So. I read with interest and emotion Anne-Marie Slaughter's article in The Atlantic. Working is kind of a hot button issue for me. I find it a horrid double standard that almost no one tells the new dad, "Wow, I could never let strangers at some daycare raise my child!" (said in a self-righteous tone) and yet I've heard it myself. I'd venture that many working moms have heard comments along those lines, where a stranger, acquaintance, or even a friend or relative tells them that while they ostensibly have choices, their choice was WRONG. Well, my choice is to work - except that it wasn't really a choice, it was a financial necessity that I knew would exist long before we had a baby.
I have a bachelor's and two master's degrees. I work in a fairly male-dominated field and industry and because of what I do and where I work there's a pretty significant dearth of women in our upper management. I have never had a female in my supervisory chain; it's always been men. Even now the only female manager in my organization is a single woman with no children. There are older women who are technical leaders but the folks who set the tone for their teams and for the organization as a whole are men. Many of those men have wives who have been at home since their kids were born, and so things like taking a sick child to the doctor, flex-timing so I can go to my kid's daycare ice cream social, or even something as simple as working from home for a few hours to meet the chimney sweep make me look like a liability compared to a single male coworker who never has to do any of that. I've been in meetings where I'm reluctant to say, "I have a hard stop at 5" because I worry that they'll think (correctly) that it's due to having to pick my kid up at daycare. When Lily was young I had to call into 8 PM teleconferences with her nursing, hoping she didn't cry and disrupt the call, all because I didn't feel I had enough job security to say "Sorry, that's my baby's bedtime - how about 9?" And I pumped breast milk in an effing bathroom next to a toilet for 8 months because my employer's HR people basically said that it just wasn't important enough for them to follow state and federal law for one of their engineers.
Slaughter makes excellent points about lack of support for families in most American corporate settings. While her piece focuses on parenting, specifically mothering, really this could apply to anyone who has significant family commitments (perhaps an aging parent or a disabled sibling). While many jobs have to be done in-person and on a set schedule (teacher, nurse, doctor, police officer, etc.) there are many like mine that could be done in a far more flexible way. My employer offers flexible work arrangements but it's wholly dependent on the agreement of one's supervisor. Face time still contributes to how you're perceived; I'm sure that my leaving work by 4 or 4:30 is giving me a reputation as a clock-watcher, while a coworker who stays until 6 and answers email all evening from home appears to be much more devoted - even though he spends more than half of his "workday" goofing off on the Internet and playing his fantasy sports teams.
To me, "having it all" is having a job that interests me and that helps pay the bills, without requiring so much time at the office that I feel like I'm neglecting my roles as wife and mom. I need sufficient time to play as well as work. When it boils down to it, my family is the most important thing in my world. I saw early in my career that having a family and having a robust family life was not going to be compatible with smashing the glass ceiling and rising to the top the way a naive, idealistic 20-year old me expected to. I've effectively been Mommy tracked and while I don't like it, I don't see an alternative that allows me to parent the way I need to. Either I go into a job where I work 60+ hours a week to get ahead and sacrifice my family in the process, or I continue on my current path and accept that I will get paid less and have less of an impact - but can be the mom I want to be.
Yeah, when I retire I'll fondly remember the people I worked with and I'll be able to look back at the patents and the awards and have the satisfaction of knowing that people around the world are using things that I helped to create. But if I don't have Mark and Lily and any future kids - maybe grandkids - to share in the celebration of that long and fruitful career, none of that will matter much to me.
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