| |
A Speech to
the Chautauqua Institution, July 21, 2004
In the mid-1970s, I was a newly
tenured faculty member in the English department at the University
of California at Berkeley. Like a number of my junior colleagues,
I was beginning a family and struggling with a new -- and
newly fraught -- relationship to time. Preoccupied with
balancing career and children, I sought advice in the places
I knew best: in books, articles and journals. I take my title
today from one of my touchpoints, a 1975 essay by the sociologist
Arlie Russell Hochschild, titled “Inside the Clockwork
of Male Careers,” a work that had -- and still has -- a
powerful impact on me.
Hochschild’s essay appeared in an early feminist anthology
with the energizing title “Women and the Power to Change.” As
a young, working mother, I found that its images resonated
strongly with me. I remember most vividly her sense of conflict
in watching a woman in a station wagon driving up to an office
building in the early evening, elbow on the window, two children
in the back, to pick up a man, walking briskly down the steps
with a briefcase. Hochschild wrote that whenever she saw
such images, something inside her ripped in half, for she
was neither and both the wife in the station wagon and the
husband with the briefcase.
Today such an image seems dated, not merely by the briefcase and the station
wagon but by its tidy division of roles. In a contemporary scene, the husband
might pick the children up from daycare in an SUV while the wife returns from
the airport after a business trip. Both husband and wife play dual roles, and
there is far less awkwardness and discomfort with the role of the professional
woman. Yet, despite this apparent progress, it is important to recognize that
the main point of Hochschild’s essay remains as salient as it was thirty
years ago. Hochschild argued that our society’s conception of “the
career” has embedded within it assumptions about time that form as powerful
an obstacle for women as gender discrimination. In this, she conceived of time
not only in a daily sense -- the juggling of tasks and responsibilities for
which the waking hours of a day never seem sufficient -- but in regard to
the span of years within which an individual achieves professional success.
Hochschild’s essay focused on academic careers. She began by asking why,
at the University of California, in the early 1970’s, did women compose
41 percent of the entering freshmen, 37 percent of the graduating seniors, 24
percent of the doctoral students, 12 percent of the Ph.D.’s, 9 percent
of the assistant professors, 6 percent of the associate professors, and 3 percent
of the full professors. She offered three hypotheses for this precipitously descending
spiral: that the university discriminated against women; that women are socialized
to avoid success and authority and therefore, in the vernacular of the time, “cool
themselves out”; and that academic careers depend upon a set of expectations
that do not leave time for family life.
What I would like to do today is return to the set of questions that Hochschild
asked -- not just in the context of higher education but more broadly in the
context of the professions -- in order to assess women’s success in
achieving gender parity. Where such parity does not exist, I will seek to determine
the extent to which discrimination, lack of ambition, or Hochschild’s “clockwork
of male careers” still constitute barriers to success. With a number of
recent studies, books and articles as my guides, I will argue that not only the
circumstances of our professional lives but also their narratives need to be
transformed. In short, for women, for men, we need to re-set the clock and tell
new stories of life and work.
In the past thirty years, we have seen a profound change in women’s representation
in the professions. In colleges and universities, women are now 57 percent of
entering students, 44 percent of Ph.D. recipients, 45 percent of assistant professors,
35 percent of associate professors, and 21 percent of full professors. Clearly,
there has been progress, and the pipeline suggests that progress will continue.
As recently as 1970, fewer than 10 percent of law school students were female;
that number today is more than 50 percent, as it is for medical schools. However,
women constitute only 36 percent of MBA students, a number that has remained
largely unchanged in recent years.
The lack of parity between male and female students in these fields has major
consequences in the professions. Women are 45 percent of the work force but hold
only 12 percent of the jobs in science and engineering. (That figure is only
9 percent in engineering.) A recent study of science faculty in research universities
found that women compose just 20 percent of the faculty in biology, 12 percent
in chemistry, 10 percent in engineering, 8 percent in math, and 6.5 percent in
physics. Even in fields where women have greater parity in educational attainment,
they are not represented in leadership positions -- as partners in law firms,
for example, or on the faculties of medical schools, in government, or in business.
