Grad School At What Cost?

Recently I’ve been considering going to graduate school.  Going through the application process, I’ve been struck by how impossible graduate education must seem to many qualified people, especially if you are a parent.

Putting aside the logistics of actually studying for a degree, just applying requires staggering resources.  Preparing for and taking the GMAT require most people to study intensely and take classes.  Normally when you take a class in preparation for a test, you get some additional value out of it — knowledge or credential.  But classes in service to standardized testing only teach one thing with one very narrow purpose: how to beat the exam.  And yet, the test is such that an average person might have trouble competing without one.

So GMAT and GMAT prep: roughly $1,500 if you only have to take the test once, and a whole lot of time.

Then there’s the applications themselves, which seem to me to have far greater intrinsic value.  The essay questions really do require you to think about why you are interested in graduate school, and they offer insight to both the applicant and the school.  But of course, writing four 500-word essays for each school, plus gathering old transcripts, recommendations, and sundry other letters and back-up materials also takes a great deal of time and costs between $100 and $250 per school.

I’m not meaning to bash higher ed for the process; the applications and tests probably do offer a fairly good indication of who might fit with particular programs.  But if you have ever wondered why it is that so many top MBA students are young adults from wealthy families, it’s because even a middle class person would find the fees and investment of time too staggering to contemplate, much less someone with a low income and children. (The same could be said, by the way, for many PhD, law and other kinds of masters programs.)

Once you’ve been accepted there are an array of financing options.  That said, the costs of higher education at private, and many public, universities are almost inconceivable.  These costs require people to take and stay in jobs they hate for years and years just to cover the crushing debt.  If working mothers in professional jobs sometimes feel trapped, for many of them it is because they are paying off education expenses.

The larger question is where this puts our workforce.  If only the wealthiest people have real access to top graduate educations, are we limiting diversity and growth in many sectors — business, law, medicine and academia?  If some suggest that the financial crisis would have been mitigated with more women in executive positions, I would similarly suggest that things might have been different with more people from all walks of life in these jobs.  It’s much easier to act in risky ways if you have always taken comfort and wealth for granted.

Higher ed people, would love to hear opinions on this from those of you on the frontlines of admissions and academia.

Related Links:

• I’m a fan of the American Association of University Women, an organization that advocates for women in academia, and helps those looking to pursue graduate education.  Check out their blog here.
• Penelope Trunk writes about why you shouldn’t go to grad school, saying that “the grad school model needs to change to adapt to the new workplace.”
• The Forté Foundation offers some terrific resources for women looking to pursue a business degree.
• Theresa Phillips at About.com writes about raising and family while pursuing a graduate degree.

Are Women Benefiting From More Flexibility in the Down Economy?

I’ve recently heard several career coaches and motivational authors talk about how the poor economy might benefit women in the workplace by offering more flex and part-time opportunities.  I haven’t found good statistics on this phenomenon, but it strikes me that even if this is true, it may be less of a blessing than we think.  And by talking about downtiming as if it were a benefit for women, we are sending the wrong message to employers about how they can treat their female employees.

The idea is that professional positions — like lawyers, accountants, marketing managers, etc. — are becoming project-based, allowing companies to retain the services of a freelancer or part-timer on a less regular basis.  This gives us hope that we can still do what we love and be home for school pick-up.  But I wonder whether most of the part time jobs that are being created are really in these professional areas.  It seems to me just as likely that if there is a statistical shift to greater flex and part time work, the jobs may be in retail or service industries.  That just means that women who have low-income jobs to begin with are having their income reduced further.

Equally troubling is the idea that, while there may be some greater efficiencies because of technology, much of the work hasn’t evaporated.  If you are working a three-day week, but cramming as many projects as if you were still on the payroll five days, have you really won?  There may be marginally better flexibility, but ultimately the part-timer just gets paid less for the same work they were doing full-time.  As Warren Farrell wrote in a New York Times essay a few years ago, people who work 44 hours a week make, on average, more than twice the pay of someone working 34 hours a week. Half as much pay doesn’t always mean half as much work.

