So asks this article from a San Francisco ABC affiliate. It's an interesting article, but the title is poorly worded in my opinion. The article implies that the only way to be "successful" is to have a full-time career.
I completely disagree with that. Success is in the eye of the beholder, as far as I'm concerned. There is not one way to define success, and balancing a part-time schedule for a portion of one's career with family and achieving happiness is certainly a form of success.
That being said, it's an interesting, although somewhat depressing article. I'm looking forward to the day when the statistics quoted in the article tend to be more favorable toward women with careers and families.
From the article:
A new study from Washington & Lee University shows professional women are walking away from motherhood and marriage -- more than the general population.
Law professor Robin Wilson's research makes up a chapter in a new book called "Rethinking Business Management."
She says, while four-fifths of senior male lawyers have children, only two-thirds of senior women do, and there is a similar break from marriage.
She looked at more than 100,000 people with at least a college degree, and found that women lawyers, doctors and MBA's are opting out of marriage at a higher rate than their male counterparts. When they do marry, women professionals have a harder time making it last...
"Professional men are much more likely to be married to homemakers or women who don't have the financial withdrawal to leave, even if they want or need to," says Williams.
Wilson's research show that among women with a law degree, just shy of 6 percent have a stay-at-home spouse, versus nearly 40 percent of male lawyers. For MBA's, nearly 10 percent of women have a spouse at home, compared with 44 percent of men. For MD's it's just over 12 percent for women versus 48 percent for male MD's.
As for having families, we asked Williams, what was wrong with careers where you can't have children.
"There aren't careers where you can't have children. There are careers where women can't have children. So the question is, are we going to design careers so that only men can have them if they want a conventional family life? Or are we going to design careers so that either men or women can have them if they want a conventional family life?"...
Williams says Gen-X and Gen-X men show signs of being different than their baby-boomer dads. The WorkLife Center hotline is frequently hearing from young men about issues like paternity leave.
I sometimes wonder about these studies. For Eg. What age group are we talking about here? We note the reference to senior male lawyers and senior women and we know the sacrifice the women who paved the way for the Genx lawyers had to go through. We note too the statement that professional women are walking away from motherhood and marriage.
Is that really what the study shows with the GenXer's movement towards more involvement of Dads in their kids'lives?
Posted by: Daille Nation | May 24, 2008 at 11:41 AM