February 18, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:Why can't mothers find part time work?
I know you didn't think I was going to say "Vast-Right Wing Conspiracy". Unfortunately--and, my liberal interlocutors, I really do regret this, because it sucks--I think the answer to the question "Why can't we find part-time work that allows us to combine work and childcare" is "For good reasons."
A top-flight career generally has little room for part-time work, because top-flight careers are about knowlege. Most companies need their knowlege around five days a week, because it is very inconvenient if a problem pops up and the person who knows the answer has only a 50% chance of being in the office that day.
Larry Summers put it neatly:
I've had the opportunity to discuss questions like this with chief executive officers at major corporations, the managing partners of large law firms, the directors of prominent teaching hospitals, and with the leaders of other prominent professional service organizations, as well as with colleagues in higher education. In all of those groups, the story is fundamentally the same. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, we started to see very substantial increases in the number of women who were in graduate school in this field. Now the people who went to graduate school when that started are forty, forty-five, fifty years old. If you look at the top cohort in our activity, it is not only nothing like fifty-fifty, it is nothing like what we thought it was when we started having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being female, twenty or twenty-five years ago. And the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to. And that is a reality that is present and that one has exactly the same conversation in almost any high-powered profession. What does one make of that? I think it is hard-and again, I am speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively-to say that there are many professions and many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work. They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place.
The model that I think a lot of feminists have in mind is one where you basically take high-powered jobs and split them in half during the childbearing years. Each partner does half the family work--child-rearing and housework--and then devotes the other half of their time to their career.
This is a fantasy, and to be fair, I think a lot of feminists recognise that it's a fantasy. But I'm not sure they recognise exactly why.
In the case of low-wage workers, it's because there are high fixed costs to adding another worker. There is training, health insurance and ancillary benefits, payroll taxes, and so forth. Training is surprisingly expensive. Domino's pizza says that every new worker costs them $2,500--this for someone who needs to learn how to pick up a pizza and carry it to the correct address. And when a friend in a VC firm is estimating the cost of hiring a new employee, they generally tack on 40% of the employee's salary for benefits and so on. So there are substantial fixed costs, and an employer who has to double those fixed costs by hiring two workers is going to recoup them certainly by cutting the wage they pay, and in many cases also by cutting benefits. Given the cost of day care, this means part-time work often brings very little actual cash into the family coffers.
But the fact is that it is not our nations waitresses, janitors, factory workers, call-center operators, secretaries, vetrinary assistants and nurses who have trouble getting part time work. They may be worried about accepting less pay or benefits, but they do not have trouble finding the work. The people who have trouble finding part time work are well-off women like me, in desireable careers, who want to keep their hand in while devoting themselves to raising their children.
But there are real reasons why the sorts of jobs we have are not available part time. (Note: I do not really consider working four days a week, instead of five, "part time", whatever the government says. If your kid spends more days in day care than with you, you are not working part time.) The main one is simply co-ordination. If you've ever worked for a European company, you know that it is much more difficult to get things done, because some person you need to talk to always seems to be on holiday; during the summer, things pretty much ground to a halt at the financial firms I've worked with. If you have a large number of people who are only in the office 3 or fewer days a week, the co-ordination problems become monstrous. The information you have locked up in your head is valuable to your company; the company can't afford to have it locked away from them for long periods of time.
Now, there are fields that use part-timers pretty well, but it's often limiting. Journalism offers the opportunity to freelance and keep your hand in while staying home, but a newspaper can't really use a reporter who might, or might not, be available when the story breaks. Part-time lawyers are growing rapidly, but AFAICT mostly limited to routine work such as simple wills or real-estate deals, which is not what most top-ten law graduates want to do with themselves. In general, part-time professional work is much less rewarding, both financially and psychologically, than its full-time equivalent. And I don't think that, in high-end jobs, that will change. A high-end job simply requires too much committment to take meaningful responsibility for childcare.
Taking time off is actually more feasible in those fields, and the very real discrimination against women who have done so is largely irrational. There's no reason that a woman (or a man!) shouldn't be able to hop off the tenure track in most of academia and then hop back on after the kids go off to nursery school--except that academics have a picture of themselves as dedicated to the life of the mind, and people who want to drop out and grind baby peas as insufficiently serious. Of course, the field changes and moves on while you're away . . . but after all, these people entered graduate school knowing much less than they do now, but no one said that they shouldn't be allowed to teach classes, did they? Admitted back into academia, those who have been away will get themselves back up to speed. Likewise investment banking, corporate law, and all the other glamor jobs that we're currently asking women to give up or immolate themselves on the altar of working motherhood.
