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Careers Outside The Narrow Path

Contributor: Connie Gersick, Ph.D., Yale School of Managment

We have certain phrases in life that kind of—make us up. Mine was, “I can’t.  I can’t do  anything.“ (laughs)  Over and over, I’ve proved myself the opposite!  I’ve been able to do things I thought I could never do. … I never thought I could do the work that I’m doing.  And the children that I have!   I just never imagined it’d be so great!     —Olivia at 51[1]                                                                                      

In his new book, Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family, Stewart Friedman presents the stunning discovery that, among graduating seniors in Wharton’s 2012 college class, only 42% (of men and women) plan to have children—half the percentage who took the same survey in 1992. This is not because they don’t want to become parents, but because they feel they must “conform to a narrow set of career paths”[2] that will not permit it.

As a teacher, mother and grandmother who cares about young people, I find the revelation heartbreaking.  Not everyone wants or needs to have children, or to pursue an involving career.  But when so many feel these deeply human experiences to be mutually exclusive, something is very wrong.  As a social scientist, I see Friedman’s finding as an urgent challenge.  What do we know, what can we learn and how can we communicate it, to provide young adults with far better options?  How can we help foster the changes needed to give them (justifiable) confidence that they may do things that they now believe—as did the successful woman quoted above–they “could never do”?

Friedman reports that Millenials are actively willing to try out new models of family and work.[3]  If this is correct, then we have arrived at a crossroads of spectacular need and opportunity for change.  In fact, resources like the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project, the Families and Work Institute[4], and Catalyst[5], along with voluminous research by scholars such as Bailyn, Galinsky, Hewlett, and Valian–to name only a few–offer a wealth of evidence-based recommendations for pulling outdated organizations into alignment with the needs of today’s workforce, both in terms of the way work is done and in the way careers are permitted to grow over the long term.

Many approaches are required, but I believe that if we wish to encourage change we need to significantly broaden our understanding of the meaning of work across the life span.  We need to provide alternatives to the “narrow set of career paths” that confine the imaginations of both individuals and institutions.   Friedman’s new study is a wonderful step in that direction, and it begs for more.   Currently, we have almost no research that illuminates the personal experience of careers beyond young adulthood and into middle age—a time span through which profound change and development can occur.   For the past several years, I have been immersed in a study of forty women from four occupations and a range of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds.  Their biographies, recounted from childhood to their mid forties and fifties, demonstrate how much room there is for variation, uncertainty, flexibility, delay and misstep on the way to rewarding work—given certain key opportunities.  These ordinary / extraordinary women’s lives veer far outside the polarized debate that has sprung up between “Leaning In”[6] and “Women Can’t Have It All, And Shouldn’t Even Try.”[7]

My study participants grew up in a culture even more confining than that described by Wharton’s 2012 graduates.   As children, their generation largely assumed that men would focus on breadwinning, while women (who might work outside the home, but in jobs, not careers) would concentrate on family.  Baby Boomers became pioneers inventing new career journeys and new ways to combine work and family, often with the support of spouses, mentors and employers.  Now they are nearing retirement, and the results of their important choices are in.  The learning they offer is immense. We can see the new pathways they carved out, the ways they managed their doubts, what helped them along and how they recovered when they got lost.  Importantly, we can see the rewards that delighted them as they exceeded their own expectations.

Capturing the underlying structure in these women’s lives was extremely challenging because of the incredible diversity in their histories.  They found their métiers at ages ranging from 6 to 50; they became mothers any time from their teens to their forties or not at all; they did or did not take time out from careers, at varying moments and with varying results.  Patterns emerged only when I stopped looking for the conventional signs of career progress and turned to Levinson’s definition of the successful life structure as one that is “suitable for the self and viable in the world.”[8]   These criteria suggested two dimensions for capturing career development: the degree to which a woman was clear about what she wanted to be (Vocational Identity) and the degree to which she was proactive in moving to get there (Navigational Control).  These measures formed the basis of a two-dimensional grid on which each woman’s starting position could be located, and then the major changes she made as she moved from adolescence to the present could be tracked.   After all forty women’s journeys were mapped, six distinctly shaped career “trajectories” emerged, each with its own particular challenges.