A study by the National Association of Law Placement found that women make up
43 percent of law firms’ staff attorneys or associates but only 17 percent
of partners. The Association of American Medical Colleges reports that in academic
medicine only 12 percent of full professors, 8 percent of department heads, and
3 percent of deans are women. Women occupy only 14 percent of the seats in the
U.S. Congress; only eight CEO slots in the Fortune 500; and only 8 percent of
top-level jobs – those at the level of executive vice-president and above -- in
major companies. What explains the lack of parity? Does discrimination still
play a role?
The answer here is yes, although discrimination manifests itself subtly in attitudes
about capacity and performance. Recent research by Smith alumna Celinda Lake,
for the polling firm Lake, Snell, and Perry, finds that both men and women show
a preference for men in high executive positions. Stephen Pinker’s recent
book about the shaping force of biology on human nature, The Blank Slate, argues
that innate biological differences explain the low percentages of women in engineering
and science. In contravention of much of the conventional wisdom in higher education,
Pinker argues that, to be intellectually honest, one must acknowledge that at
least part of the explanation for the so-called leaky pipeline in science and
engineering is that girls and women don’t prefer those fields. Or, as he
puts it, “in most professions, average differences in ability are irrelevant
but average differences in preferences may put the sexes on different paths.” Pinker
is not dismissing the role of discrimination but rather pointing out the ways
in which biology has been shown to influence choice. While some argue that sex-based
differences can be used in discriminatory ways -- women must nurture because
they can nurture -- Pinker also argues that to ignore sex differences is
discriminatory in its own way. “One ought not to assume that the default
human being is a man,” he writes, “and that children are an indulgence
or accident that strikes a deviant subject.”
Despite the evidence that discrimination still operates in subtle and not-so-subtle
ways, there has been much progress in the last thirty years in building the legal
foundation for action against sex discrimination and in changing attitudes and
practices. There is broad consensus that sex discrimination is wrong and that
men and women should have equal opportunities in employment.
Much attention has gone recently to the argument that women choose not to compete.
In a controversial article that appeared last fall in the New York Times magazine,
headlined “The Opt-Out Revolution,” Lisa Belkin wrote that as women
who were supposed to be men’s professional equals look up at the “top,” they
are increasingly deciding that they don’t want to do what it takes to get
there.
This statement takes us immediately to the key role of aspirations and ambitions
in building a career. In her recent book Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s
Changing Lives, Anna Fels describes the conflict she sees in women’s lives
in regard to ambition. Fels argues that women find negotiating the adult stages
of life problematic in ways that have no parallel in men’s lives. Brought
up to nurture and to defer to others, women avoid recognition and visibility.
They find it difficult to actively imagine their futures because so little is
mapped out and there are so many roles from which to choose -- “innovative
professional, devoted mother, competent employee, sexually attractive ‘babe,’ supportive
wife, talented homemaker, independent wage earner.” As women complete their
education, enter the workforce, and begin to make decisions about relationships
and families, they enter a particularly fraught period, one in which they must
shape their image of a life.
I disagree with Fels that women are uniquely subject to conflicts about how they
imagine their futures. The years in which young people begin to shape their lives
after college are far more fraught, for men and for women, than our society generally
acknowledges. A raft of choices confronts them. What kind of work do I want to
do? How do I weigh economic rewards in relationship to the fulfillment that the
work offers me? Do I want to make a difference, and how? What social values will
my life express? How do I balance family, pleasure, and work? All of us close
to young people in their twenties know how urgently these questions press upon
them; nonetheless, it is true that the questions women face, as Fels argues,
have a particular shape and character.
