors appointments? Why is it that my ambition should be affected by a child, but my husband's is allowed to continue unchecked? Why do my responsibilities and priorities shift, but his stay (comparably) the same?
I find this incredibly frustrating. I don't have children yet, but the thought of having the world (and possibly even my husband) expect that I should be the primary caregiver in a family where there are two parents, equally responsible for that life, makes me cringe. It's things like this that make me snap, "Oh, really?!" when someone says, "We've come a long way..." We've managed to convince people we're good enough to be in the labor force, but we've yet to convince men that they are good enough to be involved at home!
Cynthia, what a
Cynthia, what a thought-provoking piece. Congrats.
Like Amber suggests, it seems that equality means that both members of the couple must suffer a loss to enjoy a satisfying work life and meaningful home life. What a shame and tremendous waste of talent and energy.
It puzzles me that as a society we declare that we value our children highly and see them as our future yet steadfastly refuse to honor (or pay appropriately) those who care for them like parents, caregivers and teachers.
I don't know what the answer is, but surely, it can't be as complicated as we make it seem.
Best, Dina
Dina Lynch Eisenberg
This Marriage Thing
Master midlife and marriage one boondoggle at a time
Great post & discussion,
Great post & discussion, Cindy!
I have a lot to say and a fussy baby in my lap....
Liza