And then there’s the loss of benefits — no more healthcare, retirement plans, or flexible spending accounts for part-time employees.  This makes the part-timer dependent on their spouse, or responsible for purchasing a potentially very expensive private insurance plan.  Two-income families benefit from the tremendous safety net of two insurance plans and two retirement funds.  This should not be taken lightly.

Finally, what message are we sending companies when we couch the forced part-time option in such positive terms?  It worries me to have managers think that, all things being equal, it’s better to downsize or downtime women since they value flexible schedules.  There are many women who don’t want to be down-timed — they need the money and their families depend on the benefits and income.  While a relatively small group of women at the top of the earning chain will see the shift to part-time as a benefit, others will find the loss of income devastating.

There is a place for flex and part-time work in the corporate world — it can create tremendous efficiences, and offer great personal satisfaction.  But women need to be cautious about how we embrace these options.  We need to encourage eachother to do the math and understand what we are giving up, even as we celebrate what we gain.

Related links:

• Great piece from The AmLaw Daily about whether the Bad Economy is or isn’t a boon for women lawyers.
• From The Mama Bee archives: The Truth About Part-Time Work.
• A Forbes article, Flextime in a Down Economy offers some realistic thoughts.
• On Mommy Track’d, Leslie Morgan Steiner suggests that the gas crisis might push employers to allow more working from home.  (I don’t think she is right, and her piece doesn’t recognize that a gas crisis would do far more harm than good for women.)

The Switch From Witch

It’s always particularly vexing to see a publication directed at women promoting the worst kind of female stereotypes.  This week ForbesWoman, an offshoot of Forbes Magazine, included an article titled “The Office Mom” asserting that women were “making the switch from witch” in the office, and are now more likely to exhibit a softer, more maternal management style.

Let’s start with the basics.  Despite a lot of hoopla over the idea of the Queen Bee boss, there’s little evidence that what the article refers to as “tyrannical bosses…best embodied in The Devil Wears Prada” are any more likely to be female than male.  There have always been women and men who feel the need to assert their power in inappropriate ways in the workplace, and this should not be tolerated regardless of gender.

But let’s dig a little deeper.  In The Devil Wears Prada and similar films, the alpha-woman is vilified for insisting on perfection, asking her assistant to handle personal tasks like dry cleaning, and insensitivity to her employee’s leisure time.  These are things that male bosses have done for hundreds of years, and still do every day, with absolutely no flack.  In fact, at a certain level they are all perfectly reasonable expectations for a top executive to have of her assistant.

The ForbesWoman article sets up another stereotype, “the office mom,” as a counterpoint to the Queen Bee.  The office mom bakes for her employees and listens to their personal problems.  She is emotionally connected with them.  She offers support when they are in distress and doesn’t yell.

I’m not sure that being involved with employees’ personal lives is an emblem of great leadership.  I also suspect that the idea that men typically allow distressed employees to suffer, while women offer them vast support, is untrue.  Corporate environments generally are unfriendly to individuals — they exist to support the goal of the company.  Sometimes corporate goals align with personal needs, but sometimes they don’t.  That’s not because there are too many “Queen Bees” in the workplace.

Ultimately this article is part of the larger effort to rebrand women as better positioned to lead by virtue of their femininity.  The qualities that were once considered liabilities are now being co-opted as assets in books like Motherhood is the New MBA and Womenomics, and articles like the recent New York Times piece “Do Women Make Better Managers?”

But this well-intentioned propaganda can just as easily turn on us.  Not everyone is looking for a kinder, gentler workplace.  Most companies are looking for the most qualified people who can support their business goals and drive revenue.  Sometimes this means boosting morale and improving benefits, but more often it means finding efficiencies, eliminating waste and taking companies in visionary strategic directions.  Arguably, these don’t have much to do with bringing cupcakes for your employees or listening to their personal problems.

