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The Women’s Narratives Project
Jessica Bacal
November, 2008
The purpose of Smith’s annual Cycles survey is
to collect data about students’ college experience as well as their goals and
expectations for the future. The Women’s Narratives Project incorporated
questions in this survey designed to gather information on students’ thoughts
about career and other life priorities, such as staying healthy and taking time for
reflection. Nearly all Smith students will go on to careers after college. Because
research shows that women still do more care-giving than men -- whether for aging
parents or for their own children -- we also included questions about how students
envision navigating the tension between care-giving and work.
Our two years of data so far point to a solid optimism
among Smith students. Over three-quarters of students who responded to the survey
said that they expect to have demanding careers. Over three-quarters expect to become
established in those careers before having children. Their responses are consonant
with research about the family-planning of highly-educated women. “Higher-skilled
women are delaying marriage and children, often into their early 30s,” says
Betsey Stevenson, professor of business and public policy at Wharton Business School. “They
are staying flexible and investing in their careers -- waiting to have children until
they have more information on how their careers will play out.” 1
In our data, students also express confidence about
being able to build careers without losing sight of other important elements in a
rewarding life. Four-fifths of students expect to pay attention to their health,
to have satisfying relationships, and to be in control of their choices. Nearly as
many students (78 percent) expect to take time for contemplation and reflection.
The outlook of Smith students resonates with recent
research about a new generation of workers. A 2002 paper called “Generation
and Gender,” put out by the Families and Work Institute, reports that Generations
X and Y -- born after 1965 and 1980, respectively -- place a higher priority on balance
than did previous generations. The Families and Work Institute has coined the term “dual-centric” for
workers who place the same priority on their families and jobs, and “family-centric” for
workers who place a higher priority on family. “Generation-X and Generation-Y
are more likely to be dual-centric or family-centric,” the report says, and
it offers a number of possible reasons. One is that younger people may have formed
their attitudes in reaction to witnessing the busy and unpredictable lives of their
dual-earner parents: “Gen-X and Gen-Y employees are themselves increasingly
the children of working mothers and the children of the downsized generation. They
know first hand what it is like to have one or two parents in a workforce where work
has become increasingly demanding and hectic and many, if not most, have known someone
who lost a job due to workforce downsizing.” 2
Our Cycles data suggests a different explanation, also
rooted in young people’s experience: Students may expect to nimbly manage the
dance between work and life because they’ve seen it done. Nearly two-thirds
of our student respondents born in 1986 and 1987 said that they “have role
models for balancing work and family.” Almost as many said that their own
parents knew how to balance work and family.
For some students, balancing work and family means leaving
their careers to become mothers, and then returning later on. This is one area in
our data where survey respondents may be overly-optimistic. Over forty percent said, “I
expect to take time off from my career when my children are young.” Of that
group, about seventy percent said, “I expect to return to a successful career
after taking time off.” But for many women who leave work, the road back is
bumpier than they’d expected. This phenomenon was reported in the 2005 study, “Off-Ramps
and On-Ramps: Keeping Women on the Road to Success,” conducted by the Center
for Work Life Policy. While the vast majority of educated women who take “off-ramps” would
like to return to work, the study reported that “many find this more difficult
than they anticipated.” 3
Another large study, this one of academics, showed that
female professors with children were less likely to receive tenure. “Do Babies
Matter?” examined data on 160,000 people who earned doctorates between 1978
and 1984, then stayed in academia:
Women who do have babies are nearly 30 percent less
likely than women without babies ever to snag a tenure-track position. And of
those women in the study who had babies early on, only 56 percent earned tenure
within 14 years after receiving their Ph.D. Of men who became fathers early on,
77 percent earned tenure. Of men who never had babies, 71 percent got tenure.
4
We hope that the American workplace will continue to
evolve to adapt to the needs of working women and families. We imagine that the confident
young women who responded to our Cycles survey -- women who expect to balance successful
careers with other life priorities -- will go into the world and help to create policies
that push companies and universities further along, shaping them to their own hopes
and expectations.
1. Knowledge @ Wharton Network. (2007, March 7). I
Do’s and Don’ts: How Changes in Marriage, Divorce and Childbirth are
Redefining the Workplace. (Newsletter.) Philadelphia: Wharton School of the
University of Pennsylvania. Retrieved
October 31, 2008.
2. Families and Work Institute. (2006). Generation
and Gender in the Workplace. (Issue Brief.) New York: American Business Collaboration. Retrieved
on October 6, 2006.
3. Center for Work-Life Policy. (2005). Off-Ramps
and On-Ramps: Keeping Women on the Road to Success. (Press Release). Retrieved
December 11, 2006.
4. As cited in Wilson, R. (2003, December 5). How
Babies Alter Careers for Academics. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved
November 8, 2006. |
