Balancing Act

Great Expectations

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines An Academic in America On Stupidity, Part 2 Exactly how should we teach the 'digital natives'? First Person Polished Applications Nothing stunts civility like graduate-student insecurities and competition. gift. Career News Fish in the Shallows Stanley Fish would like professors to impart knowledge without viewpoint. Even if that were possible, it would be undesirable. gift. First Person The Welcome Mat On his first day on the job, an assistant professor is handed an unusual gift. Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Ellen Ostrow

In her book Time Management from the Inside Out (Henry Holt, 2000), Julie Morgenstern suggests that we visualize time as space. Imagine your day as like a closet. Outside it are boxes of all shapes and sizes that represent the various tasks you need to fit into your day. For most academics, there are more boxes than space in the closet.

The fact that you can't fit everything in exactly as planned doesn't mean you can't have some approximation of what you ideally wanted. No one can "have it all" without some risks and compromises, but that doesn't mean the quest is futile.

Reading Sylvia Ann Hewlett's controversial new book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children (Talk Miramax), I was almost convinced that it was. After about 250 of the book's 308 pages, I felt weighed down by its message. It reminded me of the early 1980s when I'd just moved to Washington. I was 30, divorced, and looking forward to the personal and career opportunities the city seemed to offer. Then I read about a study by Neil Bennett and David Bloom suggesting that a never-married, college-educated woman at 30 had a 20-percent chance of getting married. By 35, she had only a 5-percent chance, and by 40, barely more than 1 percent. As I recall, the article suggested that the situation for professional women in the D.C. area was even worse than the national picture.

Back then, I recall talking to other single professional women and hearing an epidemic of despair. We had blown it by putting our careers first, and now we faced a lifetime of loneliness.

Fortunately, Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (Crown, 1991) restored our perspective. Not only were Mr. Bennett and Mr. Bloom's figures incorrect, but their study appeared to be one of many efforts to take away the hard-won accomplishments of the feminist movement. It wouldn't be that easy to return us to the "cult of domesticity."

Fast forward to the new millennium and Ms. Hewlett's book. In it, she reports the results of a survey called "High Achieving Women 2001." Here are her major findings:

• At age 40, 33 percent of high-achieving women, and 49 percent of ultra-high-achieving women (those earning $100,000 or more annually) are childless (compared with 25 percent of high-achieving and 19 percent of ultra-high-achieving men).

• Their childlessness was a "creeping nonchoice." Fourteen percent of these women can remember that in their college days they wanted children.

• Among female academics, the childlessness rate is 43 percent.

• Only 1 percent of high-achieving women had their first child after age 39.

• About 89 percent of high achievers believe they will be able to get pregnant well into their 40s. Many women, of course, have difficulty and some turn to assisted reproductive technology. But after age 40, only 3 to 5 percent of those who use such technology actually succeed in having a child.

• At age 40, 60 percent of high-achieving women and 57 percent of ultra high achievers are married (versus more than 75 percent of men in those categories). Only 45 percent of female academics in this age range are married.

• When high-achieving women marry, they marry young -- before age 24. Only 8 percent marry after age 30 and only 3 percent after age 35.

• Married high-achieving women continue to carry the lion's share of domestic responsibilities. Forty percent of them feel their husbands create more work for them around the house than they contribute. Although younger husbands do slightly more than their older counterparts, the shift is quite small. Fifty-one percent of women (versus 9 percent of men) take time off to stay with a sick child.

• Twenty-two percent of women with professional degrees currently are not in the paid labor force. Those who were able to stay on track in their careers work for organizations that offer substantial help to their employees who are mothers.

It appears that the prime years for establishing an academic career overlap with the prime years for establishing a family. If you're an academic on the tenure track, you'll be working more hours than the space your weekly closet has for boxes, which means you won't have time to marry, much less to have one or more children. And as we all know, academic careers are unforgiving: If you slow down, or step off the tenure track to start your family, the chances of catching up are small.

Some of Ms. Hewlett's information is essential, if painful, to know. As a poster child of what she calls the "breakthrough generation," I am well acquainted with the "humiliation" as well as the failure of assisted reproductive technology. No one told me that fertility begins to decline at age 27. I'm not sure what I'd have done with that information had I known it then -- but I wish I had. And if you're a woman in academe who wants children, Ms. Hewlett has done you a great service by destroying any illusions you might still harbor about the chances of pregnancy much past 35.

She suggests a host of public-policy and workplace changes, many of which I agree with, to end the culture of overwork that threatens our careers, our families, and our well-being. She rightly points out that women are forced to make choices that men don't have to make -- although I'm not sure that the choice to have children but never see them is a happy choice either. And choosing to have a career at the expense of a life -- with or without children -- is a choice that benefits no one.

Ms. Hewlett also makes a number of suggestions about how women should conduct their personal lives, and it is there that we part company. She suggests that women not squander their freedom from the birthing practices of just three decades ago, when women suffered and often died at the hands of ignorant and apathetic doctors and midwives. And in order not to squander your hard-won reproductive freedom, she suggests that you -- young, unmarried academic women who hope to be mothers some day -- give "urgent priority" to finding a partner during your 20s.

To me, Ms. Hewlett is half right. Knowing the biological and technological limits of fertility can enable you to plan. Many women in academic careers decide to have their children while writing their dissertations. Others stay focused and on track, hoping to get tenure before their biological clocks run out.

But I'm hard pressed to see the value of worrying about finding a partner. The danger of Ms. Hewlett's book is that it might produce an epidemic of desperation. Looking for a partner from a perspective of scarcity is likely to have you sending off all the wrong signals. Your body language and behavior will likely betray any anxiety you try to hide.

And how will fear affect your choices? She suggests that accomplished, high-achieving men often prefer less-accomplished women who offer them more admiration and attention. My work brings me in contact with enough people to know that not all men are frightened of relationships with women who are their equals -- the trick is to keep looking until you find one.

The problem with messages of despair -- and telling academic women that the odds are against them unless they're out there finding husbands and having babies while, or rather than, working for tenure -- is that it encourages resignation, when what's needed is hope and determination.

So instead, I offer you these recommendations:

• Optimism is empowering. Focus on what you can do, instead of being afraid of what you can't.

• Expect your partner to carry an equitable share of domestic responsibility.

• Work for institutional policies that support a balance between work and life, including equitable pay and benefits for part-time work and options for increasing the time toward tenure.

• Participate actively in life outside of work. The more people with whom you are actively engaged, the more likely you are to meet appropriate partners.

• An appropriate partner is someone who accepts you, supports your dreams, respects you abilities, and admires your successes.

• Be flexible. Even the best-laid plans sometimes fail. Success and satisfaction come in many packages.

There is no perfect balance. And any approximation of it is hard won. But if you expect nothing, that's what you'll get.