Top career women are dropping out, while others are racked with guilt. It's time to rethink how we all work
Madeleine Bunting Monday February 28, 2005 Guardian
We had a good chunk of the global economy represented around the table. Major American and UK multinationals had sent some of their most senior women to London to thrash out why there aren't more women getting to the top.
I'm not sure I've seen quite so much gold jewellery or so many Blackberrys in one room before, yet neither inhibited an unexpectedly moving conversation about these women's achievements as a "battle-scarred generation" and whether their hard-bitten, profit-driven companies might evolve a model of success that didn't exact such a high personal price.
Take Sally (all names have been changed), who has to travel most weeks and still make time for her four children; or Anne, who after a full day at work is back on the computer at 9pm every night for another three hours; or the banker who worked round the clock for six weeks to close a deal, missing Thanksgiving and Christmas in the process. In between, they squeeze in the birthday parties, the school drop-offs and watching their children in soccer matches and plays. Their crazily driven lives sounded much like that of Ellen MacArthur - a testimony to extraordinary determination and physical resilience - and to most women (and this is the rub) about as enticing.
Among these women were pioneers who began their careers in the 70s, defying their mothers and many of their college friends. They have ploughed a lonely path through the prejudices of their employers to the dizzy top. Now, as they survey their fiefdoms, they are taking stock - if such a thing is possible in such hectic lives - and asking: couldn't there be another way?
"Please don't be like me," is what Sally, a senior executive in a multinational, tells a new generation of younger women coming into her company. After hearing her describe her intense anxiety about being around for her children, I can see why. "If I miss the school play, will my child become a serial-killer?" she jokes bleakly.
What haunted this American-dominated group - part of an Anglo-American private-sector taskforce to develop solutions to the "hidden brain-drain" - is the possibility that the rise of women to the top is not becoming more common but could be in danger of stalling.
The "opt-out revolution" has became a much-hyped media story in the US as high-profile women resign at the peak of their careers to spend more time with their kids. The first tranche of research commissioned by this taskforce is published in the Harvard Business Review today and should send alarm bells around corporate America and the UK. Of the 1981 class at Stanford University, 57% of women graduates have left the workforce; of three graduating classes from Harvard Business School, only 38% of women are still in full-time careers.
If these kinds of rates continue, there is going to be an extraordinary mismatch between the growing number of female graduates entering the labour market (now more than 50% in the UK) and the shrinking supply of talent they leave behind when they opt out. That is not in the interests of these big corporations. Hence the "diversity programmes" that have spread across corporate America.
Susie, a 30-year-old investment banker who recently got engaged, baldly stated: "Everything I used to find exciting in my work over the last 10 years, now fills me with dread as I look to the next 10: the travel, the long hours, the client entertaining."
The common argument that this is down to a failure of female ambition - they just don't want the success badly enough - obviously didn't see the light of day in a room of such ambitious women. No, the charge was that this corporate elite has only one model of success, the endurance model of all-nighters, constant travel and never being far from the Blackberry. Could there be other models of success? Would they compromise profitablility? And if they did, how would you get the senior-level backing?
There is evidence that the corporations are willing to change, but it is slow, "like watching the hour hands on a clock", quipped one banker. The pressure is coming from several directions. Partly, it is about image and reputation. Partly, it is driven by some clients who request women on their advisory teams. Meanwhile, corporations producing consumer goods are acutely aware that 80% of household purchasing decisions are made by women.
Some women were, frankly, despairing: a generation of women struggling to prove they were worth it, and where had it got them? A few are perched precariously on their pinnacles, but their stories do as much to deter as to inspire. No one wants to be a superwoman any more.
Meanwhile, two aspects of this epic have gone uncounted. The first is macro. In the US, the corporations have been the biggest winner - they are now getting more working hours per family, and for much the same wage costs in real terms. In 1970, it took one parent to pay for a lifestyle that in 2000 takes two. The second is what emerged in the course of this seminar: the personal cost of these painful lives. Women have struggled to reconcile their femininity with a male working culture built around single-mindedness, competitiveness and self-projection. It includes the battle against what is described in the US as "micro-inequities" - the patterns of language and communication that marginalise and belittle women in male-dominated organisations. It has also necessitated straddling an anxiety-inducing conflict between what is expected of them as employees and their roles as wives and mothers. Their efforts to break the mould have earned them more vilification than admiration. They're too rich, they can chose another life, they're useless mothers, they're not "real women", run the complaints.
Perhaps their unforgiveable sin is their ambition. As the American psychiatrist Anna Fels points out in her recent book, Necessary Dreams, few women happily admit to ambition, and even fewer are admired for it, let alone loved. She charts how ambition is drummed out of little girls who are groomed to be eager to please, self-deprecating and unassuming. Those whose ambition survives get lumbered with patronising labels such as bossy, awkward or, worst of all, the ubiquitous feisty (a feist is a small dog; look in the dictionary).
The ambitious successful career woman has become a hate figure for our time; and now the relish is palpable that even her opting-out daughters might be turning their backs on her.
The public perception of these women is about as judgmental as that of their male colleagues: "If they can't stand the heat, they should get out of the kitchen." It's a useless analogy, so let's flog it to death: it's about time we redesigned the kitchen with an extractor fan. That simple, boys.