Today's NYT has an article entitled: Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood. Below is the text of the article (in italics), with a few of my reactions (you'll probably deduce fairly rapidly that the commentary not in italics is mine):
"Cynthia Liu is precisely the kind of high achiever Yale wants: smart (1510 SAT), disciplined (4.0 grade point average), competitive (finalist in Texas oratory competition), musical (pianist), athletic (runner) and altruistic (hospital volunteer). And at the start of her sophomore year at Yale, Ms. Liu is full of ambition, planning to go to law school.
"So will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be a stay-at-home mom.
"My mother's always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time," Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. "You always have to choose one over the other."
Already I'm confused. If she goes straight from college to law school, she will be at least 25 when she graduates from law school, but she expects to be a "stay-at-home mom" by the time she is 30, and this means it is "not likely" that she will "join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates."
Let's say she goes to Harvard Law School, where the tuition exceeds $33,000 per year already, and is likely to continue to increase each year, and room and board expenses exceed $15,000 per year, and are also likely to increase. This means she will invest at least $145,000 in an education for a career she will pursue for five years or less before dropping out of the labor force. Many law jobs pay well, but not well enough to pay off $145,000 and interest in five years, plus any student loans accumulated while she was obtaining her undergraduate degree. Maybe her parents are wealthy enough to pay for her legal education themselves, but if not, her future husband will have to be willing to assume a mountain of debt he alone will need to work to pay off, in addition to any school loans he has taken out to fund his own education, while simultaneously supporting the wife and kids.
"At Yale and other top colleges, women are being groomed to take their place in an ever more diverse professional elite. 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.
Why is it that the phrase "women are being groomed..." strikes me as so ridiculous? I know this is not supposed to suggest that someone is doing their hair, trimming their hooves, and polishing their teeth for them, but isn't a "groom" usually either a person who takes care of horses, or the male guy at a wedding? And doesn't "groom" as a verb conjure up fancy dog salons?
In any event, could it possibly be true that: "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." Because if so, obviously the folks at "Yale and other top colleges" are not very observant or astute, and might want to consider ramping up their cultural awareness. Or perhaps simply taking a gendered head count of the leaders at their own "elite institutions" might be instructive. And maybe the author of this article could, I don't know, just for fun, see if half the people in leadership positions at the New York Times are women?
"There is just one problem with this scenario: many of these women say that is not what they want.
"Many women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment. [emphasis added]
Many, many, some, some, many. What is the benchmark and sample size? Is there any actual quantitative data at all? Oh yes, eventually there is a bit of data buried below, but since it is so problematic, one can see why the author thought it best not to reference it here.
"Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.
Good grief, did this author attend the Reader's Digest School of Factless Bland Platitudinal Journalism & Patriarachal Reinforcement? "Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children"? Really? You mean, like, by the NYT?
"At the height of the women's movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing," said Cynthia E. Russett, a professor of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. "The women today are, in effect, turning realistic."
When was the "height of the women's movement" and how tall did it get, exactly? "The women today" means who, exactly? And "turning realistic" means sinking seven years and hundreds of thousands of dollars into college and law school educations for short careers that may never be resumed, and marrying wealthy men who will never ever get sick, lose their jobs, or leave you?
"Dr. Russett is among more than a dozen faculty members and administrators at the most exclusive institutions who have been on campus for decades and who said in interviews that they had noticed the changing attitude.
More than a dozen faculty members at the MOST EXCLUSIVE institutions noticed "the changing attitude," so it must be critically important!
"Many students say staying home is not a shocking idea among their friends. Shannon Flynn, an 18-year-old from Guilford, Conn., who is a freshman at Harvard, says many of her girlfriends do not want to work full time.
"Most probably do feel like me, maybe even tending toward wanting to not work at all," said Ms. Flynn, who plans to work part time after having children, though she is torn because she has worked so hard in school.
"Men really aren't put in that position," she said.
Very few women have the luxury of not working at all at any point in their lives, but graduates of elite universities are so much more interesting than the ordinary female masses, especially when they have the changed attitude.
"Uzezi Abugo, a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania who hopes to become a lawyer, says she, too, wants to be home with her children at least until they are in school.
"I've seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at home and kids who didn't, and it's kind of like an obvious difference when you look at it," said Ms. Abugo, whose mother, a nurse, stayed home until Ms. Abugo was in first grade.
So while attending first grade, when her mother returned to the work force, Ms. Abugo became a juvenile delinquent? Or she got behind in her studies, which is why she is forced to attend Penn instead of Yale like the cool kids?