In order to help women work out answers to these questions (and I think this
would be helpful for men as well), we need to dispel a number of myths about
ambition. Chief among these is the myth that successful ambition looks like a
straight line.
Mary Catherine Bateson’s comparative study of the biographies of five women,
Composing a Life, speaks eloquently of the false paradigms that distort our understanding
of people’s lives. She writes: “Much biography of exceptional people
is built around the image of a quest, a journey through a timeless landscape
toward an end that is specific, even though it is not fully known. The pursuit
of a quest is a pilgrim’s progress in which it is essential to resist the
transitory contentment of attractive way stations and side roads, in which obstacles
are overcome because the goal is visible on the horizon, onward and upward. The
end is already apparent in the beginning.”
Bateson continues, “I believe that our aesthetic sense, whether in works
of art or in lives, has over-focused on the stubborn struggle toward a single
goal, rather than on the fluid, the protean, the improvisatory. We see achievement
as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that
has first to be brought from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert
the artist’s vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends,
like a patchwork quilt and lovingly used to warm different nights and bodies.”
Emphasizing the fluid and the improvisatory does not mean abandoning the role
of intention and design. We want strenuously to avoid the myth that a life and
a career are random, shaped by forces out of our control, and therefore not worth
pursuing with deliberation and ambition. This spring, when the Smith College
Class of 1954 came to campus to celebrate its 50th reunion, I was struck by how
many alumnae vividly remembered the commencement speech they had heard 50 years
earlier. Since I don’t find commencement speeches to be a particularly
memorable genre, I was moved to look this one up. The speaker was the celebrated
broadcaster and journalist Alistair Cooke, and what he told the graduates that
stayed with them for fifty years was this: that the most significant event in
their lives would be their marriage. He described it in these words: “At
this moment, ridiculous though it may seem, the fortune of many of you here is
being decided by anonymous young men who are packing their bags in New Haven,
Connecticut, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Williamstown, Princeton, New Jersey,
even perhaps in Grinnell, Iowa, or the Marine Laboratory in La Jolla, California.” What
is remarkable in this statement is the absence of agency in the future Cooke
envisioned for the young women he addressed, even in the single, domestic sphere
he imagined for them. Cooke’s speech stayed with the class of ’54
because, despite Cooke’s predictions, they had managed to shape lives in
exactly Bateson’s sense, crafting them from choices and opportunities to
display what ultimately became a rich patchwork pattern.
Many years ago, I had an experience teaching a seminar in Jane Austen that has
become symbolic to me of the very simplification that Cooke’s speech represented
to these Smith alumnae. I was talking about the design of Jane Austen’s
plots, specifically about the way in which they must offer multiple possibilities
for the heroine’s fortune, creating the illusion of freedom, while making
the marriage that ends the novel the inevitable and perfect resolution whose
design, in retrospect, seems implicit from the beginning. A young woman in the
front row eagerly raised her hand. “I know just what you mean,” she
said. “If I knew who I was going to marry, everything in my life would
be clear.” It’s easy to laugh at her naiveté, but embedded
in it is an assumption about the design of life’s narratives that reinforces
Bateson’s point: that we need more complex, multiform stories that do not
pose professional success and satisfying family lives as mutually exclusive paths,
like Robert Frost’s two roads diverging in a yellow wood. We must counter
the myth that balance and success are not compatible, that the so-called Mommy
track will never lead to stations on the express line.
Our culture is now struggling to compose narratives that reflect the complexity
of women’s commitments to career and family. I’ve already mentioned
some of the ways in which writers present women’s choices -- the Mommy
track, the opt-out revolution. Much that has been published recently represents
women’s situation as an either/or choice -- between, on the one hand,
a male norm, in which relentless, uninterrupted dedication to an ambitious career
goal leads to success, and, on the other hand, near-total rejection of the workplace,
in order to give children care and nurture. Not surprisingly, this bifurcation
does not serve women well. Our working lives today are far longer than the time
spent in raising children. Many of us work for forty to fifty years; we will
not spend that much time in the raising of our children, even by the most generous
construction.