Rather than defining ourselves by notions of womanhood that are older than the hills, we need to focus on gaining the skills and practical work experience that will truly give us a leg up in the corporate world.  That means overcoming political and social hurdles like the very real motherhood penalty, the lack of family benefits and the crisis in education.  Addressing those challenges will drive equality in the corporate world, not vague notions of womanly virtues.

Related links:

• Another perspective on the ForbesWoman piece from Shannon Kelley at The Undecided.
• A great piece from John Powers at NPR on Hollywood’s Strong, Self-Hating Women.
• From The Mama Bee archives: Why We Should Stop Asking if Women Make Better Managers and The Maternal Manager.
• A study reported by The Daily Mail suggests alpha females earn more than other women.  The headline should have been that women’s personality traits affect their earnings, but men’s do not.

Too Many Choices, Too Few Opportunities

There is an incredible passage in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar about choice.  The novel’s protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is thinking about her future:

I saw my life branching out before me like a…fig tree…From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.  One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was an…amazing editor…and another fig was a pack of…lovers with odd names and offbeat professions…and beyond and above these were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.  I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing the rest.

This quote was the first thing that came to mind reading Maureen Dowd and Marcus Buckingham’s recent columns suggesting that feminsim and women’s explosion of choice have lead to our increasing unhappiness since the early 1970s.  The funny thing is that The Bell Jar came out in 1963, about 10 years before one would expect to see the paradox of choice so eloquently described.

Perhaps women do have more choices than they did in the 1970s.  It has become vastly more socially acceptable to be a single parent, or a same-sex parent, or not a parent at all.  At the office, women are less discredited by virtue of gender than they have been in the past.  And certainly women have many more educational options than they did thirty years ago.

But there is a difference between choice and opportunity.  Just because we have a wider array of choices doesn’t make the outcomes any less depressing.  Just as in 1963, it seems that if we choose one fig, many of the others rot at our feet.  This may be the biggest reason why women with children (both stay-at-home and working) are less happy than their childless peers.  It is particularly that fig — of husband, home and family — that continues to limit our opportunities.

Marcus Buckingham and others respond to women’s decreasing happiness by offering pithy self-help info, and some of this can be useful.  But it seems to me that creating opportunities for women that allow them to pursue one life avenue without ruining their chances for success in another might be a more widespread solution.  In practice that means changing the corporate culture so that motherhood is no longer penalized.  It means social structures that allow women — and men too — to consider changing careers without fear of losing healthcare and other basic benefits.

It also means making our institutions of higher learning at the college, but especially at the graduate levels, accessbile to more people.  Between the cost of taking tests, applying and getting through a graduate program, only the very wealthy can meaningfully afford to gain the critical skills that would allow someone to change or enhance a career through education.  Women, nearly 40% of whom are the primary breadwinners in their households, are unlikely to be able to complete a graduate degree in a time-frame that would maximize the benefit of that degree.

As feminism has made great strides, government, academic and corporate structures haven’t adapted.  The choices are there, but any one of them still requires dramatic sacrifice.  I suspect allowing some of these options to co-exist comfortably in our lives would go a long way towards happiness.

Related links:

• Barbara Ehrenreich disputes the idea that women are getting sadder in The Huffington Post; the author of the study she attacks fights back on The New York Times Freakonomics blog.
• TIME Magazine explores What Women Want Now, and considers feminism and women’s happiness.
• Katha Pollitt’s take on the women and happiness brouhaha at The Nation.
• A Double X conversation between Kerry Howley, Sharon Lerner and Amanda Marcotte about women, happiness, children and the workplace.

When Will Things Finally Change?

Last night I was on a terrific panel about different kinds of work choices along with a career coach and a “mompreneuer.”  I represented the full-time working mom perspective.  The group asked interesting questions, many driven by personal experience, but still relevant to the group.  One exchange stood out for me: a woman asked when we thought the corporate environment might change enough for women to have access to the kind of benefits and flexibility that would keep them in the workforce.

