Childlessness is a tremendously important issue for American women. Women's reproductive lives remain extremely different from men's so that women cannot simply clone the male competitive model in the labor market. A new model is called for to enhance women's chances of crafting lives they want to lead.
In 1998, the Harvard Business Review asked me to interview some of the accomplished women of the “breakthrough generation”: the generation that came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, rode the wave of the women's movement, and became the first big cohort to take advantage of the new opportunities and new rights that opened up in those years. In 1998 these women were approaching age 50 and the Harvard Business Review felt that a retrospective on their lives would be informative to subsequent generations of women. Together we selected prominent members of that generation to interview.
It was an extraordinary collection of women, ranging from Diane Sawyer to Jessye Norman to Donna Shalala to Lisa Polsky—women who were on the highest rungs of the career ladder, across a range of occupations. In mapping the interviews, we focused on several themes: the subjects' strategies for success; how they had crashed through the “glass ceiling”; whether they had leaned on mentors; how much they had been involved in the women's movement; and their feelings about wage gaps and earning power. We were to solicit the advice they would give young women. In other words, we planned on covering some of the obvious territory.
After 15 interviews, I looked at my notes and realized one stunning fact: none of these women had children. We hadn't picked them because they didn't have children; we had merely selected a group of highly accomplished women in a variety of occupations. I was so startled by this finding that I went back for a second set of interviews with the same women and asked the obvious questions: Was this a choice? Had they planned lives without children? And these simple questions opened the floodgates.
Inherent in these second interviews was a reservoir of pain, regret, and anger. Over strong coffee and stiff drinks, poignant stories were told about children being a “creeping non-choice,” and family being squeezed out by high-maintenance careers and needy partners. There was an undertow of rage centered on the unfairness of the situation. One thing these women were clear about was that they were surrounded by successful male colleagues who were married with children. Men did not seem to face the same kinds of brutal tradeoffs in their lives—between love and work, career and children.
What was to be done with these interviews? I was well aware of the fact that this was a very special group of women—a tiny elite crop—but were their predicaments and sacrifices representative of a broad sweep of American women? We decided to back up and do a larger piece of research that took a hard look at a much wider group of American professional women. Over the next 2 years I raised some money and, together with Harris Interactive, designed a survey that looked at the top 10% of professional women in America—those earning more than $45,000 per year. We looked at two age groups: the “breakthrough generation” (the 40- to 55-year-olds), and their younger peers (the 28- to 40-year olds) (1).
Childlessness is an issue
The findings of this survey formed the basis of my 2002 book, Creating a Life. They were dramatic:
1.Childlessness really is a huge issue for American women. Across the board, 33% of professional women are childless at age 40 and yet only 14% of these women had planned lives without children (2). Many yearn for families and at least some go to extraordinary lengths to bring a baby into their lives
2.The situation is profoundly inequitable. There is a mirror image out there: the more successful you are as a woman, the more you earn, the less likely you are to have either a partner or children. For men, the reverse is true: the more you earn, the more successful you are, the more likely it is you've had all kinds of wives and all kinds of children. In corporate America, for example, 42% of the professional women in the survey (defined as those women who work in companies with 5,000 or more employees) were childless at age 40 while only 25% of their high-achieving male peers were childless at the same age. Men don't experience a significant gap between what they want and what they have on the children front—79% want children, 75% have them. So there is a continuing deep inequity between men and women in terms of their ability to lead lives that contain both career and family.
3.These sacrifices are as severe for younger women as they were for the breakthrough generation. Approaching this research I expected to find that conditions had become easier. For example, there are many more professional women in the workplace, and at least some companies are doing more to help women balance career and family. However these changes seem not to have gone deep enough to change the landscape. In my research I found that the tradeoffs facing 28- to 40-year-old professional women are actually somewhat worse than those faced by their older sisters. For instance, fully 55% of these younger women are childless at age 35, which is in fact a higher percentage than was true for older women at that age.
4.African American women face particularly harsh trade-offs (3). The survey points to the fact that women of color face an extremely difficult marriage market due to a shortage of eligible males. Only 33% of African American women surveyed are currently married. Thus, a large percentage face painful choices when they attempt to have children. Rather few African American professional women are eager to become single mothers, yet that is one of the few avenues open to them.
5.There is a great deal of misinformation out there about the likelihood of having a child late in life. The vast majority of professional women have been taken in by the hype that has come out of the market-driven fertility industry—fully 86% of the women in my survey were convinced that with fertility treatments, most women can get pregnant in their 40s. This conviction is at odds with the research data. The evidence shows that even with assisted reproductive technology (ART), only 5% to 10% of women seeking treatment for infertility will succeed in getting pregnant in their 40s. As one doctor put it, “Failure is more commonly the norm” (4). Many women find this information extremely difficult to absorb, but it's one of those cases in which “knowledge is power”—understanding “the real deal” in terms of options and risks enables women to make informed decisions about their lives.
