A Woman's Dilemma

Women in the United States of America have had to fight for the equal opportunity to be able to go to the same school, earn the same degree, apply for the same job, and vote in the same election as their male counterparts.  As a result of the women’s movement, affirmative action, and the passage of Title IX women have been granted the rights that they were once denied, and today the number of women who are receiving a college education, entering the professional workforce, occupying high-power and high-paying positions has significantly increased. Despite the progress in granting social and political equality to women in this country that has been made thus far along with the increase in the number of women in the corporate, professional, and political world, women are still at a significant disadvantage. Women who aspire to be part of corporate America are forced to make compromises and tradeoffs that their male counterparts never have to make, and if they want to assume high-power and high-paying executive positions, and wish to rise up in a company, they will be forced in one way or another to make sacrifices either at home or at work.

Holly Robinson raises the question that is at the core of this issue when she asks, “Can a woman really have it all, as in marriage (or a lifelong partner), children, and a ‘high-achieving’ career?” without having to sacrifice one for the other. It often seems like despite all of the progress that has been made thus far with breaking through the glass ceiling and granting political and social equality toward women, today women are still unable to “have it all” and, unlike their male counterparts, are forced to make tradeoffs and sacrifice one part of their life for the other. Robinson sheds an interesting light on this issue, as she anecdotally explains her own life experience and the choice she ultimately had to make and the repercussions of her decision.

Holly Robinson earned a master's degree and worked as a public relations director for a California school district when she met her first husband and became pregnant with her first child. Holly loved her job, and had a very prestigious and time consuming position. She explains in her article that she fully intended to return back to the office after her 12-week maternity leave. However, once the baby entered the picture, she realized that it would be very difficult to follow her original plan and return back to work immediately because after being a mother for only two months she discovered two truths “1) [her] husband was in sales and traveled three weeks out of four, there was no way both of [them] could be gone all day, every day, without going broke on daycare; and 2) [she] couldn't bear the thought of leaving this 8-pound person in the hands of anyone else.” After the two discussed the different options for many weeks, they made, what seemed like at the time, the most “rational decision.” Because her husband earned three times as much money as she did, they decided that he would continue working, and she would give up her career for the time being, and stay home for a year or two then return back to work. In the mean time she began working as a freelance writer, which, in her mind, seemed more like an appropriate career for her because it had a more “compatible schedule with mothering.” Robinson did not want to completely give up on her career, however, she realized that once she became pregnant with her second child and her husband was promoted, returning to a full-time career no longer felt like a realistic option.

Eighteen years later Robinson and her first husband got a divorce, and she continued to raise their children while he traveled. She points out that while she was “on call for snow days and sick days, school vacations and summer” her husband “rose through the ranks of his company to become a Really Big Cheese.” At that point in her life she realized that she “put motherhood before [her] career,” and although it was a choice she made, she did not know that “just by having a baby, [she] was jeopardizing [her] career.”

If I could just waltz out the door every morning and stay gone for 8- to 10-hour work days like the men in my life (and like the men in the lives of most other women I know), I could make a hell of a lot more money. I might have become president of my own PR firm or a New Yorker staff writer. Hell, I might even have become an astronaut or a Supreme Court judge. That would have been a fascinating, fulfilling life. But that wouldn't have been the right choice for me.

The way our society is currently structured, with so little parental leave and no subsidized child care, and very little support in the home by relatives, women can't have it all. Neither can men. All we can do is make our best choices, sacrifice what we must, and hope that we're doing the right thing for ourselves and for the people who depend on us.

Robinson explains when she made her first decision to choose motherhood over her career it may have been a huge mistake. She discusses openly that she envies her husband’s financial success, and is extremely confident that if she had continued to work she could have made “a hell of a lot more money” and could have even rose up and become the “president of [her] own PR firm.” The options seem limitless. Looking back, she did not regret her decision, but through her story it is evident that she felt like she missed out on a portion of her life as a result of her initial decision to put her career on hold in order to help raise her children. Because of her decision she was unable achieve her highest potential in her career.

The most interesting part of her story is revealed when she explains that once her and her husband made that initial decision for him to continue working and for her to put her career on hold in order to raise their child, both of them “breathed a sigh of relief as [they] fell into the roles [they] knew so well from [their] childhoods,” where their families consisted of “stay-at-home moms and fathers who traveled for business.” This widely accepted norm, which Holly and her husband are so familiar and comfortable with, plays an integral role in keeping women out of positions of power in the corporate arena, and forces most women to become stay at home moms and assume the larger burden of childcare instead of pursuing their career.

