Studying to be a mother: Ivy Leaguers say women can't have it all

[fortyfeetunder]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/242169_womencareer26.html

"At Yale and other top colleges across the nation, women are being groomed to take their place in a professional elite that's ever more diverse. It is almost taken for granted that, just as they make up half the students at these institutions, they will move into leadership roles on an equal basis with their male classmates.

There's just one problem with this scenario: Many of these women say that's not what they want.

Many Generation Y women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already decided to put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students do not plan to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many...say they will happily play traditional female roles, with motherhood their main commitment."

[Berry Cool]

1. Oh my God, they picked up THIS story??

For the past week, this NYT story has been questioned by media pundits and derided for the sloppy journalism involved in interviewing a few students and extrapolating THEIR opinions into an entire trend.

Note the use of weasel phrases throughout that mean nothing, such as "many" (the author never says HOW "many"), "most," "seems" (that way, she doesn't have to back up her thesis with facts to prove it), etc. The closest she gets is saying that "more than a dozen faculty members and administrators who have worked for decades at the nation's most exclusive institutions" have seen this trend." More than a DOZEN? Wow! That's an epidemic! Oh, and here's a statistic: "While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerged again and again in e-mail interviews with Ivy League students conducted over the past school year, including 138 female freshmen and seniors at Yale. The interviews at Yale found that 85 -- or roughly 60 percent -- said that when they had children, they plan to cut back on work or stop working entirely."

Eighty-five percent of 138 students surveyed at ONE school? And she has made this into a trend story? Wow...talk about junk journalism!

And even if it were true...I'd have to say to those girls, "Wake up. You're assuming three things: you're going to marry young, you're going to marry rich, and you're going to stay married for life. How likely are all those things to actually take place?"

But anyway, it's sloppy journalism, is all, and has been derided much already as such.

[Blue_Tires]

34. yeah, i think a person at the poynter institute tore up the shoddy work

i dont have a link

[nvliberal]

35. The only REAL "trend"

is that more and more people in this country are winding up in the underclass, male and female, and few women as it is are even in the elite, male-dominated professions, and fewer still will be there.

Few women will return home to raise kids, not because of "choice," but because the vast majority of women don't have any choice. They aren't working in high-paid, "male" jobs, the only jobs that count to the MSM and many feminist writers.

At most, these elites are only 10 percent of the female workforce, yet 90 percent of media blather is about them.

I hate those types of articles and books focusing on these miniscule numbers of women, because it distorts what is really happening to the great majority of working people.

[smirkymonkey]

2. Who the hell are these "women" and how did they get into an

Ivy League University with such "lofty" goals? Yale is not know for picking applicants who are solely on the mommy track unless they are legacy girls looking for an MRS. degree. I smell propaganda.

They probably found ONE woman at a Christian sorority or something who said it and therefore it's now a "trend". Bullshit.

[fasttense]

3. They are rich princesses who don't have to work for a living

Why would anyone, male or female, throw away an Ivy League education? If they just wanted to raise children, all they need do is go to a local community college. Not that raising children is easy but you don't need an Ivy League education to do it. I don't buy it. I think someone is projecting their ideas onto these women.

[MountainLaurel]

21. Tradition

Daughters of trophy wives?

[cap]

4. they need to come up with the justification for why women

arent moving up the ranks in corporate America. Women can take an entry level to mid level job and then leave to have kids.

I am an Ivy League Alumna and this article does not reflect the consensus. They are trying to push us back into the fifties.

These Ivy Leaguers who follow this article's advice will be on Xanax big time. When it is too hard to get a good job, how can people support families on one income? With hubbies facing layoffs, well educated women are going to sit on their tails?

[Lasher]

5. 60 Minutes Segment

I remember a July 17, 2005 segment on 60 Minutes, in which Lesley Stahl reported on women who crashed through the glass ceiling and became successful in the workplace, but who then chose to go home and raise children. According to Stahl, this behavior has become more common in recent years.

[Caria]

6. COLLEGE should broaden students

What bugs me is that the "journalist" seems to be using the optimism of a select few (all from elite background with a cushion of family money to fall back on?) to imply that educating women is wasteful.

The students quoted in the article are freshmen and sophomores. What will they think and where will they be when they are 22? 25? 30? My own life is not at all what I thought it would be when I was that age - it is much better, fuller, richer. But mine is also not a life I'd have chosen for myself when I was 18.

That said, I think it is wonderful that young women assume that they will have control over their own lives, that they will have a range of options from which to choose, and that they will have flexibility. I don't remember thinking that way when I was their age.

Furthermore, I agree with Shirley Tilghman, that stay-at-home-parents can have "a powerful impact on their communities."

[SheilaT]

7. Despite the rhetoric

of the last 40 years, women have never been able to have it all.

If a woman decides to have kids, even if she returns to work two weeks after giving birth, she's seen as not really committed to the job. And if she wants to stay home and actually participate in raising her own children (personally I can't understand not raising your own kids, but that's just me) then she's REALLY punished.