Women need not feel that they are rejecting ambition when they apportion time
differently while raising children. We must reject the myth that balance and
success are not compatible. At the same time, as Smith Professor Meredith Michaels
points out in a new book, The Mommy Myth, that women need not feel that anything
less than “intensive mothering” -- a media-championed, 24/7,
single-minded focus on childrearing -- somehow represents a disloyal, selfish
or unnatural choice. We must reject the fallacy that a balanced life is not a
sign of a successful career.
Indeed, the noted psychologist Rosalind Barnett has demonstrated in numerous
studies the positive effects of family relationships and roles on career success,
as well as the invigorating role of career experiences on family life. “Multiple
roles are, in general, beneficial for both women and men,” she has written, “as
reflected in mental health, physical health, and relationship health. Adding
the worker role is beneficial to women, and adding or participating in family
roles is beneficial for men.” She also points out, significantly, that “strong
commitment to one role does not preclude strong commitment to the other.”
As we seek new narratives of our professional lives, we must also reject the
myth that to be a successful woman you can’t be a woman at all, that you
must sacrifice your desire to have children, and that you must assimilate to
a male culture, one that measures career success by competition, not cooperation.
Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s recent book, Creating a Life: Professional Women and
the Quest for Children, helps sustain this myth by her account of the anguished
quest of older professional women “to snatch a child,” in her words, “from
the jaws of menopause.” As long as we define choices in such stark terms,
we will always see women as opting out, as choosing a different track. We need
to question both terms of this dichotomy.
This brings me back to Hochschild’s phrase, “the clockwork of male
careers.” What is that clockwork? It has two dimensions. The first makes
its claim on the hours of the day. Jobs that provide entry to the most prestigious
professions -- untenured faculty positions, medical residencies, entry positions
in law and finance firms -- have notoriously long hours. You prove your worth
by the time you invest. The heavy commitment of daily time, in Hochschild’s
analysis, leads to advancement along a linear career path, the pilgrim’s
progress that Bateson conjured, on which relative achievement is measured by
age: a full professor by 32, a partner by 36, a CEO by 40. Because age so often
provides an important measure of success, competition takes the form of working
longer and harder than the next person.
Such a pursuit depends upon the work of others to care for home and family. Women
climbing up the career ladder often joke, “I need a wife.” Hochschild
showed the way in which the structure of the male career depends on what she
referred to as “small branch industries,” the work of home and family
subcontracted to a wife. She argued that the classic image of a career is cut
to the profile of a traditional man with a traditional wife. In spite of all
of the changes in women’s lives in the past three decades, there is ample
evidence to suggest that we have not sufficiently challenged this model. It is
still the case, as Hochschild argued, that the total situation, is often perceived
as “a woman’s problem, her role conflict,” as if we could separate
the conflict from the career system itself, the rules for which have been constructed
to fit the patterns of the lives of men with wives at home.
In this system, time, for women, becomes a scarce commodity, a rare gem that
one hoards. When I had my first child, I felt I was undergoing a crisis in my
relationship to time. I could no longer control my use of it; I could no longer
work at something until I was finished. In my obsessive reading about career
and family, one of my favorite finds was titled Help! A Handbook for Working
Mothers. The hysteria in its title reflected my own, and the absurdity of its
advice finally helped me understand how I needed to change my relationship to
time.
The book counseled the working mother to keep a pad of paper at her bedside,
and right before going to sleep, to write out a plan for the next day. It advised
leaving an hour each day, unscheduled, for spontaneity or emergencies. I worried
about this a lot. What if you had already used your hour for spontaneity, and
an emergency came up? What if an emergency took more than an hour? I realized
I had to give up my obsession with planning and control and to live, paradoxically,
both more in the moment, and more for the future, with an adjusted clock and
a long-range sense of aspirations and goals.