So the deck does seem to be stacked unnecessarily against women. But I don't think that's some sort of cosmic injustice. Employers want you to work full time, or stay the hell home, because it's easier for them. You want them to provide a career-track part-time job because it's easier for you. What makes you think you're the one occupying the high moral ground, here?
What's the answer, though? We've got a generation of smart, educated, extremely able women. It seems a crying shame to keep them from raising their children as they want to -- or punish them, if they do, by ever after sequestering them from jobs that could use their talents.
I don't know what the answer is. I'm certainly worried about how I'll manage, if and when my time comes. But I'm not that worried about "Society". Society is still coping with a gigantic change in the role of women, groping towards a stable balance between work and children. The fact that it may not come out exactly right for me doesn't mean that my daughters are in trouble . . . any more than the invention of the spinning-jenny meant that the descendants of the English cottage weavers were forever doomed to penury.
I think that the path to a better future will be reached by working with our companies and families to find arrangements that work better than either the fifties stay-at-home, or the eighties Power Mom. I think we could use more suggestions on how each of us can make those kinds of adjustments, and fewer calls for Uncle Sam to fix it all for us helpless little ladies.
Posted by Jane Galt at February 18, 2005 2:57 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksJane,
You hit the nail on the head. When my family moved to Europe my wife gave up a job as a VP of a Bank. She was easily on the path to be the Pres of the bank in a few years. Instead she left her job and we started a family. Now, after three children she is ready to get back into the job market. That means back to school for a quick refresher, then applying to jobs were her boss will be 28. Worse, since her age, she will not get on the fasttrack again. She has had friends (male and female) tell her, who work, that you won't even get a fair shake since they want to groom the late-twenty somethings and early thirty-somethings that can work 60+ hours a week (more during crunches!). And the fact that she has kids will be discriminator in hiring/firing/promotion decisions. The boss doesn't like it when you can't stay until midnight to make the deadline. And yes I help a lot (more than any guy I know).
Childcare for the fast-track high-powered women is a chimera. My youngest goes to bed a 7:30pm. When I worked in the Pentagon (in the AF) I rarely saw my children during the workweek. Most fathers I know who work don't see their younger kids except on the weekends. You just are not there. Same with the women (and sometimes both parents miss the kids - that's what nanies get paid for...).
Solution, my wife and her best friend (both stay-at-home moms)plan to open up their own business...
We've got a generation of smart, educated, extremely able women.
It seems to me there's a major competitive advantage waiting for the company (or industry) that can make good use of part-time and returning moms (and dads, to a lesser extent).
In my limited experience, it's really the career-track jobs that are closed to returning workers. If they're willing to settle for a non-career-track niche, they can still do well financially.
"Employers want you to work full time, or stay the hell home, because it's easier for them. You want them to provide a career-track part-time job because it's easier for you. What makes you think you're the one occupying the high moral ground, here?"
Exactly. Somehow the concept of an opportunity cost always gets ignored in these discussions.
I agree with most of the last two posts. AOTW, I'm kid-less, though, so what do I know; every parent I've ever spoken to says that parenthood is, like auto-erotic asphyxiation, an experience that must be had to be understood.
A couple of points:
1. My understanding is that the 40% number is a rule-of-thumb, and not a great one. I know that some of your readers will have a better fix on the derivation of the number (paging Walser), and I'd love to find out about it (b/c I suspect it hides a multitude of sins, etc.)
2. I suspect that the largest component of this is that primary parenting and 80-100 hr weeks are not really reconcilable. Most of the dads I know also only see their kids on weekends, and then not that much. Furthermore, many parents (for reasons I don't fully understand - see #1) enjoy spending time with their kids. The joy of kids seems to pay out, unfortunately, in drips and drabs on a daily basis, so it isn't like you can store up all of your joy for use when they're 18. So most of the primary parents that I know resent work that doesn't allow them to see their kids with some frequency. Finally, I know a number of women who've managed to have wildly successful careers after having kids. Uniformly, however, they've either waited till they could latch-key the kid to re-start or they've outsourced parenting, and they've all committed to the 70-100 hr work week.