The career coach suggested that it would happen when so many women opted out of the corporate world that companies had to take notice.  Because companies are increasingly hiring freelancers and part-timers, and women have more opportunity to start their own businesses, there is likely to be a greater number of women leaving corporate environments, though not opting out of work all together.  She also suggested that benefits like flexible workplaces are at least in part a function of the economy.  At times when labor is cheap and easy to find — like now — flexibility is at greater risk because it’s considered a benefit, rather than an integral part of workplace culture.

I had very mixed feelings about her answer.  While I agree with her comments on the economy, it’s not likely that women will be opting out en masse anytime soon.  We need the salaries, but even more importantly, we need the healthcare, retirement plans and other benefits.  The option to leave the corporate world and become a freelancer or start a business is only available to a small number of women who have partners or other support systems that make their exit possible.  (A caveat: the mompreneur on our panel was her family’s primary breadwinner, even before her business took off.  She did it by working and saving on her own.  But she also had a husband who cared for the children full-time.  There are many models, but they all require some kind of support.)

The women most able to leave the corporate world are those at the top, and what gains we have made in the working world will retrench if we lose them in large numbers.  We will be leaving men to manage companies, and they will not be crying over our absence.  Of course there will still be many women in the workplace, but they will be the ones who couldn’t leave — middle managers, secretaries (still the country’s number one profession for women), and cleaning staff.  Their working lives will get worse without women in top jobs to advocate for better benefits and family-friendly work policies.

As the Shriver Report points out, over 63% of women are now the primary breadwinner or co-breadwinner in their families.  A third of women in the top 20% of income brackets make as much or more money than their husbands.  These women can’t or won’t abandon the corporate world anytime soon.  If they did they would be leaving money on the table and exposing their families to risk.  Overall, our 23% pay gap would widen.

So is everything hopeless?  Are we destined to be miserable, overworked corporate drones?  I don’t think so.  In response to the original question — when will things change — it will happen when men demand family friendly workplaces too.  And increasingly, men are insisting on work life fit.  If family policy is always considered a “women’s issue,” it will never gain traction.  But if men, who still overwhelmingly hold positions of power in our corporate world get on board, we will see real change.

It’s heart-breaking for feminists to think that we can’t effect change in this area on our own.  But until women are valued equally in the workforce, it won’t happen.  And yet there’s hope in this area too — with better family policy both in corporate and government arenas, women will be able to move up the corporate ladder in ways they haven’t been able to before.  Family policy is the driver that will propel women to higher achievement, better lives and genedr equity in an out of the boardroom.

Related links:

• Cali Yost at work+life+fit calls for an end to talking about flexible work as a “women’s issue.”
• An NPR story from earlier this week: Women in the Workplace Still Face Inequality.
• The panel was sponsored by the Park Slope Parents Career Networking group and Momasphere Events, both great organizations creating community for parents.
• Two provacative articles from the British news: The Only Glass Ceiling That Exists Today is Created by Women and Women Have Got Greedy With Maternity Leave.

Making Cooking Work Every Day

Last week I heard this interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with the wonderful Ruth Reichl, former New York Times food columnist and editor of the recently closed Gourmet Magazine (November is their last issue).  Reichl is also a working mother who took the job at Gourmet in part so she could be home more evenings with her family.

As a regular reader of the magazine, I saw a marked change in the publication’s style under Reichl’s leadership.  It became political and friendly to working people who might not have the time to bone their own fish or find obscure ingredients.  Each month offered a number of recipes that could be completed in less than 30 minutes, alongside more exciting and time-consuming special occasion dishes.

In the interview Reichl talks about how she makes cooking work every night, despite her intense schedule, and how important that has been for her family life.  She says that it’s not usually the cooking the takes time –there are many wonderful recipes that require relatively little preparation.  It’s the grocery shopping and meal planning.  I couldn’t agree with Reichl more.