Back in 1975, Hochschild argued that without changing the structure of the male
career and what she described as its imperial relationship to the family, mothers
would not move far up in careers nor would fathers share the load at home. Sylvia
Hewlett cites disheartening statistics: almost 33 percent of high-achieving women
are childless at age 40; the figure rises to 42 percent in corporate America
and 49 percent among women earning more than $100,000 a year. Hewlett does not
want to challenge the choices of women who elect not to have children, and neither
do I; rather, she is concerned about the sacrifices of women who do want children
but have been unable to negotiate the conflict between career and family.
As did Hochschild, Hewlett argues that we must change the structure of the career
itself to better accommodate the balance between work and family. The changes,
I believe, need to be of two sorts. One set of changes would address the daily
time demands of many professions. We not only need part-time jobs; we need part-time
jobs at high levels that allow for professional advancement. It has long puzzled
me that some fields -- law, medicine, and finance come most readily to mind -- have
at once greater demand for high-level jobs than job opportunities and excessive
work hours. Increasing the number of jobs would both create more professional
opportunities and improve the quality of employees’ lives.
Hewlett writes about the perverse incentives in what she calls our “long-hours
culture.” In most companies, she observes, management feels intense pressure
to use its professional workforce as many hours a week as possible, since there
are no marginal costs attached to such labor. Professional employees are not
paid overtime, and they do not receive increased benefits when they work more
hours. Managers can encourage long workweeks by basing promotions, explicitly
or implicitly, on number of hours worked. Hewlett proposes changing the incentives
in this system by reducing the percentage of employees who are exempt from overtime
and adopting benefits plans that peg benefits to numbers of hours worked.
The other set of changes important to implement pertain to the trajectory of
careers. A number of fields share the assumption that you must remain singly
and consistently engaged in your chosen career in order to achieve a high level
of success. Instead, we need to encourage careers in which people can take time
off, or work part-time for a period of years, and not sacrifice the opportunity
to advance. Hewlett refers to the work of policy analyst Nancy Rankin, who compares
careers to highways and recommends that we develop at least as many on-ramps
as off-ramps. Some that Hewlett recommends are the following: career breaks,
which would allow employees, female and male, to take unpaid, job-protected leave
and return to work; alumni status, which would allow employees to preserve their
ties to companies and professions; and tax breaks for education that would facilitate
career re-entry. In addition, employers can be more supportive of employees’ family
needs by offering paid parenting leave, telecommuting, and compressed workweeks.
This all seems to make sense and yet, as I travel around the country and the
world and talk with successful women about the need to change the time commitments
expected in various careers, I have been surprised at the amount of resistance
I’ve encountered. Current work arrangements, many argue, suit companies’ needs
best; corporations would sacrifice an important competitive advantage if they
were to do things differently. High-level jobs demand 24/7 commitment. The “truisms” abound.
Assumptions like these echo with dismaying similarity the very constraints that
Arlie Hochschild struggled against 30 years ago. Until we successfully challenge
them, we will remain caught, unsuccessfully, inside the clockwork of male careers.
Not surprisingly, such a clockwork results in considerable economic loss for
women. A recent New York Times column reported findings by economists Stephen
J. Rose and Heidi Hartmann on women’s earning power. Challenging the latest
Census Bureau report that women now earn 77 percent of what men earn, Rose and
Hartmann showed that this measure substantially overstates what women earn over
time. Traditional measures of the gender wage gap track only those women who
work full-time for a year. Because women work far fewer hours than men and because
they often drop out of the workforce to care for children, they wind up earning
only 38 percent of what men do, when their earnings are tracked over a fifteen-year
period. But hours alone do not account for all of the discrepancy. Rose’s
and Hartmann’s analysis shows continuing evidence of gender segregation
in each tier of the labor market. They argue that these tendencies are self-reinforcing.