Men who are fathers usually have wives. And if they don't, they're almost never the custodial parent.

The real problem is that the workplace at all levels, not just the highest ones, is completely antipathetic to children. I guess the idea is that the lower classes do all of our childbearing and childrearing for us.

[greenman3610]

9. there's men that have discovered this too

My Dad missed his kids lives, and we all paid
a price.
I'm trying to scale things so I know
my kids, and they know me.

[SheilaT]

10. It's true that some men

understand this, but the truth is that the vast majority of men don't pay the price women do.

Workers, regardless of gender, are expected to live for the job. The higher up one goes in the corporate hierarchy, the more successful the career, the more this is true.

There's some amazing statistic out there about women at the top corporate levels, and essentially none of them have children

Plus, it's socially acceptable for men to be uninvolved in their children's lives. They're not the ones who are expected to be there for them. Women carry the double (maybe it's more like triple or quadruple) burdened of being criticized if they have kids and then are gone all the
time in the job, if they're not home baking cookies for the class parties, if they don't make the kids' Halloween costumes and on and on. But if they don't have kids there's something wrong with them.

As for the women who are stay at home moms, they're often considered at the intellectual level of brood mares, treated as if they have an IQ in the single digits, no matter what they might have done in the world of work before staying home.

I wish men and women, those with kids and those without, would band together and demand that the workplace be accommodating of non work life.

Childless employees often complain bitterly that they're expected to work late when those with kids can leave at 5pm. Since it gets couched in the those-with-kids vs those-without-kids conflict, both sides start feeling enormously resentful of the other. It's the ludicrous demands on workers, regardless of marital or child-bearing status that's the problem.

[shrike]

11. Very true

My father was unusual (back in the 60s and 70s) in that he attended every school function, every school play and event. He would come home from work, find my brother standing there with his mitt and ball, drop his briefcase and play catch in his shirtsleeves and tie, because if he had supper first they'd lose daylight. He refused to take up golf along with his friends because it would take up too much family time.

Sadly, many men feel that a stay-at-home wife gives them carte blanche to live their own lives. They stay late at the office, go drinking with their friends, sign up for a hundred boards and organizations, and play ball or golf on the weekends. They think all the kids really want is their mommies anyway, so they're off the hook. And they are so wrong.

I hope the single mothers (and African-Americans) on this board are not offended by this observation, but I remember doing a story for a local magazine on successful African-Americans in our community. One thing they all had in common was a consistent male figure in their lives whilst they were growing up. Didn't have to be Dad -- could have been grandpa or Uncle so-and-so, but the male presence seemed to make a difference.

[ozarkvet]

13. Ancient Greece

"I guess the idea is that the lower classes do all of our childbearing and childrearing for us."

Just read about the same concept, circa 600 BCE. (Returned to school after Army -- gak.)

Good plan if you want a civilization to collapse.

[dback]

14. This was on "Desperate Housewives" the other night

It was silly, but the core of it was true: Lynnette was going back to work, and had a majorly important 2nd interview, and her husband--who'd agreed to take care of the kids while she became the breadwinner--proceeded to throw his back out. Thus, Lynnette had to take her cranky baby to the interview, and when the receptionist wound up being too inept to watch her for 10 minutes, had to bring her into the interview (and change her diaper while multitasking and making a marketing pitch. She got the job.). Her new nemesis is a single woman who made it very clear that she didn't have kids and didn't want them to interfere with Lynnette's job in any way.

"The View" kicked this around yesterday as well--moms who leave work early to care for their kids are OK because the "singles" will cover for them, but single women (or men) who choose to leave an hour early to do something for themselves (gym, a movie, a spa, etc.) are somehow suspect. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

[nvliberal]

36. Women "can't" have "it all"

because men DON'T have it all or else they wouldn't have wives doing it all.

It's a vicious myth.

It's a bunch of media-influenced garbage putting a guilt trip on women.

It's so much irrelevant crap, with outsourcing of jobs, the destruction of unions, the dismantling of our education system, and everything else, it just makes me goddamned sick.

We are far more likely to have a country where CHILDREN will be forced to work to help support their families than some pie-in-the-sky nonsense of "job-sharing," "flex-time," and other types of proposals that are just simply stupid on their face because they appeal to the tiny number of elite women.

[abluelady]

8. And When Their Husbands leave

them for their secretaries, the women will be able to go back out in the world and take care of themselves. Nineteen year old girls are soooo naive. Can't believe their mothers are encouraging that kind of nonsense.

[shrike]

12. I remember meeting a divorce attorney

An African-American woman, who usually represented women.

So often she represented homemakers, women who had been out of the work force for decades, who were forced to start over.

Occasionally the settlement was large enough for them to live on, but oftentimes not. They'd be forced to go out in the world, to work, and jobs were not there for them. Their skills were so outdated that most ended up in supermarkets or behind the convenience store counter.

