Kids or Cash: Why Force Women to Choose?

WASHINGTON —  There are so many things wrong with the way the media cover women’s issues that it’s hard to know where to begin. But why not with Exhibit A, the recent stampede to sensationalize the non-news that there are disproportionately few mothers among higher-earning women.

This bombshell was reported by Sylvia Ann Hewlett in her recent book “Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children,” which has been breathlessly featured on “60 Minutes” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” as well as in the weekly news magazines. A survey conducted by Hewlett found that one-third of women with high salaries were still childless at age 40. This has been interpreted as a tragedy that women can best rectify by planning early marriage and childbearing, before they wake up one day and find themselves--gasp--too old to bear fruit and find happiness.

Note that this issue is not about fertility per se. It is about how hard it is to be a mother and have a well-paying job. These are two different things. I myself had a baby at 44, and nothing could have been easier. What was tough was balancing my desire to spend some meaningful time with my child against my desire to keep my high-powered, all-consuming job. I couldn’t do both, and in the end I quit my job.

Other women facing similar dilemmas give up the idea of having children. This is the extreme, all-or-nothing choice facing many educated American women, and there is absolutely no evidence that having a baby sooner will enable you to wiggle out of the career-family conflict. What we do know is, the earlier a woman marries and has kids, the lower her lifetime earnings will be and the greater her risk of divorce and poverty. So much for the advice to find a mate and procreate before it’s “too late.”

This is not to deny the reality that it does become harder for many women to become pregnant past a certain age. But does that mean, as Hewlett and the media would have it, that all those childless women are miserable? Haven’t we come further than that? Thirty years into a highly successful women’s movement, do we really still believe that a woman can only be fulfilled by becoming a mother? I have many friends who have never had children and they are at least as happy with their lives as the mothers among us.

One of my childless buddies is a vivacious financial whiz who is active in women’s issues and cultural affairs in Washington, D.C.--and married to a gorgeous, supportive guy. Another is a 50-year-old investment banker, a merry widow with a duplex overlooking the East River in Manhattan and a highly satisfying job that frequently takes her to South America. The other night we went to the theater, and her car and driver picked us up, took us to a restaurant for dinner and then home to our respective apartments. If these high-earning women are miserable, they sure have me fooled. And what about Oprah, who, after a miscarriage in her teens, went on to become the most famous childless career woman of our time? Do you want to bet that she cries all the way to the bank?

As a matter of fact, several “60 Minutes” producers called me to discuss this childless career woman phenomenon and asked me to suggest some people they might interview. I gave them the names of my two friends, and both later told me that they were called. Ultimately, though, they were told they would not be used--because, as one put it, she was “too happy.” So much for simplistic sound-bite sociology.

But the worst thing about this latest attempt to spread fear and panic among accomplished young women is that it drops a systemic problem at their feet and says, “You solve it.” This is what professor Robert Drago of Penn State University calls “social science backwards.” First, you identify a problem that is widespread and therefore not the result of individual, feckless behavior, and then you urge individuals to change their behavior, leaving the system intact. This, as Drago put it in a recent group e-mail, is “bad stuff.”

While Hewlett does offer some suggestions for reform--like curbing long work hours by requiring employers to pay overtime to almost all employees--apparently it is too much to ask the media to give us the “good stuff.” They rarely explore the reasons American women face such harsh, either-or choices between children and well-paying jobs--choices that women in some other countries do not have to face. I spent almost two weeks in Sweden while reporting a book on the economics of motherhood. Childlessness is far lower there, because it is much easier for Swedish women to combine work and family than in the United States. Mothers (and fathers) in Sweden have the right to generous paid parental leave, the right to shorter workweeks until their children reach school age, much greater access to good child care and a culture that does not demand a monastic (or locker-room) dedication to the office. An employee’s love of family doesn’t have to be hidden like an extramarital affair. These are the factors that have been shown, in country after country, to reduce childlessness (although they do not seem to boost the number of children a woman has).

Swedish feminists and economists also convinced me that these child-friendly policies do not prevent ambitious women from rising to prominence. Almost half the members of the Swedish parliament are women, as are a high percentage of local government officials, and the percentage of women in high corporate positions is very similar to the percentage in the U.S.--low in both cases. (In 2000, women constituted 4% of the top earners in Fortune 1000 companies, and 7% of the next tier of high earners in the same corporations. Clearly, American women are not gaining top corporate jobs in return for giving up those children.)

The truth is that the time clock of corporations and other institutions is easier to change than the biological clock. So let’s stop obsessing on the latter and start focusing on the real problem: workplace rules that are out of sync with the rhythms of human reproduction.