This from the Department of Duh (Daily Mail, 8/15/10).
It seems that a British firm called InterExec conducted a study of 100 headhunters who specialize in placing people in high-earning executive positions. InterExec wanted to know what the career consequences would be for women who took significant time away from their careers. The key question was
‘If women are looking to compete on an equal footing, and assuming they are equally well qualified, do you think that they will have to forsake a career break (for any reason), thus having comparable experience in order to reach the top positions?’
The only thing remarkable about the findings was that only 53% of respondents said ‘yes.’ In the U.S. last year, there were at least three studies done of those in high-end fields – law, MBA graduates and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathmatics) academia positions. Those longitudinal studies showed clearly that women were far more likely than men to take significant career breaks and that those who did showed lower earnings and less advancement than those who didn’t.
A less sophisticated way of stating the findings is that people who work more and contribute more to their employers and their fields, tend to earn more and get promoted more. That’s neither unusual nor unfair. And of course it’s what men have known for a long time. Based at least partly on cultural expectations of the sexes, men have tended to emphasize work over family and women have done the opposite.
But for years, women were told that they could ‘have it all’, which apparently meant working and earning equally with men with no diminution of their family connections. That was always an absurd notion given the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day and one’s reservoirs of energy are limited. The ‘you can have it all’ line was always an invitation to an ulcer, a divorce and intensive drug therapy inside a place with high walls.
Of course most women figure that out very readily and attempt to make reasonable accomodations to the twin demands of work and family. The various permutations of those accomodations that men and women come up with are many, but each person confronts the issue and does his/her best to solve it in a way that works for all concerned.
What the vast majority of people do is to avoid becoming a workaholic. The simple fact is that most people don’t aim for the highest heights of career success anyway. The few that do learn very quickly that that decision and spending a lot of time with one’s spouse and kids aren’t very compatible. As Kit Scott Brown, chief executive of InterExec said,
‘I know very ambitious women who ensure their husbands fill the traditional mothering role while they focus on their careers.’
In other words, they do what their high-achieving male counterparts have done forever – recognize that they can’t make it to the top and raise a family too, so they let their partner care for the kids. It’s a choice. Moreover, it’s a choice the ‘you can have it all’ crowd assured women they’d never have to make.
We hear echoes of that in the recent kerfuffle about the three women who now sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. We’ve been urgently informed that none of them has kids, whereas all of the male justices do. The conclusion? That in some way high-achieving men can have careers and families but high-achieving women can’t. That’s so much nonsense of course. Those men got to a pinnacle of the legal profession and had families too because they had wives who did the lion’s share of the child rearing. Stated another way, they had kids, they just didn’t see much of them.
Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan didn’t manage to find men willing to do that, or maybe they didn’t try. After all, Kit Scott Brown says she knows women who have found exactly those men. No one seems to consider the possibility that those three women didn’t want kids.
But we still live in a world in which men are discouraged at almost every bend of the road from believing that fatherhood is a real calling for them. Men are told pretty much daily by popular culture that we’re dangerous to children, incompetent at raising them and in any case uninterested in doing so. And the law bends over backwards to deny fathers equal rights to their children in cases of divorce, adoption, single-parent families, paternity fraud and countless other situations.
And then we’re supposed to be shocked when people like the three female Supreme Court justices can’t have children because they can’t find a man to be the stay-at-home dad. When family law starts supporting fathers’ rights and when the culture gives dads the respect they’re due, high-achieving women won’t have trouble finding men to care for their children. It happens some anyway, even in the face of all the obstacles.
The solution is simple – equal parenting rights and equal respect for dads. But the very people who wail about women’s failure to advance in the workplace are the same people who would rather be boiled in oil than let a father have access to his kids. Go figure.