Two years ago, when I made the pledge to try and cook at home as many weeknights as possible, I quickly figured out that grocery shopping and finding a recipe could delay dinner by and hour or more.  It also took up valuable time in the evenings that I wanted to spend with Baby Bee.  So I rejiggered to minimize the time I spent at the store, ensure I always had staples in the house, and give up recipe-searching (though I still got a lot of inspiration from reading Gourmet and Cooks’ Illustrated on my morning commute).

How do you give up grocery shopping?  Reichl suggests doing one big shopping trip on the weekend.  Another possibility is to sign up with a CSA, or a delivery service like Urban Organics, Greenling, or Spud.  Just limiting the time you spend choosing and buying produce will keep your shopping trips shorter.  Some services even provide add-ons like eggs, cheese, meat, herbs, and bread.  These may cost a few dollars more than you would usually spend, but your time is worth the few extra dollars — and you will eat more fruits and vegetables.

Another thought: especially if you have a child in preschool for part of the day, but even if you don’t, there’s no crime in asking a sitter to pick up a few things for you.  Of course, you wouldn’t want your sitter to spend long periods of time at the supermarket, but it’s much easier for her to do some light grocery shopping in the middle of the day when lines are short than it is for you.  You can keep her trips short by making a clear list — even including brandnames — the fewer choices that your sitter has to make, the less time she needs to spend in the store.

Finally, many communities now have online grocery delivery services like FreshDirect, NetGrocer, Peapod, and even some bricks and mortar stores like ShopRite.  The best of these allow you to create a list of items that can be easily replicated each week without you “shopping” each time.  Many of these services deliver in the evenings and on weekends, but you can also have a sitter or an older child home for the delivery.  This is especially great for ensuring that you have staple ingredients like canned goods, beans, rice, pasta, olive oil and vinegar in the house.

The most difficult thing for me was giving up my tradition of searching the internet and my many cookbooks for recipes each time I want to make a meal.  I still do it on the weekends or when planning a special meal, but most of the time on weeknights I wing it based on what we have in the house.  Some combo of grain or potato, protein and vegetable — and if all else fails, pasta with tomato sauce.  Just make sure you have parmesan cheese.

Related links:

• Epicurious.com will continue to house Gourmet’s recipe archive, and has a great feature called “Everyday Cooking” that offers tips and ideas.
• Mark Bittman’s blog and cookbooks are a great source of inspiration to me.  Bittman helps you adapt what you have in the house to many simple, delicious and interesting recipes, and has recently been helping me to cut down on our meat consumption.
• Craig “Meathead” Goldwyn writes about Who Killed Gourmet Magazine in The Huffington Post.
• From The Mama Bee archives: Not Julie or Julia; why I’m not crazy about some of the recent journalism on slow food.

Work 2.0

I recently read a 2008 article in Edutopia by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, that presents an exciting “Education 2.0″ vision of using technology to create lessons that are tailored to individual student’s best ways of learning.

The article made me think about whether the same possibilities hold true for the workplace.  Could Web 2.0 technology meaningfully change the way we think about work, making our lives more flexible?  To some extent this has already happened, but the revolution that would dramatically alter our perception of “working remotely” hasn’t come to pass.

Many companies still are not maximizing the possibilities of remote access.  They fly account managers cross country for meetings that could be done via web conference, or insist that documents be kept in paper format when they could be stored in a good online system, offering more cost and space efficiency, and allowing employees to access documents wherever they are.

Some of these technologies — like Skype or creating a robust document filing system — cost relatively little money.  But they require a vast shift in how people do their jobs.  Ironically, the people at the top, who are most in a position to effect some of these dramatic changes, are also the most likely to choose to keep things status quo in their own offices.  They and/or their assistants are unable or unwilling to seriously rethink how they do their jobs.