Arlie Hochschild, discusses in her study titled “The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home” how women she interviewed—lawyers, corporate executives, word processors, garment pattern cutters, and  daycare workers--  felt far more deeply torn between the demands of work and family than their husbands. Hochschild refers to this idea as the “second shift” where women who work full time jobs, come home after a long day of work and are “on duty” to prepare “dinner, care for [their] children, and wash laundry.” When interviewing 50 couples she came to find that they felt very differently about some issues such as how right is it for a mother of young children to work a full-time job, or how much a husband should be responsible for the home. Hochschild came to find that these issues became more central and pertinent as more women begin to work outside the home.  We have seen, in America, that the “number of women in paid work has risen steadily since before the turn of the century.” More than two-thirds of all mothers are now in the labor force, and today “more mothers have paid jobs (or are actively looking for one) than nonmothers.” As a result of this change we see that increasingly today two-job families now make up more than 58 percent of all married couples with children. As more young mothers are stepping into the workforce outside the home, what does that mean for the fathers? How much more are the fathers doing at home? Hochschild explored this question and analyzed many different studies, and in one study she found that “working women averaged three hours a day on housework while men averaged 17 minutes.” In this study she also found that women spent on average “fifty minute a day of time exclusively with their children” and “men spent twelve minutes.”

The women she interviewed appeared to be extremely more torn between the demands of work and family than their partners.  These women, felt that “the second shift was their issue and most of their husbands agreed.” The men, however, who did share the responsibilities at home appeared to be just as torn between the demands of career and family as their wives, “but the majority of men did not share the load at home.” Women, in this study, expressed that they feel a deep obligation more than man to juggle work with family, and “even when husbands happily shared the hours of work, their wives felt more responsible for home and children.” One reason for this, some may argue is due to the way gender roles are socially constructed and perpetuated in society.

Oyeronke Oyewumi points out in “De-confounding Gender: Theorizing and Western Culture, A Comment on Hawkesworth’s ‘Confounding Gender,’ ” that gender and gender roles are socially constructed (Oyewumi, 1050). In the Western world we see that gender roles begin their construction at home and essentially from birth. Gender and gender roles refer to our ideas about how men and women are expected to behave and are constructed by our culture.  At a young age we learn these gender roles through the clothes in which our parents dress us, the adjectives they use to describe us, the cartoon classic Disney movies we grow up watching, the television characters we watch on our favorite television shows, and the images we see on a daily basis in newspapers, magazines, and on our entertainment television networks.  The different mediums of the media serve as prescriptions and proscriptions for gender appropriate and culturally acceptable behavior.

Through the many different types of media mediums gender roles are constructed and perpetuated helping to prevent women from reaching and achieving their full potential in their careers. Elline Lipkin points out in “Getting and Making the Message: Girls and Media,” that gender and gender roles are constructed and perpetuated through the “media- saturated world” in which live (Lipkin, 125). Lipkin points out that the main reason why women are not able to reach their full potential in their career paths is because of the conflicting standards imposed by the media. Lipkin describes how “the media often encourage girls and women to hold themselves to an impossible set of often-conflicting standards…filled with mixed messages about what women should and should not do, what women could and could not be” (Lipkin, 134).  For example, the media wants girls and women to be “smart but not too conceited, or assertive but not too bossy” (Lipkin, 126). For this reason, women are prevented from being their true selves as they are constantly being looked at under a magnified lense with everything they do and how they look being judged against their compliance with the foregoing standards.

Dale Winston, discusses in her article “A Woman CEO’s View: You Can’t Have it All,” how a female executive has a very different responsibility and role from her male counterparts, and that there are “several possible paths for the high-potential executive women who wants it all, but each involves a tradeoff.”  One track is to be married to a “house husband.”Another is to insist on flexible work arrangements. The third is to hire a nanny. Finally there is the option to take a sabbatical when a baby comes.  Each of these options involves compromises that male corporate executives never have to make.

Recently on The Today Show, she discusses how she saw a segment about a Lehman executive who had lost his job, and both he and his wife looked for work. However, only the wife was able to find a job. He spoke at length about the “difficulties he encountered sharing play dates with other mothers and trying to adapt to a role he found neither socially acceptable nor comfortable.” In such times of hardship, these role reversals are more acceptable, however Winston points out the fact that “we must remember that we expect very different things from a mother and a father.”

The option of creating a flexible work schedule can provide the woman an opportunity to balance her career and parenting, but “will never allow the woman to reach the top of the heap.” It may appear to be the ideal option, but once the woman is no longer as available as her male counterparts it places them in a more competitive position. Carol Bartz, who was the chief executive officer of Yahoo! is a perfect model of someone who seems to “have it all.” Bartz admitted in an interview that “women have more of a burden on them to manage the house and manage the children and manage the school interface.” She explained that she always made a concerted effort to not allow daily work pressures to get in the way of seeing and caring for her daughter everyday, “but there were times when eve she had to compromise her parenting experience.”

Many people believe that the option of the sabbatical can risk one’s ability to enter back at the same level or near the top of one’s career.  Brenda Barnes, who served as the president and chief operating officer of Starwood Hotels and CEO of PepsiCo took a sabbatical to spend time with her two children. She was able to successfully, return after four years of leave, as the COO of Sarah Lee and became the president of the company. For some executive mothers, if they are lucky enough, are able to “have it all” like Brenda Barnes, but that is not the case for the majority of women.  Part of the reason for this is not only due to the antiquated definition of gender roles which women are still victims to, but also because of the informal formal policies practiced in the workplace.