I'd worry less about career-track issues as the world gets more competitive. Few people I know stay with a company for longer than a few years, and I'd bet that the new Brownian labor market yields more opportunity for the strangely cv'd.
I saw a report on ABC News (yes, some of us bloggers still watch the dinosaurs, mostly because I was fixing dinner and didn't want to change the channel, but still...) about how Des Moines has the highest rate of women managers - something like 70 %. Des Moines companies actually use their family friendly policies to lure families to Iowa (look, here you can buy a nice house, commute 10 minutes, send your kid to the nice school down the street, have flex time). Des Moines (at least the west part of it) is actually growing at a decent rate.
"...They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency..."
My experience, in one of these hi pressure jobs, is that most of the 'contingency' was bullshit. For example, a manager would leave a package in his inbox for two weeks, and come in all agitated at 5pm on Friday saying "This has to get done tonite! It's urgent!" Or, we'd be worked round the clock for 3 days straight to finish a milestone, and at 2am the 3rd day someone would make the kind of error you'd expect from some one who hasn't slept in 3 days. So, we'd send out the work from the day before, which turns out to be perfectly usable after all.
Anecdotal, I know, but I hear the same anecdotes from everyone I know, and frequently see or hear of studies that indicate the same pathologies. Companies don't do this shit because they have to, they do it because they can. Even when it's counter-productive.
As for needing to have access to the special knowledge possessed by one person at all times, that's why we have phones, and cell phones, and email, and instant messenging, and pagers, and for that matter, cross training.
"Domino's pizza says that every new worker costs them $2,500--this for someone who needs to learn how to pick up a pizza and carry it to the correct address."
I'd like to see this number broken down. I wonder how much of this figure is intrinsic costs, how much is due to government HR regulations, and how much is some Domino's HR functionary pulling numbers out of thin air.
As a new, entrant into the workforce, I'd also like to point out that it's possible to find great jobs that don't require 80 hours of work. I work at a bank, in a career-track area (I'm an analyst on an incentive plan) and my boss is a woman with two kids (5 and 7). Most of the women on the floor are married, almost all of those have kids, and are definitely both furthering their careers and doing the responsible parenting thing.
It's anecdotal, sure, but I think if you're willing to give up, say, International I-banking for something like Business Analysis at a mid-cap regional you'll both do fine financially and be able to have a family.
Basically, your post is right on: high powered jobs require high-level trade offs. Gee...opportunity cost, whodathunkit.
I'm starting a new job next month (yay!) but if I weren't, I'd job-share with one of my coworkers, who's on track to have kids at the same time I am. If when the time comes I can't find someone like her, I'll go into business for myself. Sites like guru.com are redefining the job market.
Great post and absolutely correct. I would extend it not just to women who want to be mothers but also to men who don't want their life to be about the job. I know plenty of men in my company who are amazingly bright and talented but self-selected out of the fast track. They actually like only working 40-45 hours per week, they like having most/all of their weekends free and they like being able to take vacations without having to bring their laptops along.
The fact is that there is intense competition for the "high-powered" jobs. If one of your competitors for a job is willing to log 16 hours/day while you're only willing to put in 12, you'd better have an immense talent advantage to offset that deficit in work ethic. And the grinds frequently have quite a bit of talent too...
So how can women achieve the high-powered jobs and still have kids? The same way high-powered men do -- find a partner willing to take care of the family while the high flyer puts in 80 a week. The problem for women is that despite decades of feminism, most men still find it humiliating and/or unmanly to hold the caregiver role instead of the breadwinner role. So women who want to follow this route have a much smaller pool of potential partners than are available to men following the same route.
Somewhat off-topic -- buffpilot, my understanding is that most banks are absolutely crawling with VPs. Everything I'd heard suggests that baby-faced MBAs get hired as associates and in 2-3 years either get promoted to VP or are shown the door. Have I been misled or was it different at your wife's bank?
DRB: It's not just that men find it humiliating to keep house while their wife works. It's also that women very rarely marry below their social class - so if the woman is on the fast track, so is her hubby.
