Working women are pioneering in fields that would have been inconceivable even 10 years ago. As they forge ahead, opening new doors and raising expectations, they are rewriting the rules for managing the phases of life-career, marriage, parenthood.
Three California professional women who have crossed that frontier-Nancy Collins, Susan Gilbert and Susan Nycum-surveyed 160 high-achieving American women for a book on how women in business are managing. Collins is assistant to the president of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation; Gilbert is founder and chief operating officer of Apprise, Inc., a medical diagnostics company; Nycum is a senior partner in the law firm of Baker & McKenzie.
Their typical respondent is between 41 and 50 years old, has an advanced degree, works in the same field as academically studied, salary well above average (over $50,000), married (first marriage of 16-20 years) with two children, financial status average as a child, mother did not work, one sibling, first in the family birth order. The advanced degrees most frequently listed were law, business, math and computer sciences.
In an excerpt from ”Women Leading: Making Tough Choices on the Fast Track,” the authors focus on managing children, sharing their own experiences as well as the findings from the survey.
Women with children are the fastest-growing commodity in the job market. A U.S. Department of Labor study in 1986 shows us that over half the American mothers with children younger than 1 year old work outside their homes. The study reported ”profound” changes in the overall number of employed women, saying that the number of working mothers has more than doubled in the last 15 years. This has caused a strain on both marriage and child-rearing that traditional couples would never have faced a generation ago.
According to Linda Bird Francke in ”Growing Up Divorced,” in 1982 divorces hit an all-time high of 1.2 million. This was double the number 10 years earlier. While the percentage of divorces dropped in both 1984 and 1985, approximately 1 million children a year continue to be added to the ranks of those from broken homes; 12 million American children now are members of single-parent familes. Sixty percent of children now being born may expect at one time or another to live in a single-parent family; 9 in 10 of such families are headed by females. And raising children alone requires an even more intense dedication than sharing the responsibility with another.
One of our respondents said, ”As I became a parent, I tended to repeat with my children the patterns which I had experienced, and thus became aware of how they are transmitted from one generation to the next. The messages that parents give their children are enormous and form the groundwork for their roles as adults.”
Whether or not to have children is one of the most important decisions ever made by either parent. At the time the decision is made, usually neither realizes the almost overwhelming commitment of some 20-plus years that parenting requires. This commitment is in terms of personal time, finances, lifestyle, living arrangements and in the overall serenity and direction of one`s life. The decision to have children is one of a small handful of decisions that forever change our lives.
As Susan Nycum notes, ”A lot of folks seem to have babies the same way others would acquire a puppy or a kitten. Their friends are doing it; it sounds like fun and there is a great biological push to become a parent.”
Most of our respondents felt that parenting should be entered into with equal commitment on the part of the husband and the wife, with both parents willing to spend whatever time was required.
Susan Gilbert says, ”My choice to have a child was made easier by the knowledge that the responsibilities truly would be shared between Keith (her husband) and me. In 12 years as parents, he has never wavered from this commitment. I see many other working mothers brought close to the breaking point by husbands who won`t share the duties. It`s hard enough to combine parenthood with two careers; if only one person bears all the child-rearing burdens, something has to give-the marriage, the care of the child, the career, or the health of the burdened parent.”
There is very little evidence that male workers expect to make the same personal commitment to parenthood that female workers do. A study of family/
work conflict reported in the 1982 Stanford Law Review points out that most males do not expect to be equal parents, nor are their firms willing to give them the work flexibility needed for equal parenting. Thus, for many the family/work conflict remains primarily a woman`s problem.
While most women approach motherhood as a joint venture and responsibility between both parents, one factor that ought to be taken into consideration before having a child is the possibility that either parent could become a single parent.
As Nycum notes, ”Single parenting, like loneliness and poverty, is all that it is cracked up to be.” She comments on her own experience as a single parent: ”There were logistics problems, of course-such as studying for law school finals with a teething child screaming on my shoulder. But I believed that came with the territory. I was not prepared for the negative reactions of outsiders to my child simply because her parents were no longer married. No amount of time or energy I could spend with Sue could compensate. Thank God society`s view of the single-parent family has changed!”
By its very nature, motherhood demands an incredible personal commitment of time. The time involved can be as great as you are willing to allot-there is never enough! Parenting takes a great deal more patience, faith and hard work than most of us orginally expected. Even when children reach the magic age of 21, the job is seldom finished.
What became clear to us as we studied the results of our survey was the extraordinary juggling act that having children creates. Wrote one
(respondent), ”It`s a good thing children grow up-by giving up all free time for myself, I was able to successfully combine marriage, the children, and my career. But I don`t think I could have done this forever!”
Another shared, ”All my time was spent on the baby, the job and keeping my marriage together. Two was okay and manageable, but three pushed me to the edge.”
The time involved in raising children is always greater than many women expect. Nancy Collins` experience agrees with this assumption: ”I was ignorant of how much time it took to raise children. I somehow thought that if I could just get my sons old enough to tie their shoes and begin school that a lot of free time would open up for me. Then I discovered that the older they became, the more time they wanted me to be with them. My personal attendance at their activites-from horse shows to soccer games-became primary in their eyes. Even though I sat in the stands, they especially wanted me there when they performed. What worked best was separate time that each could count on.” Many women with whom we spoke seem to think a lot of time and attention are needed only when the baby is small and cannot care for himself or herself. They fail to take into consideration the time needed years later when the child becomes a teenager and much counsel and guidance are required to see him or her successfully through these critical and formative years. Nor do they realize the extraordinary financial resources needed for a quality college education.
One said, ”My career looks like a broken line. I worked 12 years before my children arrived. The time required to raise my children led to the decision not to work for several years; then I finally started back part time for several more years. While I have been full time for the last six years, I have never been able to get back into the excellent career stream with the prospects I had before I left the work force to have my children.”
Obviously, raising children has its inevitable demands, and those demands begin with the birth process and preparation for it. Commented an attorney,
”Since I was the first female partner in my firm and also the first to have a child, I was very determined to get back to work so as to reinforce my boss` notion I would return. I also felt I needed to show he had made the right decision to promote a woman to partnership. Therefore, I was back at work within a few weeks, which was a very foolish thing to do. I was exhausted for many months and would have recovered much quicker had I stayed home an extra week or two.”
An old cliche in business states that no matter how stridently women promise to come back to work after the baby is born, they frequently change their minds once they look at their (babies). Susan Gilbert says, ”I have been occasionally disappointed by young women who have left to have babies, but resigned when their maternity leave was up.”
Nycum adds, ”On the other hand, there are instances where the organization welcomes the woman back, but penalizes her for that time off when she is reviewed for her next promotion, even though company policy states she was entitled to that time off.”
It will be interesting to see the effect of the 1987 landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling (in the case of Lilian Garland) that a state can require an employer to provide job protection for workers temporarily disabled with pregnancy. As Garland said, ”Women should not have to choose between being a mother and having a job.”