If some have been unwilling to adapt to the new technology environment, others have adapted for the wrong reasons.  Many working mothers have seen new technologies as offering more opportunity to “work from home” or develop a schedule that allows for more time with family.  That may be a positive outcome of Web 2.0, but I worry when the needs of working mothers become a driver for companies to adopt new technology.  For one thing it gives license to lots of people who aren’t working parents to opt out of these advances — and for Web 2.0 to work as a corporate strategy, everyone needs to be on board.

Using new technology primarily to allow parents more flexibility also reinforces a myth: that working remotely allows for fewer hours spent “at the office.”  In my experience, remote employees who are doing their jobs well work as much or more than their in-office counterparts.  The problem is that there are also lots of remote employees who aren’t doing their job well — they think that working from home will allow them to concurrently watch babies, or do laundry, or cook dinner.  This makes companies rightfully wary of allowing employees to use technology to facilitate working from other locations.

Finally, one thing in the Christensen article concerned me.  The piece opens with a group of children sitting around using noise-canceling headphones and laptop computers to learn Mandarin.  Amazing possibility.  But not for a whole day.  Educators will have to figure out how to use technology not only to create uniquely effective learning experiences for children, but also to bring them together in meaningful ways.  At its best, Web 2.0 creates community and facilitates teamwork.  A world that consists only of the kids with the headphones and computers will surely be less educationally rich than the one we have now.  But one that uses those experiences as a launchpad for collaborative projects where kids work together in person could truly be revolutionary.

Similarly, there is a pitfall in the workplace.  In-person communication — not just via email or phone, but being able to see eachother’s faces and body language — is critical to keeping corporate environments healthy.  People who work remotely on a regular basis may lose (or never gain) some of the key interpersonal skills that would allow them to function at top capacity.  The challenge for managers and management experts is to find ways of using technology that deepen bonds between employees and facilitate their work together.  When that happens working parents — and lots of others — will benefit considerably too.

Related links:

• Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani writes about matering the art of working remotely in her Harvard Business Review blog.
• Michelle Conlin asks “Working Remotely…or Remotely Working?” in the Management IQ blog at Businessweek.
• An interesting article from the Miami Herald about how the internet is extending working mothers’ days.
• The Columbus Dispatch says that legitimate work from home jobs are few and far between.

Solutions for All Working Parents

I’ve been critical of Judith’s Warner’s New York Times blog in the past; however, her latest post “The Choice Myth” is a worthwhile read.  Warner recaps new data suggesting that most stay-at-home mothers are disproportionately uneducated, low-income and of immigrant backgrounds, and discusses why these findings have major policy implications.  She includes a great quote from E. J. Graff, the associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism:

If women are happily choosing to stay home with their babies, that’s a private decision. But … [i]t’s a public policy issue if schools, jobs and other American institutions are structured in ways that make it frustratingly difficult, and sometimes impossible, for parents to manage both their jobs and family responsibilities.

This is an important point: who is choosing to stay and for what reasons have enormous implications for how we structure work and family policy.  If we understand that most stay-at-home mothers are not home by choice, but because they don’t have access to education and jobs that would make working worth their time, that is a far different environment than one where mothers opt to be at home over participating in the workforce.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t policies that might help both constituencies live better lives.  I recently heard Secretary of Education Arne Duncan speak about two related options: lengthening public school hours and extending the school year.  My initial reaction was horror — do we really want our children to spend more time in school when play-based learning is probably as important?

But Duncan makes the point that middle class children already experience extended days through extra-curricular activities.  By contrast, low-income children have fewer resources when they are released from school; after-school programs are of varying quality, and many do not offer the kinds of enrichment activities their middle-class peers experience.  A longer school day that incorporates art, music and sports might better serve all children, but particularly those most in need.

Summer break also offers a challenge and an opportunity.  Studies suggest that children lose knowledge over the break, requiring teachers to start from the beginning each year.  Extending the school year, which is currently based on an agrarian calendar that is irrelevant for most Americans, would limit the knowledge loss and help working parent who scramble to find affordable care for their children during the long summer break.