Because wives earn less, they are more likely to give up their jobs for child
care. They also take lower-paying part-time jobs to be free for family responsibilities.
This creates a labor pool that businesses can exploit. To address such problems,
Rose and Hartmann make recommendations that reinforce Hewlett’s: paid family
leave, jobs with more flexible hours, and a greater commitment to quality day
care.
But policies are not the only things we need to change. At the same time, we
have to change the stories we tell about peoples’ professional lives. If
our story is the opt-out revolution, if our story is the Mommy track, then we
reinforce the idea that this is a problem of individual women and individual
choices. I find the reception of Hewlett’s book particularly interesting
in this regard. As I’ve mentioned, Hewlett argues for a far-reaching set
of policy changes, on the part of businesses and of the government, in order
to build a new clockwork for women’s careers. And yet, this is how Publisher’s
Weekly describes the book: “In this study of baby lust, Hewlett portrays
the anguished hand-wringing by middle-aged women who were career-obsessed throughout
their 20s and 30s, only to wake up single at 40, biological clocks all petered
out.”
In this summary review, and others, Hewlett’s policy proposals drop out,
and we only hear the story of anguished women, caught in a Procrustean dilemma:
shape your life in conformity to the clockwork of the male career and you will
sacrifice your hopes for marriage and children.
We need to tell different stories, stories like those that Mary Catherine Bateson
encourages, of the ways women compose lives with different shapes. Madeleine
Albright’s recent autobiography, Madam Secretary, provides an example.
Marrying right after graduation, she held two entry-level jobs -- as a reporter
for a small daily paper and as assistant to the picture editor of the Encyclopedia
Britannica -- before the arrival of her first children (twins, born just two
years after her marriage). She then did not hold a full-time paying job for fifteen
years, although she was hardly idle, earning a master’s and a doctorate
and volunteering in numerous capacities. However, she was 39 years old before
she began the sequence of positions that ultimately led to her becoming secretary
of state. Although one might assume from the title Madame Secretary and the powerful
picture of Albright on the dust jacket that her life story falls into the mythic
pattern that Bateson describes of stubborn struggle toward a single goal, it
has more the character, in Bateson’s terms, of the fluid and the improvisatory.
Stories like this help women, for they do not represent ambitious career goals
as a Hobson’s choice -- adapt yourself to the male model or give them
up. Perhaps the greater flexibility available in running your own business explains
why women have been so much more successful in becoming entrepreneurs than in
becoming corporate leaders. According to the Census Bureau, women-owned companies
now compose 26 percent of the privately owned firms in this country, up from
about 5 percent in 1972.
Clearly, we need new definitions of success and ambition, and we need the policy
changes that support them. Such changes will benefit companies as well as employees.
The most important competition among businesses is for talent. A 1999 study by
McKinsey & Company concludes that “the most important corporate resource
over the next 20 years will be human capital -- specifically the education,
skills, and experience embodied in talented professionals.” As Hewlett
observes, losing skilled personnel is enormously expensive; estimates of the
cost range from 93 percent to 200 percent of the departing person’s salary.
In the academic world, for example, start-up costs for a new faculty member are
at least in that range without even considering the costs of a search. Replacing
people is expensive. Turnover involves other losses as well -- contacts, relationships,
organizational history. Businesses of all kinds cannot afford to lose the battle
to recruit and retain half of the workforce talent. Family-friendly policies
are good business, and gender diversity in the workplace pays. A 2004 study by
Catalyst found that companies with the highest percentage of women on their senior
management teams had a 35 percent higher return on investment and a 34 percent
higher total return to shareholders than those with the lowest representation
of women
Family-friendly policies also benefit men. Hewlett asks the reader to imagine
what a “normal workweek” of 50 to 60 hours means for individuals.
With a commute and a lunch hour, the workday stretches almost thirteen hours.
What kind of life outside of work does that allow either men or women? How can
men share in the care and raising of their children with expectations like these?
