Women and the "Pass to Success"
There was an op-ed piece in last Friday’s Financial Times titled “How to keep women on the path to success”, by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the director of the “Hidden Brain Drain” taskforce. The piece described an article in the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review, titled “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success”.
According to that study, 37 percent of highly qualified women voluntarily leave their careers at some point and a further 21 percent take flexible or reduced hour options. Among the women who leave their careers, 93 percent want to return to work – but only 74 percent of those who want to return actually do so. On average, women lose 18 percent of their earning power when they temporarily leave their careers. The figure rises to a staggering 37 percent when they spend three years or more out.
This is an important study, and its findings are disturbing. In a liberal meritocracy (which is what we should strive to be), a woman should be able to do what she wants when she does it best.
But I have two concerns about the thrust and basic assumptions of this article – and with what many now describe as the new front for feminism: the struggle to achieve a “work-life balance” for highly qualified professional women.
First, it is unfortunate (and perhaps ultimately counterproductive) that the need to achieve a work-life balance is viewed as an issue peculiar to women. It is not. A huge – and growing – proportion of highly qualified professional men very much want to spend more time caring for their children. I suspect the workplace is at least as unforgiving to men who want to stay at home caring for their families as it is for women: it may be more difficult for a man to walk into his boss’s office and ask for six months off to care for his newborn child than it is for a woman. His options when he returns to work may be more limited, because there may be even more of a stigma.
Indeed, whereas women today who have taken the “off-ramp” have trouble getting back on the “on-ramp”, many men today don’t even dare to take the off-ramp in the first place. In many cases – and increasingly – that’s not because they don’t want to. It’s because (like many women) they feel they can’t.
Second, while I haven’t yet read the underlying “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps” article, I find the title disturbing. The whole notion that caring for one’s own children is like taking an “off-ramp” is twisted. Why is it that the “path to success” is necessarily the commute to the office, for men or women? And are our brains really being “drained” when we care for our kids? We as a society so obviously overvalue work and undervalue family. Ironically, our twisted values even make their way into studies that are ostensibly designed to improve the work-family balance (at least for women).
2 Comments:
I think both men and women are forced to make a decision about how much time they want to spend working, and how much they want to spend with their families. Both men and women have options. It just so happens that most women would NOT WANT a man who chose to "stay home with the kids" because women like men with AMBITION.
Let's not get too high on ourselves. Families have to work together to survive and sometimes sacrifices and burdens fall different ways.
It isn't until the end of your comments that I sense a twinkling of hope....success ought not to be defined by the amount of time at the office or the abiltity to "do it all" with savvy work-life balance. As a stay-at-home mom, I'd like to think of myself as a "highly qualified woman" and not defined as such by the size of my paycheck. Women, and for that matter, men, make tough choices in life. Some of those choices need to be in the best interest of children. All too often in this "liberal" time we live, we scratch our heads and wonder why we can't have it all. Why are these demanding companies so unsympathetic? Perhaps it's because if a woman or a man wants to take six months off, whether to care for their child or take a karate class, their absence leaves a gap. Who will replace them? In your fantasy world where everyone is happy raising kids apparently there is a pool of tenured, experienced personell ready and waiting to fill in. And those same fill-ins are going to go back to assistant-crappy job when you so gloriously decide to return. My point is, however sarcastically made, that raising children is (or ought to be) thought of as a job that shouldn't be taken lightly. And the reason companies have a "stigma" is that it is expensive and time-consuming to replace an employee for any amount of time. It's basic economics, and you can't fault a company for wanting to be cost-effective.
Also, if it's true that 93% of women want to return to work but only some actually do, maybe it's because they have found motherhood to be too rewarding, and that her choice, however difficult, is to stay home.
You can't have it all. You can have some people make it work or some people do it sort of O.K. but people need to make tough decisions in the interest of their family or their career. The two cannot live happily together because one always suffers. And isn't it funny, you wouldn't stick your boss in daycare.
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