The Idea in Brief
Anyone who believes that women in the United States can have high-powered careers and families should consider these sobering statistics from economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s January 2001 survey:
- 49% of ultra-achieving career women (earning more than $100,000) ages 41–55 are childless.
- 33% of high-achieving career women (earning $55,000–$66,000) ages 41–55 are childless; 57% are unmarried.
- By contrast, the more successful a man is, the more likely he has a spouse and children. Only 19% of ultra-achieving men are childless and 17% unmarried.
Clearly, women don’t have it all—while men apparently do. And it’s not because successful executive women don’t want kids; most yearn for them. But the brutal demands of ambitious careers, the asymmetries of male-female relationships, and late-in-life child-bearing difficulties conspire against them.
These realities take an obvious personal toll. But companies and the overall economy also pay a significant price. U.S. industry cannot afford to have a quarter of the female talent pool forced out of their jobs when they have children. Yet in 2000—at the height of the U.S. labor crunch—22% of women with professional degrees were not working. And in Hewlett’s more recent survey, 66% of “high potential” women—highly qualified women not part of the workforce—would like to return to full-time jobs.
How to avoid this waste of expensively educated talent? Business leaders and federal lawmakers can establish new policies that support working parents. And young women can be more deliberate about career and family choices. Greater work-life balance is possible. It’s also essential—for women, their organizations, and U.S. business overall.
The Idea in Practice
The Challenge to Business Leaders
Employers can provide more meaningful work-life policies, in particular, by giving the “gift of time” to high-achieving working mothers. These women need reduced-hour jobs, careers that can be interrupted—and the ability to use such benefits without suffering long-term career damage.
To address this situation—and win the intense loyalty of their professional women—companies must make it easier for workers to get off conventional career ladders and to get back on. Examples include:
- a time bank of paid parenting leave: three months of paid leave that parents can take, as needed, until children turn 18
- restructured retirement plans: programs without penalties for career interruptions
- career breaks: job assurance after (up to) three-year, unpaid leaves
- reduced-hour careers: positions that offer promotion possibilities and reduced workloads
- active status for former employees: helping women on leave stay in the loop by paying their professional association dues and certification fees, and tapping them for advice
The Challenge to Women
Young women themselves must also actively expand their life choices. Most important, they cannot assume that, as they pursue their careers, their personal lives will simply fall into place—or that medical science will extend their childbearing years into their 40s. By being more deliberate about career and family trade-offs, they take a vital first step toward having it all—or at least having what men have.
There is a secret out there—a painful, well-kept secret: At midlife, between a third and a half of all successful career women in the United States do not have children. In fact, 33% of such women (business executives, doctors, lawyers, academics, and the like) in the 41-to-55 age bracket are childless—and that figure rises to 42% in corporate America. These women have not chosen to remain childless. The vast majority, in fact, yearn for children. Indeed, some have gone to extraordinary lengths to bring a baby into their lives. They subject themselves to complex medical procedures, shell out tens of thousands of dollars, and derail their careers—mostly to no avail, because these efforts come too late. In the words of one senior manager, the typical high-achieving woman childless at midlife has not made a choice but a “creeping nonchoice.”