The study’s findings contrast sharply with the notion that in order to succeed, people must know clearly in advance where they want to go, and must be vigilantly strategic about getting there.   Defined goals and well thought-out plans were not always best.  Alongside those who did well by the conventional wisdom, there were women who benefitted by loosening the focus of their ambitions, women who found fine careers by trial and error, and women who thrived on improvisation.

The six trajectories are illustrated in “Getting from ‘Keep Out’ to ‘Lean In’: A New Roadmap for Women’s Careers.” The paper also explores the pervasive role of confidence in women’s development, and offers a set of implications for individuals and institutions.  This forum is not the place to go into detail.  But I do want to emphasize the sharp contrast between the imagined futures of new college graduates who fear their careers will rule out family–with the experience of a generation who began adulthood with at least as many constraints.  These women’s stories suggest the possibilities of a much richer, more adventureous, more complicated and more forgiving reality.

 


[1] Pseudonym.  Quote from Gersick, C. 2013  “Getting from ‘Keep Out’ to ‘Lean In’: A New Roadmap for Women’s Careers”

[2] Friedman, S.  2013  Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family  Wharton Digital Press  page 5

[3] Friedman, op cit

[6] See Sandberg, S., with Scovell, N.  2013  Lean In  location 118, Kindle edition  New York: Alfred Knopf.

[7] Leibovich, L.  9/30/13  “Debora Spar, Barnard President, Says Women Can’t Have It All — And Shouldn’t Even Try” The Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/30/debora-spar-wonder-women-making-it-work_n_4015978.html

[8] see Levinson, D.  1996  The Seasons of a Woman’s Life  New York, Knopf.  pp. 28-29.

 

 

Videos of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Feb 6 Talk and K@W Interview

The videos of Anne-Marie Slaughter’s lecture (one hour) at Wharton and the interview (20 minutes) with her at Knowledge@Wharton are now live.

You’re invited to share your ideas and questions by commenting here in our Forum.

 

W/LIP Co-Hosts Slaughter Lecture

Slaughter Talks to Friedman

 

 

Penn Reacts to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Talk

Contributor: Stew Friedman

Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of The Atlantic article that shook the world — “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” — spoke  at Wharton today in the Authors@Wharton series, co-sponsored by the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project and Wharton Women in Business.

An interview with Professor Slaughter was videotaped today for Knowledge@Wharton and her Huntsman Hall talk was also videotaped.  Subscribe to this forum to be alerted when these videos become available.

You are invited to post your ideas, reactions, and questions about Professor Slaughter’s remarks in the Comments section for this post.  Let’s keep the conversation about this important topic going!

 

How Much to Have? 40 Women’s Stories

Contributor: Connie Gersick, Yale School of Management

Forty years and two generations after the social revolution that opened countless doors for women, “work-life” conflicts remain raw and painful.  As the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project’s research shows, there is an increasing body of knowledge on ways to make our institutions more responsive to the problem.  Innovations like the Total Leadership approach offer excellent tools for creating “four-way wins…at work, at home, in the community, and for the private self.”

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic article — and the storm of reactions to it —reveal a sharp individual longing, alongside the call for systemic change.  Individuals need assistance with the high-wire act of managing their own competing priorities through the life course.  They need models to help them identify meaningful alternative pathways, and evaluate the rewards and risks of each.  They need stories that help them imagine satisfying futures that feel achievable over the long term.

The following excerpts are adapted from one chapter in a study of women’s adult development that I conducted in an effort to respond to these needs.  The study focuses on a generation of women who embarked on careers in large numbers in the late 1960s and early 1970s—a group now old enough to know pretty much how their choices about family, career, and lifestyle have worked out.  Their perspectives and their experience offer valuable lessons for both men and women, at any stage of life.   The full chapter, “Having it all, having too much, having too little: How women manage trade-offs through adulthood” can be accessed as a Yale Working Paper here.  An excerpt follows:

It’s a fine line whether I have it all or everything’s off.  Some days, I feel I’ve really got it all.                       