And as to why so many service jobs are part time: It's the hours. Few stores or restaurants stay open just 8 hours a day so one shift will do, or can use a full crew for the 16 hours needed for two full-time crews. Worse, even if a restaurant opens at 6 am and stays open until 10 PM for a 16 hour day, they don't need everyone for the whole 16 hours. Their ideal employee would work a couple hours at breakfast, clock out and go stand in a closet until lunch time, work two hours, go stand in the closet until supper time, work three hours - that is, be at work at 6am and 8 pm for just 7 hours pay! (They do need some people between times, but even with all the work that can be done in advance or put off until after the meal, the off-hours still need less than half of the peak-hours staff.) Since they can't make people do that, they fiddle the schedule around to a lot of overlapping shifts: say, 6am-2pm, 11am-7pm, plus short morning and evening shifts. That leaves around half the staff as part-timers - and many of them NEED more hours to make ends meet.
And Walmart may be open 16 or 24 hours a day, but if they staffed as a straight 2 or 3 shift operation, they'd have a lot of employees twiddling their thumbs on paid time. They probably do far more than half their business from 3PM to 8PM, and there just isn't enough stocking and cleanup work to keep those clerks busy the rest of the time.
"My understanding is that the 40% number is a rule-of-thumb, and not a great one. I know that some of your readers will have a better fix on the derivation of the number (paging Walser), and I'd love to find out about it (b/c I suspect it hides a multitude of sins, etc.)"
Since I was asked (blush), using x% of base salary as an estimate of the "additional" costs of hiring an employee is a practice that varies by region and industry. We use 35% for our own internal budgeting. The number, in our case, is a proxy for a number of costs: 1) 6% of salary is contributed to each employee's 401(k) account. 2) Annual bonus (which is not a strict % of salary, but does, generally increase by level.) 3) The firm's share of payroll taxes. 4) The firm's share of the cost of insurance. 5) Training. (We set aside over $2,500 per professional per year for training.) 6) Supplies. (This is more than just desks, but includes additional computers, software, copies of professional resources, etc.)
Some of these costs, like the 401(k) contribution and payroll taxes, vary with base salary. Others, like a computer or medical insurance, do not vary with salary. Overall, the 35% rule-of-thumb works pretty well for us.
All in all, Jane's right. It costs a lot for us to hire someone. We have a few people who work reduced hours (in this case reduced = 40 hours per week) or alternative schedules. It is NOT easy for us to make these accomodations. When a client calls with a question, they want the answer NOW.
If successful women aren't willing to marry down to men willing to stay at home to take care of the kids, as many successful men have done, I don't see why any of us or the government should do anything about it.
You hit the nail on the head with the "needing knowledge 5 days a week" observation. I work on a joint project with another company, and they have a "9-80" work week (every other friday off). Invariably, even though it is just two days a month, I end up need to wait till Monday on something because for an entire day, half the project is missing.
Jane. I can't see what you're saying. Too many words. But I know one thing: I love you.
i hope this isn't too romantic for this world to appreciate; said in another world where appreciation wwasn't so exceptional.
reader
Not a single mention of entrepreneurship as an alternative. The 80-hour a week career track is not the only path to upper middle classdomm! Hmmm...
Heinlein observed that there is a 20 year gap
between the best biological age for bearing
chldren, and the best social age for rearing them;
So birth the puppies, pop them into Cryogenic suspension, and thaw them out later.
In 1961 the average partner in a large, successful lawfirm was required to bill 1300 hours. These days that number is more like 2000 -2400 hours. I think there are many of us working, professional women who have no problems with a full time job and we have no problems with slogging away at 90 hours a week or more for the first bit of our career to pay our dues. The problem is that, for example if you are an attorney, there is no end in sight. You're stuck leaving your house before sunrise and coming home well after dark, six or seven days a week. Lawfirms don't even like you working from home. They like "face time".
So yes, we, as attorneys, can go out on our own, take huge pay cuts, have to do all admin and attorney functions ensuring that while we may end up with "flexible hours" and we will probably work just as many as we did before. In addition the large clients won't even go with us because no matter how good you are or how much the client likes you, they are institutional clients of a law firm and they don't move...ever.
