Not All, But More

Chinese Lantern Festival at the MO Botanical Gardens

"Why Women Still Can't Have it All" was proclaimed loud and clear in the July/August issue of the Atlantic.

On the cover, a grey skirt with decidedly humorless legs, stockings and shoes, is standing on an ugly grey carpet. The hand belonging to an arm covered by a long white buttoned shirt is holding a sturdy, more or less classical, design leather bag from which pokes a scantily clad curly haired toddler cherub (with Poulbot size eyes) looking straight at the camera, his/her beauty/life and expressiveness contrasting mightily with the drab grey background. The cover captures the main essence of the article by Anne-Marie Slaughter: Women, can not have it all, because... they are more torn than men when it comes to being away from their cherubs from crib to college. One of her main supportive arguments is that many phenomenally successful women (e.g., those currently on the Supreme Court) are childless and that childlessness is required to withstand the harrowing schedules that come with many successful carreers.

For some counterpoint: the September issue of the Harvard Business Review featuring more discretely: "Will Working Mothers Take Your Company to Court?"by Joan C. Williams and Amy J.C. Cuddy. Having heard Joan Williams when she visited WUSM last Fall and even summarized some key points she made (http://captrainingdirectorblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/coal-mining-investment-banking.html), I opened the HBR eagerly.

First of all: yes working mothers and working parents will more and more take companies to court. I will not focus on that too much.

Secondly, there are many related interesting data to glean from this piece: http://hbr.org/2012/09/will-working-mothers-take-your-company-to-court/ar/1 and I am summarizing a few since you can not access the article freely if not a subscriber.  
The data support the idea that, in many more ways than not, work environments are not yet overwhelmingly working mothers' friendly or supportive. In fact, not necessarily working fathers' friendly either. 

 How would you rank the following prototypical employees in terms of the treatment/benevolence that they receive from employers (on average): (A) Working father, wife takes maternity leaves when children are born; (B) Man, no children; (C) Woman, no children; (D) Working mother; (E): Working father who took a paternity leave, even a small one.  They are already ranked by order of popularity. According to Williams and Cuddy, several studies have convergent findings that fathers (not those who take paternity leaves, see further below) benefit from a positive employer bias and are "held to lower performance and punctuality standards..[and] more likely to be promoted than childless men with  identical qualifications".  However, "Fathers with even a short work absence because of family obligations are recommended for fewer rewards and receive lower performance ratings".  Thus, there is evidence that the nurturing/family caretaker role is penalized across gender and (one can surmise that this is because stereotypes and those that uphold them do not take gently to contradiction) this is even more true for dads. So, not just a "maternal wall" but a caretaker wall.

So, yes, harrowing schedules are difficult on family life; however, work environments which are permeated with measurable biases are as likely to push caretakers out.

We can't have it all, which hopefully every post adolescent comes to grips with; but let us not give up on having more or rather...less bias.

Till Later,
Anne

Thanking Joan Williams for allowing me to cite sentences from her paper.