In lobbying for changes in employment policies, women and men must be allies.
What can colleges, and specifically women’s colleges, do to change the
clockwork of professional careers? Research shows that women’s colleges
are particularly effective in producing leaders. Graduates of women’s colleges
occupy today far more leadership positions than would be expected given their
numbers. Although the graduates from women’s colleges represent only 2
percent of all female college graduates, they constitute more than 20 percent
of women in Congress, and 30 percent of a Business Week list of rising women
stars in corporate America. The figures for math and science are particularly
impressive. Undergraduates at women’s colleges major in economics, math,
and life science in larger percentages than do male undergraduates at coed colleges.
Compared to women at a coeducational institutions, they are three times more
likely to earn a degree in economics and one-and-one-half times more likely to
earn degrees in life sciences, physical sciences, and mathematics. They continue
toward doctorates in math, science and engineering in disproportionately large
numbers. The National Science Foundation keeps a ranking of the top 50 producers
of women recipients of bachelor’s degrees that go on to earn doctoral degrees
in science and engineering. Note that this is a ranking by numbers of graduates,
not percentages, so it gives the advantage to large institutions. There are only
five undergraduate colleges in that list; four of them are women’s colleges.
The striking success that women’s colleges have demonstrated in producing
scientists suggests an opportunity for women’s colleges in engineering
education. Smith has just begun an engineering program; this past May we graduated
our first class: the first all-women class of engineers ever to graduate from
a U.S. college.
Women’s colleges are remarkably effective in educating scientists and in
producing leaders because they provide a culture all of whose elements work together
to reinforce a single message: that women’s voices matter. When I travel
around the country talking to Smith alumnae, I often ask what they learned or
experienced at Smith that has had the most powerful shaping influence upon their
lives. The answer I get is almost always the same: confidence in my own capacities,
the belief that I could do anything I set my mind to.
As one of her final projects as president of Duke University, Nan Keohane last
year commissioned a study of the status of women at the university. The most
controversial conclusion of the study -- a conclusion that has spurred nationwide
debate -- is that women undergraduates at Duke (and, by extension, at other
high-level, coeducational colleges) feel pressure to conform to an ideal of “effortless
perfection,” a culturally reinforced belief that they should be “smart,
accomplished, beautiful, and popular” -- all without visible effort.
In response to this finding, Duke, which closed its women’s college in
1972, has created a leadership program for women that attempts to duplicate some
of the benefits of -- yes, you guessed it -- a women’s college.
Women’s colleges have long emphasized their records in educating women
for leadership. But they have given less prominence to the set of issues that
I have been discussing today -- the clockwork of the career. We must take
this on. If the first feminist revolution was about equity, and the second feminist
revolution was about aspiration, the third is surely about the structure of careers.
At the beginning of June, Smith and Mount Holyoke hosted a conference of women’s
college presidents from around the world. Educational leaders came from Korea,
Japan, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Australia,
France; every continent but South America was represented. Before the conference,
presidents were asked to identify the three most important challenges facing
them. By far the most frequent answer was “women and work.” Presidents’ concerns
about this topic varied, but many agreed strongly with one of my French colleagues
that we needed an innovative restructuring of employment practices to accommodate
a more diversified workforce.
College and young adulthood is a time of reinvention, of re-imprinting. We need
to help our students and young people, particularly young women, imagine new
narratives for themselves that do not undermine ambition with a false sense of
choice. We need to talk about balance and the need for balance. Women often repeat
the joke about Ginger Rogers -- that she did everything Fred Astaire did,
but backwards and in high heels. It’s time to walk forward in flat shoes,
in the same direction as our partners, arguing for policies that allow us all
more capacious and humane lives. With different responsibilities for family,
we need to invent a new clockwork that keeps time for families as well as careers.
|
|
Speeches & Writings
Letters
to the
Community
Senior Administration
Office
Staff & Hours
Biography
Community Advisory Board
|