"While the changing attitudes are difficult to quantify, the shift emerges repeatedly in interviews with Ivy League students, including 138 freshman and senior females at Yale who replied to e-mail questions sent to members of two residential colleges over the last school year.
The interviews found that 85 of the students, or roughly 60 percent, said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely. About half of those women said they planned to work part time, and about half wanted to stop work for at least a few years.
I don't actually see that as particularly radical departure from previous generations. The women I went to college with in the 1980s also hoped to work part time or spend a few years home with their children, if they had any, and if they had the financial resources.
"Two of the women interviewed said they expected their husbands to stay home with the children while they pursued their careers. Two others said either they or their husbands would stay home, depending on whose career was furthest along.
I hope this works out for them. I'm not being sarcastic, for a change. I really wish them the best of luck with this.
"The women said that pursuing a rigorous college education was worth the time and money because it would help position them to work in meaningful part-time jobs when their children are young or to attain good jobs when their children leave home.
Oh yes, all those meaningful part time jobs that up until the recent "changed attitude" were going completely unfilled.
In recent years, elite colleges have emphasized the important roles they expect their alumni - both men and women - to play in society.
A shocking new development! Up until recent years, elite colleges expected their graduates to fade into affluent obscurity, noticeable only when they begin writing substantial alumni donation checks with an eye torward getting their offspring admitted as legacies.
"For example, earlier this month, Shirley M. Tilghman, the president of Princeton University, welcomed new freshmen, saying: "The goal of a Princeton education is to prepare young men and women to take up positions of leadership in the 21st century. Of course, the word 'leadership' conjures up images of presidents and C.E.O.'s, but I want to stress that my idea of a leader is much broader than that."
"She listed education, medicine and engineering as other areas where students could become leaders.
"In an e-mail response to a question, Dr. Tilghman added: "There is nothing inconsistent with being a leader and a stay-at-home parent. Some women (and a handful of men) whom I have known who have done this have had a powerful impact on their communities."
You can certainly have a powerful impact on a community by doing unpaid work, but even if you do it from home, wouldn't it be a bit time consuming, perhaps creating a need for some help with caring for young children? Of course you could hire a nanny for this, right?
"Yet the likelihood that so many young women plan to opt out of high-powered careers presents a conundrum.
"It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
"It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.
Whew, they will marry rich men, that's a relief. For a minute there I was worried that working part time or staying home might require material sacrifices. I guess spending $145,000 on law school is worth it if it enables you to marry somebody who makes partner at a big law firm. Better hope the man you pick doesn't get any crazy ideas about doing public interest work, teaching at a public law school, or simply working fewer than 80 hours per week, day after day, world without end.
"It is less than clear what universities should, or could, do about it. For one, a person's expectations at age 18 are less than perfect predictors of their life choices 10 years later. And in any case, admissions officers are not likely to ask applicants whether they plan to become stay-at-home moms.
"University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students' minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.
Plus, what a great place to meet rich boys, isn't that the not too subtle subtext here?
"What does concern me," said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, "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."
Hmmm, I wonder why that could be, given the incredibly generous support society provides for those who make nontraditional choices.
"There is, of course, nothing new about women being more likely than men to stay home to rear children.
"According to a 2000 survey of Yale alumni from the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989 and 1994, conducted by the Yale Office of Institutional Research, more men from each of those classes than women said that work was their primary activity - a gap that was small among alumni in their 20's but widened as women moved into their prime child-rearing years. Among the alumni surveyed who had reached their 40's, only 56 percent of the women still worked, compared with 90 percent of the men.
"A 2005 study of comparable Yale alumni classes found that the pattern had not changed. Among the alumni who had reached their early 40's, just over half said work was their primary activity, compared with 90 percent of the men. Among the women who had reached their late 40's, some said they had returned to work, but the percentage of women working was still far behind the percentage of men.
"A 2001 survey of Harvard Business School graduates found that 31 percent of the women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 who answered the survey worked only part time or on contract, and another 31 percent did not work at all, levels strikingly similar to the percentages of the Yale students interviewed who predicted they would stay at home or work part time in their 30's and 40's.
So what about "the changed attitude"? Oh wait, completely unsupported by the studies cited above, it resurfaces in the next paragraph.
"What seems new is that while many of their mothers expected to have hard-charging careers, then scaled back their professional plans only after having children, the women of this generation expect their careers to take second place to child rearing.
"It never occurred to me," Rebecca W. Bushnell, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, said about working versus raising children. "Thirty years ago when I was heading out, I guess I was just taking it one step at a time."