If done right, both of these solutions would help working parents tremendously — and give their children a better chance at quality education and enrichment experiences.  Even parents who have access to full-time sitters might choose to have their children in a high-quality, low-cost after-school program instead.

Not all of us are proponents of more school, particularly in places where the public schools are not meeting high standards.  But even if this solution isn’t the one you think is best, we can all agree that this kind of broad thinking from federal, state and local governments is needed.  Thinking that doesn’t just meet the needs of one kind of parent, but addresses the many needs of families at all socio-economic levels.

Related links:

• A fascinating report from the Nellie Mae Foundation on The Untapped Power of Summer to Advance Student Achievement.
• A report from Education Sector, On The Clock: Rethinking the Ways Schools Use Time.
• TIME article on the Obama adminstration’s plan to lengthen the school year.
• Robert Longley at About.com’s US Government Info Blog writes that teachers are cool on the idea of a longer school day.

The Opt-Out Revolution Numbers Game

Last week Lisa Belkin’s 2003 New York Times Magazine article “The Opt-Out Revolution” reared its ugly, mommy-wars inspiring head yet again, when Washington Post reporter Donna St. George took the time to parse 2007 census numbers on stay-at-home mothers.  The conclusion?  The majority of at home mothers aren’t former lawyers or MBAs who have opted out of stressful, high-powered careers.  As the article says:

Stay-at-home mothers tend to be younger and less educated, with lower family incomes. They are more likely than other mothers to be Hispanic or foreign-born…Given this portrait, mothers at home appear to be “the more vulnerable women, for whom I would argue the issue is lack of opportunity,” said sociologist Pamela Stone of Hunter College. “They have a hard time finding a job and finding a job that makes work worth it.”

In other words, Belkin’s piece got it wrong (as many of us have long suspected).  There is no “revolution” among women at the top sending the best and the brightest running from the corporate world.  

In an odd misreading of the Post article, New York Times Economix blogger David Leonhardt comes to Lisa Belkin’s defense citing statistics that the absolute number of stay at home mothers has, in fact, increased — and that’s true — nearly a quarter of women are out of the labor force versus roughly 20% in 1994.  But that’s not what St. George is saying in her article.  She is pointing out that the phenomenon of wealthy, upper class mothers “opting out” doesn’t represent the vast majority of at home mothers.  Leonhardt condescendingly concludes with a “modest proposal” (one that none of us silly, over-emotional girls have thought of before):

Maybe we should stop arguing so much about whether women are staying home in greater numbers and focus instead on the policy questions. How can companies be persuaded, or pushed, to make part-time work a more serious options for both mothers and fathers? How can part-time work — or, for that matter, years spent outside the labor force — become less of a career killer? What can be done to encourage more fathers to take paternity leave? How can we create better, more comprehensive pre-school programs, so that middle-class and poor parents of 3- and 4-year-olds can feel more comfortable working full time?

As blogger Dana Goldstein points out, flex-time and part-time options are not the answer for women at the bottom of the working totem pole.  In fact most of Leonhardt’s “solutions” work for women in corporate office jobs, probably not the 68% of at home mothers who don’t have a bachelor’s degree, and certainly not the 20% who don’t have a high school diploma.  For these women there needs to be massive change in social welfare at federal, state and local levels, not just cosmetic changes in corporate policy.  Those changes can’t just be about children; they have to also provide opportunity for women to further their education and get better paying jobs.

This doesn’t let the women of Belkin’s article off the hook.  Though they may be fewer in number than The New York Times suggests (not just in this piece, but in many others over the years), the 32% of at home mothers who have a college degree or higher are surely hurting the collective by opting out.  They are the influencers and decision-makers who could foment change in both government and corporate policy.  Instead they leave male colleagues in the most powerful jobs, essentially abandoning their female support staff. 

That means that some of Leonhardt’s suggestions are relevant, but they aren’t the only, or even the largest part of the solution.  And this is one of my biggest problems with media coverage of working mothers — invariably the conclusions drawn are most applicable to the lives of people with jobs that are inherently flexible, can be done from different locations, with varying degrees of intensity and at varying times — jobs like writing.  Time and again I see flexible and part-time work touted as one of the most important solutions to the work-life crunch.  

