The New York Times recently ran a post bemoaning the fate of mothers in the workplace. These poor working women are finding it hard to have it all because “the bias against them is often casual, open and unapologetic.” Employers don’t find them the ideal employees–they have the temerity to suggest that someone who is distracted by her pregnancy or has rescheduled meetings because of sick kids is not as dependable an employee as a single or childless person. It is “sexism” rather than common sense to suggest “that our kids are better off with a mother who doesn’t have a demanding job.” In response, the article says, we need to have a #momstoo movement of women who insist on ending this “truly harmful” discrimination against working mothers. I had a pretty sarcastic post mentally composed on this topic, but fortunately, my kids have kept me too busy the past two weeks to write it, and in that time, I’ve come around to feeling intense sorrow and compassion for how this cohort of working mothers has been sold a lie.
It’s graduation season, so we’re inundated with girl power messages for young women entering adulthood. You can do anything! Work-life balance is possible! You can have it all! We need more federally mandated maternity leave, and that will just fix everything! Break those glass ceilings! Women in power are necessary to represent our interests (because our husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons would never think to advocate for us)! Even those of us with little girls are encouraged to give them books about STEM pioneers like Ada Lovelace rather than exemplary mothers like Mother Carey. But none of their female professors are telling them how much more exhausting it is to have children in your 40s rather than your 20s, how when both parents work full-time, childcare decisions are made based on parental convenience more than the child’s needs (literally, a friend told our spin class last week that she had found a “great” daycare for her four year old twins while she researches in a different city this summer–6:30 am to 6 pm, five days a week, for the same price she’s paying for 8-5 four days a week here in Malibu!), how school holidays and summer breaks are dreaded disruptions in routine rather than exciting opportunities for relaxed family time, and how hard it is to walk away from a two-income lifestyle once you’re habituated to it.
I think of the friend who accepted a prestigious job, only to inform her new employer after she’d signed the contract that she was pregnant and would have to spend the first months of her new job on maternity leave. Fast forward a few years, and it turns out that when a department has to scramble to find a temporary replacement for their new hire and then watches her leave work at 5 to go home to the baby, even if everyone else is staying late working on a project, ill well builds up. Men who have tried to put family above career have known for ages that there is a cost to going home for dinner with your family, whether a denied promotion or a general impression that you’re not committed enough to the company. It’s particularly maddening in cases like my friend’s husband, who was denied tenure after taking a semester of paternity leave for one of their three children but whose female colleagues who took a full year off to have babies and published the same amount as him were granted tenure. But we as a society have been telling women that there will be no consequences to their asking for special treatment. We’ve been dishonest to them, and they’re genuinely confused when employers and coworkers resent having to shoulder more than their fair share of the burden.
Our young working mothers have been sold a totally false view of female freedom. Their (well-meaning) parents and teachers have encouraged them to pursue advanced degrees (regardless of the student debt that they pile up) in the most prestigious STEM careers (because we don’t have enough women in STEM, because every vocation should be at least 50% female, or it’s a sexist field). The fact that many STEM jobs don’t allow for the flexibility of taking time off for kids–recently, one of my friends described the nightmare of shuttling off her four kids to all different camps/activities/daycares over summer break because she can’t step away from her cutting edge research for a summer to hang by the pool with her kids–isn’t something that girls should worry about. The message they convey is that choosing a career with future family in mind (something flexible, possible to do part-time, or family-friendly, like teaching, nursing, or child-related fields) is selling out before you’ve had a chance to really live.
We host a lot of students in our home every semester, and these young women are dedicated, brilliant, and….taking on so much debt to get this advanced degree that they will never be able to afford to stay home with their children unless they marry a very rich husband. Yes, many of them have opportunities galore, but by choosing this field, they’ve cut out one very basic opportunity–raising their own children!–that no one has probably even mentioned they might want to consider. One of my dear friends longs to stay home and homeschool her children, but she and her husband are both classical musicians with boatloads of debt, and they can’t see how they could adjust down to one income, so their kids are in the truly nasty local public school, she is constantly stressed over stringing together sitters, and they’re too busy to get together as much as we would both want to. It’s not just time with children and family that young highly-educated and highly-indebted professionals are giving up; one of my single girlfriends, a liberal lawyer with a passion for social justice, has so much debt that she has to work for at least 5 more years in her current job, or something like it, before she can afford to take on the kind of advocacy work that she feels God has called her to. Another friend is working her dream job, but her marriage, family, and job are all suffering from her attempts to do it all. She has to keep working, because she has more earning potential than her husband, and they moved and sacrificed for her career rather than his. At some point, there’s no going back. Even when “having it all” has arrived and doesn’t look as appealing as it sounded back at college graduation, sometimes it’s too late to change your mind. For most of my mom friends, the freedom of their careers looks a lot like captivity to a lifestyle they chose without thinking through the lifelong ramifications.
So what can we do differently with our daughters? I have three girls, and we plan to raise them as my parents raised me–give them a great education (I’m already giving them the hard sell on my beloved alma mater), talk about the consequences of the choices they see the women around them making so that they can count the cost of any career path they might want to pursue, teach them that their identity is in Christ, not money, career, or prestige, and live out my life as a homemaker in front of them with gratitude and joy, not laziness or resentment. As a dear single 30 something in our small group often reminds me, I have no way of knowing whether my daughters will get to be married and have children, even if that’s their heart’s desire, so I certainly am not assuming their life will look like mine in 30 years–but I am going to send them into adulthood with the full picture of the demands of career and parenthood so that they can make those life-altering decisions with their eyes open.
What messages about freedom and achievement are being conveyed to young women in your neck of the woods?