The point I'm trying (and I think failing) to make is that over the past 30 years or so the amount of work executives have been expected to put in has increased substantially (and salaries have also increased substantially, they've basically doubled in the past 15 years)so that young female attorneys don't feel they can compete in the long run. I have no problem working 40 or 50 hours a week when I have kids, heck, my mother did it, but I have a big problem not seeing them at all. Interestingly enough my cleints never seem to expect me in the office at 8pm. They're constantly telling me to go home, not to do things, that things can wait. Obviously in a crisis you have to put the hours and I think most busy professionals expect that, but it's not the client who is demanding the hours, it's the firm. For every hour I work, the firm makes major dollars. I don't need to be there, the firm needs more money and I can be replaced with someone else who is willing to work the hoursif I am not. That person may not have my experience or skills with the client, but they will be there, billing the client and I won't. Since the client won't leave, the level of service provided to the client goes down. Not that they can do anything about it. It's a terrible system, and one not likely to change.
See I bet you think I am going to say something about haw good government mandates would be about working professionals, but I'm not. It's a terrible idea. The only way this system will change is that if firms and companies discover this really isn't the most efficient way to run a professional organization. Unfortunately lawfirms are run by lawyers and not business professionals. They only see the short term.
On a side note (and then I'll promise I'll stop) My mother worked at a major bank for almost 30 years. She was in by 8am and out by 5:30pm every day when I was a kid. They paid her less than her similarly leveled co-workers but she got 5 weeks of vacation (since cut down to four) and amazing pension, insurance, health and disability benefits.
In return when her kids grew up she started putting in the hours, traveling all the time for business, all at the same below market salary. When she finally retired on disability in 2001 she was a regarded as a valued employee, a trusted person who they knew had added significant value to their organization. They definately got their moneys worth, and so did she.
What they had mostly from her was loyalty. Something which I have always felt is very important for any company and yet something which is no longer valued. Give a working mother a job where she can see her kids and engage her mind and she will never leave. Until loyalty is again valued working mothers are screwed.
Excellent post, Jane: As usual, a good, clear analysis. However, one minor quibble:
"...any more than the invention of the spinning-jenny meant that the descendants of the English cottage weavers were forever doomed to penury."
I'm not sure how you would define "forever" in this case, but unless I missed something in all my economic-history readings, penury was precisely the fate of the "English cottage weavers" whose livelihoods were lost to industrialization. Low-paying jobs in the new, mechanized factories being often the only employment opportunity open to them, except for migration to the cities, and joining the urban underclass as a lumpenproletariat.
Kate -- Amen!
I heard a story on NPR several months ago, that large law firms in big cities are finding that associates are bailing out in significant numbers at the 3-5 year mark, just when they are getting profitable. They are taking lower paying government jobs, or other positions where the hours aren't so ridiculous. The firms were baffled.
I don't understand why no one has taken President Summers to task for his other controversial point. He claims that, "top positions on university math and engineering faculties require extraordinary commitments…, with many professors working 80-hour weeks in the same punishing schedules pursued by top lawyers, bankers, and business executives. Few married women with children are willing to accept such sacrifices…."
How does one work an 80-hour week? If you work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., take only 1 hour for all breaks, 6 days in a row, you have only worked 66 hours. Try 7a.m. to 9 p.m. (less 1 hour) . After 6 days only 78 hours.
My suspicion is that very few of us work 80-hour weeks. In some professions it is customary to claim that we do. That Mr. Summers thinks that these claims are really the norm indicates that he should give this canard the same scrutiny as he will be giving his remarks on gender differences.
Harvey,
When I was on a roll on my dissertation I was able to work at home. In my typical day I would get up around 6:30 am, get to work by 8:00 am, and work until almost 10:00 pm, day after day after day. I wouldn't "stop" for lunch or dinner, but I would munch through the day while I was working. Sustained 80+ hour weeks are possible, although I've personnally done it only for months at a time, not years at a time.
As an associate I worked routinely 12 hour days. I would get into the office at 9am, I would leave by 9pm. I sleep about 8 hours a night and, in order to consistantly work the hours I did, I required all of it. I would not take breaks for lunch or dinner, I would generally either order take-out food or bring my lunch. If I knew I was leaving at 9pm I would eat dinner when I got home. I kept a variety of snacks in my desk which I would replenish when I came in on the weekends. I would do this six days a week. And you're right, that's 72 hours a week. Except you're not counting the hour or so of work I might take home every night, or the documents I would review at home, or the 11pm calls from my boss asking me questions regarding things he was working on.