             — Eileen (pseudonym), Family Business Owner and President, at age 54

What could be more reasonable than to aspire to a good standard of living, meaningful work, and a personal life that includes nurturing relationships with family and friends?  But for women, and increasingly for men, this set of desires is described in unreasonable-sounding terms as “having it all.”  The question so many women ask themselves, “Can I have it all?” implies a need to confront trade-offs:  If I commit deeply to any one choice, what will I have to sacrifice?  If I postpone family to launch my career—or the reverse—what am I risking?  Will I lose my chance to have both?  Exactly how am I going to make this work?  And how am I going to feel, in the long run, about the trade-offs I’m making now?

Such questions were particularly formidable for the corporate executives, artists, social service agency directors, and family business owners interviewed for this study.  Born between 1945 and 1955, their girlhoods were spent in a society which insisted the ideal for women was to marry, have children, and live happily ever after.  They would take jobs if necessary–significant numbers of women have always combined work outside the home with marriage and motherhood—but they would not strive for careers.  Their husbands would devote themselves to succeeding in the work world, while they took care of home and family.  Two (full-time) halves were supposed to make an unassailable whole, and “work-life conflict” was not part of the culture’s vocabulary.  In this world-view, the meaning of “All” was simple.  No woman whose husband provided her with children and a nice home could legitimately question whether she had it.

But the participants in this study embarked on adulthood just as that ideal started to fracture.  Betty Friedan’s revolution-making Feminine Mystique (1963) dared to describe housewives’ “problem with no name”: a longing for more.  The women’s movement of the 1960s and ‘70s and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 heralded a wave of change that forced doors open—a crack.  A generation of young women were challenged to reconcile traditional responsibilities and taboos with vast new opportunities.  They did not know how or whether they could make it work.  Their task was no less than to re-invent adult womanhood.

As the stories here attest, these women created a wide spectrum of responses to their new choices, and discovered richly satisfying lives in the process.   Because of them and many others like them, our culture has changed profoundly.  Women have amassed decades of experience pursuing careers that were once tightly closed to them.   Men are more involved at home and more concerned about juggling work and family than ever before (see Galinsky et al).  Why, then, are young women and men still asking whether they can have it all?  Why is “How does she do it?” not just a cliché, but a truly urgent question?

This study uses the tools of social science to begin answering that question.  It examines the lives of 40 women from four occupations and a wide range of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds.  It shows how they managed the trade-offs of adulthood from late adolescence into their forties and fifties, creating lives that were far richer than their girlhood gender roles ever led them to expect.

Understanding how these women dealt with trade-offs was not easy.  Patterns were initially difficult to see amid all the variation in their lives.  The categories suggested by existing paradigms—whether they put family, career, or both-at-once first—simply did not work.  Moreover, major trade-offs were not confined to work and family.  Other factors, such as lifestyle (i.e. money, preferences about where and how to live), often entered forcefully into the equation.  Looking literally at who did what, in what order, was bafflingly uninformative about how women fared.

Finally, I realized that such “objective” observations were misleading.  Choices that looked the same on the outside held different meanings for different women, meanings that very much influenced how their paths unfolded.  The order within the chaos finally emerged from the women’s descriptions of their subjective experience with trade-offs.  Their personal answers to two questions went to the heart of the matter: “Can I have it all?” and “How have my choices about trade-offs worked out over time?”

In a nutshell, study participants described three divergent and highly consequential answers to the core question, Can I have it all?:

“No, I cannot have it all, but I can have what is most important to me,”

“Yes, I can have it all but not all at once,” and

“Yes I can have it all, by delegating some responsibilities to others.”

Each answer implies a distinct strategy for managing trade-offs, with its own set of requirements for success and its own trajectory over time.  There was no one best way; each answer worked well for some women, into middle age.  For each answer, there were women who made successful changes when it no longer suited them, and some who ended up with regrets.  The study fleshes out the character and internal logic of each answer and strategy, illustrating with case examples in women’s own words.

There are no super-women in these pages.  The findings offer accessible models, and show that although there are no standard or easy formulas, women and men can craft trade-offs that serve them well.