As I scroll through my 2009 blog posts trying to come up with new topics for a New Year, I realize that I have an eclectic blogging personality. Some of my blogs have focused on the "Big Issues" working moms confront, while others are entirely about trivial stuff. A few take a look at the wider world, while some focus on the home front. (Not necessarily in a flattering way, e.g., my recent snowstorm-inspired reflections on housework.) I usually can't tell you why I'm drawn to a particular topic or idea on any given Wednesday.
But sometimes I can. Like today. Today's blog is a response to several pieces from the past week or so on the future of women - mainly, professional women - and work. Actually, it's less of a reaction and more of a tour through some of the articles, blogs, and other pieces I've been reading in the past week or so about women and workplace changes. It provides some context - some background reading - for my more personal musings from last week about finding, creating, and refreshing my own work-life balance. Turns out that the at the beginning of our new recession-led decade, working women - and the issues of child care and work-life balance - are all the rage.
For starters, there are two mostly celebratory companion pieces on women in the workforce, We Did It and Female Power, in the stodgy British news and politics magazine,The Economist. The Economist (there are no by-lines) posits that, "Women's economic empowerment is arguably the biggest social change of our times." It sees progress and predicts even more - at least for women in "rich countries." It observes that, "Just a generation ago, women were largely confined to repetitive, menial jobs. . . . Today they are running some of the organisations that once treated them as second-class citizens. Millions of women have been given more control over their own lives. And millions of brains have been put to more productive use."
The Economist recognizes, however, that these developments are not without a few "stings" - mainly the failure of society to adjust to the impact of women's movement into the labor force on family life. In other words, the juggle. The Economist describes the dilemma in characteristically lofty terms, "Social arrangements have not caught up with economic changes." But it also highlights more concretely that, "Many women - and indeed many men -feel that they are caught in an ever-tightening tangle of commitments." And it cautions that, "If the empowerment of women was one of the greatest changes of the past 50 years, dealing with its social consequences will be one of the great challenges of the next 50."
Consistent with its philosophical bent, The Economist argues for "letting the market do the work" to address these challenges. But it also acknowledges that this approach has a downside: "America and Britain, the countries that combine high female employment with reluctance to involve the state in child care, serve their children especially poorly." It rightly identifies poor children as the "biggest losers" and excoriates America as the "only rich country that refuses to provide mothers with paid maternity leave." You know there's something afoot when The Economist calls for America to "invest more in its children."
Then, there's Ellen Goodman's Christmas Eve swan song - Women - looking back on the changes the women's movement brought to her beat over 40 years as a syndicated columnist. Goodman, who sadly retired on January 1, frames the "social consequences" issue more simply: "We have yet to solve the problem raised at the outset: Who will take care of the family?"
She explains:
"It turned out that it was easier to kick down the doors than to change society. It was easier to fit into traditional male life patterns than to change those patterns. We've had more luck winning the equal right to 70-hour weeks than we've had selling the equal value of care-giving. . . .
As a young mother and reporter, it did not occur to me that my daughter would face the same conflicts of work and family. Or, on the other hand, that my son-in-law would fully share those conflicts. I did not expect that over two-thirds of mothers would be in the work force before we had enough child care or sick pay."
Taking a very different tack from The Economist, Goodman laments our society's piecemeal approach to work-life issues: "The troubling news is that so many think their problems -- especially balancing work and family -- are private dilemmas to be solved on their own rather than as, well, a movement." Yet, like The Economist, she celebrates women's economic empowerment, and views the progress so far as just a "beginning."
Monday's piece from the Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog - Harvard Prof Wonders: Why Are There So Many Women Veterinarians?- takes a more micro approach. The blog reports on a speech by Harvard economist, Claudia Goldin, who asked her audience, a bunch of economists, why 77% of all new veterinarians are women. And then gave them the answer. (Hint, it's not because women like pet bunnies - or snakes - more than men.)
According to Goldin, the answer is work-life balance and flexibility: "Being a veterinarian has prestige, equivalent to that of a physician. Like some physicians there is considerable room for part-time and flexible work. The training period is less than that for doctors. Veterinarians work lower hours than MBAs and engage in more part-time work sooner in their professional lives.”
Goldin makes the point that many women are consciously making the choice to trade pay for workplace flexibility ("winning the horse race but losing the rat race") and are drawn to professions - like veterinary medicine - where it’s relatively easier to do that. And she notes that this is a novel development: "The goal of ‘career and family’ for college women is a relatively new one historically,” she said. “Only with cohorts born since circa. 1950 and graduating college in the early 1970s could many college graduate women have even considered having a career and family.”
Although you could applaud the "veterinary approach"as a way for professional women to create their own family-friendly work-life balance or decry it as a self-imposed glass ceiling, what struck me most about Goldin's thesis is that it captures the complexity of addressing work-life balance issues on the macro-level. Indeed, while an individual woman's choice of a career that offers workplace flexibility may be a rational, market-based response to the struggle of the juggle, it's hardly the type of market response (e.g., widespread telecommuting, revised promotion paths) envisioned by The Economist. And it perpetuates the trend identified by Goodman of our tendency to characterize work-life balance issues as "private dilemmas" rather than as larger societal shifts requiring larger (and more innovative) responses.
How to make sense of all this? I'm not sure, yet. (And, of course, none of this deals with problems of less educated and low income women.) As Goldin and Goodman suggest, in some ways, it's too soon to know. But I'm hoping for some real change before 2020. Meanwhile, I need to get over my dog and cat allergies and check out job opportunities at the local animal hospital!
That one word hint is enough to answer this question!
- Mathew J.
Posted by: veterinary clinic | Tuesday, February 09, 2010 at 11:43 AM