Despite the progress in granting social and political equality to women that has been made thus far along with the increase in the number of women in the corporate, professional, and political world, women in the United States are still at a disadvantage. The gender based discriminatory informal and formal policies practiced and adhered to in the workplace place women in the United States at a significant disadvantage and hinder their ability to maintain or promote their positions in the workplace. Maxine N. Eichner discusses in The Yale Law Journal the challenges that women face as a result of the gender biases in the workplace by highlighting the fact that even in today’s progressive cultural climate where women have been granted equal opportunity to be able to go to the same school, earn the same degree, apply for the same job, and vote in the same election as their male counterparts, “many well-paying jobs in today’s labor market require traits and life patterns generally associated with men”(1401). Many jobs in today’s market possess “structures and requirements that reflect the family roles and work schedules that men have traditionally adopted” that require the person who takes the job to travel frequently, work long hours or overtime with little notice(1403). These policies “require the employee to subordinate family responsibilities to work requirements,” and inadvertently place women at a significant disadvantage as “women…still assume the greater burden of caring for children, other dependents, and the home, even while employed” leaving them unable to “effectively compete against men for these jobs.” Consequently women are then forced to scale back on their hours, find less remunerative careers, or quit working all together (Women and Work: An Annual Review)1404.

Gender based discriminatory work-family policies practiced by some of the most successful corporations all over the United States force many women in the western world to make the choice between having a family or having a career.  Pamela Aaronson, in her article titled “The Markers and Meanings of Growing Up: Contemporary Young Women’s Transition from Adolescence to Adulthood,” claims that these “policies” practiced in the workplace “do not adequately accommodate family responsibilities” and force women who are mothers to “scale back,” and in some cases, give up on their “careers to adjust for family responsibilities” (Aronson). Even though many young women today have psychologically benefitted from the ideology behind the progress made during the women’s movement, they are not actually fully embracing and living feminism. While many women, today, believe they can “run a whole company and be a CEO just as well as the next guy,” they fail to actually obtain these high-power positions as a result of the antiquated definition of gender and gender roles that are constructed and perpetuated in education, in the media, and in the workplace. Many women are forced to “make traditional gender choices” and assume traditional gender female roles as mothers instead of becoming high-power executives (Aaronson).

Arlie Hochschild, author of “The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work” discusses one poignant example of a young professional mother, Eileen, who becomes a victim of gender based discriminatory policies when she is forced to decide between her career and taking care of her newborn son. Eileen’s son was born with improperly developed lungs, placed in intensive care for ten days, almost died three times in his first 3 days, and was diagnosed with brain damage leaving him paralyzed from the waist down (Hochschild, 96). As a result of her son’s critical condition Eileen and her husband Jim, who was also employed at the same company, took time off work to care for their critically ill son. Once Eileen found out that her son had brain damage which was causing him to lose all feeling in his leg and fall down she knew that she needed to “bring up the question of reduced time (and pay)” (Hochschild).  When she asked her supervisor he “practically whispered” saying that “maybe [he] could work it out” but the truth is that department she works in is “too busy” and “doesn’t have time for family-friendly policies” (Hochschild). His response made “Eileen feel as if she had done something shameful” by asking for reduced time to spend with her son. Even her husband, who tried to take a “brief paternity leave…in an effort to support Eileen who was forced to cut her hours,” was frowned upon and ridiculed at work by his male superiors for assuming the female gender role when choosing to be at home with his son instead of at work for that short period time. His male coworkers saw Jim’s actions as a direct outward defiance of culturally acceptable gender roles as his “top priority” was to take care of his child instead of focus on “[rising] in the world of work.” Eileen’s story explicitly displays that our “culture [isn’t] ready for” breaking this “double-standard” in the workplace. In the western world it is considered culturally acceptable, and we are taught at a young age that is “normal” for women like Eileen “to want shorter hours (though it was not normal for her to ask for or get them)” in order to care for her son instead of worrying about being committed to a full-time career. At the same time this story shows us that through these gender based discriminatory policies practiced at work men are also encouraged to make traditional gender choices, choose their career over family, and not to be like Jim who wanted to be home taking care of his child. As a result of this double standard that is enforced in the workplace, women and men are forced to make traditional gender choices when forced to decide between subordinating work or family responsibilities, and as a result women are prevented from achieving their highest potential and obtaining high-power and high-paying positions. 

Although we would like to think of our nation as the most socially progressive nation in the world, the reality is the U.S.is decades behind other countries in ensuring the well-being of working families. At least 178 countries have national laws guaranteeing paid leave for new mothers, and with so little “parental paid leave and no subsidized child care, and very little support in the home by relatives, women can't have it all” (Robinson).  The way our society is currently structured, the way that gender roles have been defined and perpetuated, along with the laws that are currently in place all hinder a woman’s ability to be able to “have it all” or at least have it all at one time. We must collectively restructure and redefine gender roles at home and in the work place in order to prevent women from having to sacrifice or make tradeoffs at home and in the workplace.  Women should be able to live knowing that they are “doing the right thing for themselves and for the people who depend on them” without having to compromise achieving their fullest potential in their career and in their personal life (Robinson).