But your right, I wouldn't work 80 hours every week, I would sometimes only work 60-70 hours and then I would have spikes where I worked 90 or 100. It is possible to work 100 hours in a week. You just don't sleep much and when you do, you sleep at the office. The most I ever worked in a row however was 56 hours. To be fair, I took a two hour nap in the middle when I was waiting for some documents to come back from duplicating. I learned to keep a clean pair of underwear and socks in the office as well as a comfortable pair of pants, a blanket and a pillow.
Of course I burned out. But there are a few people who love it. They need four or five hours of sleep a night. They live and breath work. They don't understand not wanting to be in the office. My boss was one of those people. He once was on a vacation with his family and started calling the office and emailing us. We asked him wasn't he supposed to be on vacation and he said yes, but he had to take a break from it because he wanted to get some work done. I thought that was one of the sadest statements I ever heard.
Kate:
I'm curious - when you were putting in 72 hrs a week, did you have kids? And if so, did they somehow enter into your decision to make a change?
FWIW - the 110 hr rule for residents seems to indicate they were routinely worked for longer than that.
Of course I burned out. But there are a few people who love it. They need four or five hours of sleep a night. They live and breath work. They don't understand not wanting to be in the office. My boss was one of those people. He once was on a vacation with his family and started calling the office and emailing us. We asked him wasn't he supposed to be on vacation and he said yes, but he had to take a break from it because he wanted to get some work done.
People like your boss should be immediately put to sleep, preferably before they can be allowed to breed.
I heard a story on NPR several months ago, that large law firms in big cities are finding that associates are bailing out in significant numbers at the 3-5 year mark, just when they are getting profitable. They are taking lower paying government jobs, or other positions where the hours aren't so ridiculous. The firms were baffled.
An alternative explanation I've heard from reading lawblogs is that this is the law firms' business model. You get all a whole bunch of young associates working like dogs to make partner. The ones who burn out before they get the big raise did all that extra work for free.
One thing seems to be missing in the discussion. Children are a responsibility, not simply an accessory to be accomodated. If one chooses to have children it would seem that the priority shifts from career to nurturing and support. Comments about latch-key kids and childcare inconviences seem to me to be a sort of denial - having children is not the same as buying a new briefcase. Is the choice difficult? Hell, yes. But that's what adulthood is about.
One can whine about the "unfairness" but the reality is that children need parenting and, bless Larry Summers, women are, have been and will be the primary source of love and guidance during the early, formative years. That's nature, not nurture. And it falls squarely, as it has for eons, on Mommy. And, to my mind, that activity eclipses in importance any possible contribution one could make in the business world.
Although it may not be palatable in todays "I'm entitled to it all" mindset, the choices are really very simple: Fast-Track or Kids. Both engender real responsibilities and neither is an entitlement.
This is a great blog by Jane and some really interesting follow-up posts but I think the discussion has been too focussed on very demanding, competitive jobs at law firms and banks. Of course, these jobs require a massive commitment in all senses. But why isn't there a culture of part-time work in less demanding professional fields? I work in a corporate setting where most everyone -- except for the sr executives, of course -- has left the office by 6. But there are no part-timers that I know of at my company.
Jane's explanation makes sense but I believe that there also must be a more straightforward economic explanation to undergird the lack of a "part-time culture" in the US, namely fixed costs, such as payroll taxes and insurance. The two arguments -- purely economic and Jane's -- aren't mutually exclusive.
What are people on the "Mommy"- or "Daddy"- track really missing out on? When you're on your deathbed, having had a life will seem much more important than having been a BMW-driving big shot when you were in your 40s.
I don't think it will change until people who make balance in life a priority are running companies. I started my own company with a goal of providing a family friendly environment. It was hard, especially with pressure from investors to hit milestones, development glitches, the need to chase opportunities as they arose. We did an okay job with folks through middle management, but the handful at the top were consumed by the business - me included.
BUT - I think we wasted a lot of time. I think it's easy to suffer the tyranny of the urgent and then be penalized by the necessity of completing the important. It's cultural. Working tons of hours is a badge of honor in both corporate and entrepreneurial worlds. It's supposed to speak to your dedication and productivity. Too often it's simply a sign of poor prioritization, the inability to estimate scope and effort, the desire to impress, the difficulty in determining what's critical. It's too easy to ignore root causes so we simply suffer the hours.
My promise to myself has been that I will not give a company a bigger commitment than it has given me. They rent my time, they didn't buy me. That's easy to say now, as I run my own consulting business and answer only to my clients. But I adopted that attitude back in corporate America and it served me well.