Much of my book is devoted to explaining why professional women have gotten themselves into such troubled waters. Part of the problem is that when women embarked on ambitious careers back in the late 1960s and 1970s, they attempted to clone the male competitive model. The advice coming from teachers, mentors, family, and friends in those years was that the sensible thing for an ambitious young woman to do was to focus like a laser beam on career for the first 10 years of adult life. And then, in one's mid-30s, when the career was launched, one could incorporate the “easy stuff”—the stuff that women have been doing for millennia—husband, children, home.
The fact is, this quintessential male path through young adult life doesn't work so well for women. If women focus exclusively on career until age 35 they are very apt to get into trouble. At this stage in life the marriage market is difficult—it is much easier to find a mate in one's late 20s than in one's late 30s—and in addition, the biological clock has begun to kick in. Despite the miracles of modern science, age-related infertility is very much still with us. Fertility drops off a cliff in one's mid-30s. Indeed, recent studies indicate that infertility can start creeping up as early as one's late 20s (5). And certainly by the time one is 40 it is extremely difficult to have that first child. Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have and somewhere in their mid- to late 30s they start running out. This is a fact that even cutting-edge medical science has not changed.
Because women's reproductive lives remain extremely different from men's, they must create different paths in the labor market. One pattern that might work better for women is a more determined effort to find that loving partner in one's late 20s and to have that first child before age 35. What this means for professional life is complicated. Obviously, it is extremely important to get qualified; to put together the skills that enable one to have a lifelong career. But in those key years, 28 to 35, it's important to construct a professional life that doesn't demand 70 hours a week, but one that allows time and attention for personal goals.
For women life is long these days. If a woman reaches age 40 in good health, she can expect another 43 years of life. So it might well be possible to postpone ambition, to climb the career ladder more aggressively in one's 40s and 50s. In sharp contrast, the window of fertility is short and not easily expanded or extended. For professional women this window is barely 15 years long—stretching from the end of college/professional school to ages 35 to 40—and needs to be respected.
A “to do” list for younger women
At the end of my book I develop a simple “to do” list that encapsulates the insights and strategies that fall out of the data—and the life stories—presented in Creating a Life.
This is what young women can do to enhance their chances of crafting lives they want to lead:
•Figure out what you want your life to look like at age 45. What do you want your personal life to look like? What do you want your career to look like? If it turns out that you want children (and approximately 86% of professional women do) you need to become highly intentional—and seriously proactive. If you don't want children, the pressure is off.
•Give urgent priority to finding a partner. This project is time-sensitive and deserves special attention in your 20s. Forging a loving, lasting marriage can enhance your life and make it much more likely that you will have children. Data show that it is easier to find partners at younger ages.
•Have your first child before age 35. The miracles of ART notwithstanding, do not wait until your late 30s or early 40s before trying to have that first child. Late-in-life childbearing is fraught with risk and failure. And if you do get that first child in, you may fail to have a second. This also can trigger enormous regret.
•Choose a career that will give you the “gift of time.” Certain careers lend themselves to better work–life balance because they allow more flexibility and are more forgiving of career interruptions. Across the board, self-employed and entrepreneurial women do much better than corporate women in combining career and family.
•Choose a company or organization that will help you achieve work–life balance. Companies vary widely in the kinds of work/life options they provide. If you want a family, find a job at a firm that provides employees with a rich array of work/life policies that include reduced-hour schedules and various kinds of job-protected leave.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett, President, Center for Work-Life Policy, P.O. Box 77, New York, NY 10113, USA
☆ The consequences of delaying childbirth are widely misunderstood
Planning is key for most women to combine professional life with motherhood
1 For further details, see Hewlett SA. Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children. New York: Talk Miramax, 2002.
2 This 14% figure for high-achieving women is a little higher than in the female population at large. Across income groups and across countries, approximately 9%–12% of young women state that they expect to remain childless. See ibid., pp. 312–313, fn 4.
3 The sample size for African American women was small and results should be interpreted cautiously.
4 Quoted in Marrs R. Fertility Book: America's Leading Fertility Expert Tells You Everything You Need to Know about Getting Pregnant. New York: Delacorte Press, 1997, p. 137.
5 Dunson DB, Columbo B, Baird DD. Changes with age in the level and duration of fertility in the menstrual cycle. Hum Reprod 2002;17:1399–403.
FULL TEXT
00005-2/journalimage?img=PIIS1546250104000052.gr1.lrg.gif&fig=&kwhquery=&issn=1546-2501&ishighres=false&allhighres=false&free=yes','journalimage');)