[rodeodance]

15. so few students seem to be able to think outside the box, how true!

.......It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one thing, a person's expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. In any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask outstanding applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms.

University officials said that success means different things to different people and that universities are trying to broaden students' minds, not simply prepare students for jobs.

"What does concern me," said Yale College's dean, Peter Salovey, "is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box, so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn't constructed along traditional gender roles."

[shrike]

17. That may be part of being young

I can remember myself, wanting everything now, never imagining I could get old(er).

I also remember my dad pushing me to get an education (I'm female), to learn how to handle money, etc. At the time I just thought he was being a nag, but now I know where he was coming from.

Wonder how many of these kids have heart-to-heart talks with their parents? Or if said parents bother to talk, or if said kids bother to listen?

[rodeodance]

16. nominated

[rodeodance]

18. kick

[jhain]

19. Why is raising children a' waste' of an education? n/t

[Gormy Cuss]

32. because it's still viewed as women's work. n/t

[cap]

20. this is a tactic: blame the victim

the article fails to note that the impact of the layoffs in the Bush administration has fallen disproportionately on women and minorities.

You cant talk about work-life balance with layoffs threatening.

[fortyfeetunder]

22. such as the life of the privileged world

These women assume that they can go to work, and find a nice Mr. Right with the means to support them in the style they are accustomed to, be able to dress their kids in the stylish clothes, drive a nice SUV and live in an expansive house.

What these idealistic young women forget that education alone will not guarantee re-entry in the workplace after years of hiatus to raise children, unless they are well connected...

And they oh so conveniently forget it was the feminist movement that struggled for years just so they could have that choice to come, go, and returned to the labor market....

[kath]

24. yes, many of them act as if "feminist" is a dirty word.

grrrrrrrrr.

[cap]

25. you are wrong...

a lot of women there are on a scholarship and have hefty student loans to pay back. Those women are there for the careers. I go to alumni meetings and I havent met these vapid air heads described in the article.

[fortyfeetunder]

28. Well I work with some of them

and I have to counsel several women who've left the workforce for maternity leave...some don't take a class or do any self-improvement, while they are gone, and they think after 5-6 years they can waltz back into the workplace and go back to work as if nothing happened.

And these aren't always air heads, these are mostly intelligent women. Unfortunately some in this group don't realize in this technology-intense society, not maintaining current in their profession, regardless whether they are gainfully employed or not, is at an employment disadvantage....

[cap]

29. the problem with maternity leave is one thing

I agree that many women (including Ivy League) do not plan for re-integration back in the workplace and that is a problem. Is there any way to have an emotional life and an intellectual one at the same time without suffering a nervous breakdown?

[fortyfeetunder]

33. Emotional and intellectual

In this economy, continuous learning is essential for even maintaining one's career. It doesn't mean only taking a formal class, networking with other professsionals, reading books, even doing online classes to build skills, (especially transferrable skills) will help some people re-integrate.

But I think it would help many women and men if they had a career plan and got as much education and work experience as possible before taking off for the maternity leave. The reality is, unless the individual is well connected, it is difficult to leave for several years and waltz back in without doing anything in between the leave.

[kath]

23. The sad thing is that so few men seem very (if at all) concerned about how

they will fit children into their lives. Fatherhood just doesn't seem to matter much at all to them. Balancing fatherhood and career isn't even an issue.

There was a movement for a while to get people to think beyond traditional gender roles in childrearing etc, but it all seems to have disappeared.

We really haven't come that far in the past thirty years.

Sad, sad, sad.

[cap]

26. you are so right....

women are supposed to live most of their lives isolated in the suburbs while the men toil 12 hours a day . What kind of family life is this?

[cap]

27. Note: the key word is a vague many

these schools are large institutions ... so a minority of women can be "many".

I think women at the Ivies are seeing the impact that 2 careers are having on the family. They want a full emotional life and that means a relationship with their children. They also want the intellectual stimulation that goes with a career.

I think this is the same genre of thought that is going on with women in their 40's dont want a career. I think it is a quiet propaganda to get women back in the kitchen.

Why isnt NOW dealing with this? Women's economic freedom is the foundation for having the freedom for many privacy issues such as abortion, gay rights, etc. Without the economics, we have no power.

[shrike]

30. These young ladies are in for a rude awakening

Try to get back into the workforce after you've been out of it for five, even 10 years. I've seen it happen time and time again. There are plenty of youngsters waiting in the wings, ready to work eighty hours a week and sacrifice their lives to get ahead.

I also to beg to differ with the woman who says she sees a "difference" between children raised by a stay-at-home mom, and those whose moms worked. I know plenty in both situations and a good mom is a good mom, whether she's home all the time or not.

[ElectroPrincess]

31. Yes, when hubby runs off with his secretary, it will be brutal /eom