And I know that most corporations believe (as I have in the past) that the manager's job is to wring every ounce of productivity and time out of staff that it can, without paying more money. The individual has to learn how to set boundaries without jeapordizing their job. It's hard, but doable. And if we don't do it it's our time that's lost.
"A top-flight career generally has little room for part-time work, because top-flight careers are about knowlege. Most companies need their knowlege around five days a week, because it is very inconvenient if a problem pops up and the person who knows the answer has only a 50% chance of being in the office that day."
-------------------------------
I agree that perhaps a "top flight" career might not work part-time. But thousands of other careers *do* work in a part-time setting.
I work part time in marketing (3 days/week) and it works well for both me and my employer.
With email and cell phones - it is incredibly easy to only be in the office 3 days a week. And with a flexible childcare arrangement, I can pop into the office for a meeting on my "off" day if necessary.
Yes, I gave up some promotions and pay raises. But I have flexibility and the ability to control my schedule. With young children, those are the most important things for me. No amount of money in the world will keep me from being at my daughter's field trip to the zoo...
And I do a lot of work at night. Not ideal. I do miss all the good TV....but life is full of trade-offs and this is one I'm glad to make.
I get a lot of "You are so lucky" from friends who work full time. And I explain that my company didn't come to me and say "Gee, you just had a baby, would you like to work part time?" I had to do a lot of research and present a detailed plan on how I would make it work. I *am* lucky that I work for a flexible, wonderful company who was willing to give it a shot, but if I hadn't presented it, it never would have happened.
Entrepreneurship? Raising a company is every bit as life-consuming as raising a child, and in many cases equally expensive. If you haven't already got the business started and running well by the time the kid arrives, you sure as heck aren't going to do both at once, not to mention that being the boss of your own company is every bit as much of a life-consuming job as the VP spot at the bank.
Home-based business does offer more realistic opportunities, but generally not so exciting (clerical work anyone?). Life is about choices and you can't just have them all.
After eight years of environmental consulting, my husband decided to go to B-school for his MBA - a goal he'd long held but had put off. Our oldest (and at that time, only) child was about 2 1/2 when he (my husband) started school. It was a top-25 school (he was, possibly, a "diversity" admission because he was 32 when he started, but he graduated #2), and he deliberately turned his back on all the very lucrative opportunities that came his way in consulting and I-banking because of the hours. He took a corporate job with a salary a little above the previous year's average (in energy, in the age of Enron, salaries were going up pretty well year by year), and kept that job for two years, seldom working longer than 50-55-hour weeks.
Then he was scooped away from that company by another energy company to do M&A work - still relatively short weeks, 50 hours or so - and after only a year there they transferred him to HQ and made him ass't treasurer with an eye toward treasurer in a year or so. Still, he works about 50-hour weeks, sees our now-3 kids morning, evening (they have late bedtimes compared to many other parents I've talked to, specifically so we can all eat together and spend time together in the evenings - so far no one's falling asleep in school or taking unusually long naps), and virtually all of every weekend.
Part of our good luck is his ability; part is that the CFO has five kids and the CEO has quadruplet grandchildren, so there's a strong family "bias" in uppermost mgt at this company. But none of that "luck" would have tumbled to us if he hadn't made being a dad a high priority.
This thread being about women who try to balance career and motherhood, I ought to add that I'm still figuring out my next step. I was a geologist in another life and, with catch-up training, could go back to it and be dang good again. But my at-home years are also kind of a way for me to have a do-over if I want to. The money I'll make is not critical to our livelihood since we're already functioning well on one salary, so I have, in large part, carte blanche. If I'd been wild about my pre-kids career I'm certain I'd feel differently about my prospects. But as it is, I'm confident that I'll be able to find and do meaningful work once I get #3 here launched.
The answer is to encourage mothers to bring their children to work. Because it is illegal in Pennsylvania for an employer to provide on premise child care, we help our employees hire people to look after their children. We provide play space on the same floor for the children so that the mothers can visit the kids whenever they want and whenever they are needed. We also provide free assistance in doing their payroll.
Of course the schools refuse to let buses pick up or drop off kids at our offices (they only do home delivery even though that involves driving past our building). Its also illegal for us to provide bus service. But we do help the mothers by renting them our van and driver ($1/year) to do this task.
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