Yet the reality is that these are a small part of the complicated matrix we need to weave to make working mother’s lives better.  Much bigger pieces of the puzzle include adequate social services, including, but not limited to, universal access to high-quality early childhood care, universal health care, quality public education and after-school programs, and assistance for the many mothers who are not at home by choice.

Related links:

• Judy Berman writes about the Donna St. George article at Salon’s Broadsheet.
• Katie Allison Granju at Babble writes poignantly about opting out, and why women need to think carefully about the choice to stay home.
• The New America Foundation explores policy implications of the new census data around at home mothers.
• More from The Mama Bee on media coverage of working mothers here, here and here.

Working for More Than Money

In a recent post over at Double X, Linda Hirshman heralds a new era of working women.  She points out that because of the recession and some very public examples of men failing their stay-at-home wives, women are now re-entering the workforce in higher numbers.  In other words, the “opt-out revolution” is winding down.

I like Hirshman’s assessment, but would add a little feminist nuance.  First, while it’s true that most women work for financial reasons, couching women’s role in the workplace as primarily about supporting ourselves — especially in the context of deadbeat husbands — implies that women should look first to the jobs that are highest paying and second to those that are most secure.  I would argue somewhat differently; the highest paying and most secure job is likely to be one that holds your passion and allows you to grow over a period of years.

Second, I worry that the excitement about womens’ changing role in the workforce doesn’t address improvements in corporate culture that would lead to more women in senior management roles.  It’s not enough to just be happy that we have jobs — those jobs need to offer the same opportunity for professional growth and financial independence as our male counterparts.  Right now they don’t, in part because women are not well represented as decision-makers.

There have been a spate of articles and books recently that suggest dialing back your career is okay — hey, not everyone needs to be CEO or VP, and it may just be too difficult for women with children to meet the demands of a high-powered job and a strong family.  Of course it’s true that not everyone wants or needs top jobs, but what are the ramifications of systematically telling ourselves that it’s really just too hard to have a strong family and a high-powered career?  In addition to the external challenges we face, women also are limiting themselves.

I was struck by a recent quote from Cathy Greenberg, author of What Happy Working Mother’s Know, in the Philadelphia Bulletin:

Women have been socialized to avoid “ambition” as though it is something that makes “us” bad people…we often hear the messages couched as…why aren’t you happy with just being included, being a good partner, a good mother and associate?  Women always want to know why “enough” is just not… enough?  Women can help this feeling by taking an inventory of what they believe is “enough” for them and truly commit to their own happiness and wellbeing as part of the formula.  Often this will help them gain insight into the motivations of “being enough” vs. having enough so they can have more control/influence over their desires and thus recognize — we cannot measure our success in life by our money or our status — but by the relationships we create, depend upon and look forward to as successful people.

As Greenberg suggests, our happiness as mothers is neither about staying home or working.  It’s about figuring out what we really want and aspiring to those goals — whether they be in the boardroom, a self-started business, our own homes or somewhere else.  Most of us work to make money, to support our families.  But if we really aspire to success in whatever we are doing, we have to find what we love.  And this is a perspective that is noticably absent when we talk about working versus staying home.

Stay-at-home mothers frequently say they are doing it for their kids or because their salaries don’t cover the costs of childcare.  Working mothers say they work because they need the financial stability.  But rarely do women on either side say they made their choice because they are following a passion.  If we are to see a feminist revolution in the workplace, fulfillment as much as finances must drive our choices.

Related links:

• Why You Really Ought to Want to Love Your Work from Susan Heathfield at About.com’s Human Resources page.
• Ideas on Finding Career Passion from Louise Fletcher at CareerHub.
• From The Mama Bee archives: Passion, Fulfillment and Pay Equity and The Right Career for You and Your Family.