"Dr. Bushnell said young women today, in contrast, are thinking and talking about part-time or flexible work options for when they have children. "People have a heightened awareness of trying to get the right balance between work and family."
Wow, thirty years ago one woman did not consider the trade off between work and children when she was "heading out." She was, after all, hungry and "heading out" for pizza. Who knew what a critical data point this little foray into Italian fast food would produce! Seriously, though, thirty years ago a lot of women were thinking and indeed writing about these very issues. See e.g. this site, or this one.
Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her American Family class last fall approved of women's plans to stay home with their children.
"A lot of the guys were like, 'I think that's really great,' " Ms. Currie said. "One of the guys was like, 'I think that's sexy.' Staying at home with your children isn't as polarizing of an issue as I envision it is for women who are in their 30's now."
Of course, as she learned in her American Family class, women who are in their 30's now all married men who hate the idea that women might want to work part time or stay home with their children for a few years. But then again, perhaps this is explained by the remoteness of the possibility that men could find women in their 30's sexy at all, no less because they want to stay home with their kids. If only she'd done the course reading, she might know for sure.
"For most of the young women who responded to e-mail questions, a major factor shaping their attitudes seemed to be their experience with their own mothers, about three out of five of whom did not work at all, took several years off or worked only part time.
"My stepmom's very proud of my choice because it makes her feel more valuable," said Kellie Zesch, a Texan who graduated from the University of North Carolina two years ago and who said that once she had children, she intended to stay home for at least five years and then consider working part time. "It justified it to her, that I don't look down on her for not having a career."
I feel very sorry for any woman who judges her life choices against how it makes her stepmother feel about her own choice not to have a career.
"Similarly, students who are committed to full-time careers, without breaks, also cited their mothers as influences. Laura Sullivan, a sophomore at Yale who wants to be a lawyer, called her mother's choice to work full time the "greatest gift."
"She showed me what it meant to be an amazing mother and maintain a career," Ms. Sullivan said.
But since neither the words "many" or "some" appear in this paragraph, we are to assume that "Ms. Sullivan" and her mother are freakish outliers.
"Some of these women's mothers, who said they did not think about these issues so early in their lives, said they were surprised to hear that their college-age daughters had already formed their plans.
It is sort of fascinating that women aged 18 to 21, many of whom may not yet have even declared their majors, no less figured out who, if anyone, they want to marry, have already irrevocably decided how they will balance work and family issues.
"Emily Lechner, one of Ms. Liu's roommates, hopes to stay home a few years, then work part time as a lawyer once her children are in school.
"Her mother, Carol, who once thought she would have a full-time career but gave it up when her children were born, was pleasantly surprised to hear that. "I do have this bias that the parents can do it best," she said. "I see a lot of women in their 30's who have full-time nannies, and I just question if their kids are getting the best."
And I'm postive those women enjoy your pointed questions about whether "their kids are getting the best" to no end!
"For many feminists, it may come as a shock to hear how unbothered many young women at the nation's top schools are by the strictures of traditional roles.
Of course, because "many feminists" are completely out of touch with today's youth! None of them work at "the most elite institutions" where they could be privy to "the changed attitude." Thanks goodness we have this brilliant NYT article to enlighten us.
"They are still thinking of this as a private issue; they're accepting it," said Laura Wexler, a professor of American studies and women's and gender studies at Yale. "Women have been given full-time working career opportunities and encouragement with no social changes to support it.
"I really believed 25 years ago," Dr. Wexler added, "that this would be solved by now."
Since Dr. Wexler apparently speaks for "many feminists" I would have expected a lot more exclamation marks in her quotations, to more emphatically express the shock we are all reeling from. But then again, Dr. Wexler seems painfully unaware of "the changed attitude" so possibly she is just another clueless feminist.
"Angie Ku, another of Ms. Liu's roommates who had a stay-at-home mom, talks nonchalantly about attending law or business school, having perhaps a 10-year career and then staying home with her children.
"Parents have such an influence on their children," Ms. Ku said. "I want to have that influence. Me!"
"She said she did not mind if that limited her career potential.
"I'll have a career until I have two kids," she said. "It doesn't necessarily matter how far you get. It's kind of like the experience: I have tried what I wanted to do."
"Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.
"I accept things how they are," she said. "I don't mind the status quo. I don't see why I have to go against it."
"After all, she added, those roles got her where she is.
"It worked so well for me," she said, "and I don't see in my life why it wouldn't work.
Yep, those young women are "turning realistic" alright.
