I recently attended a women lawyer networking event for work (what I do for my job!) and one of the panels featured “success stories from top businesswomen.” Following a brief narrative by each panelist, the topic quickly turned to “work life balance” during Q&A. Here’s how each woman described how she maintained balance between “work” and “life”:
#1: The first panelist never had kids, so she and her husband “never had to worry” about work life balance. Being an entrepreneur, her business is very demanding. She recommended that people save time by ordering “everything” online, including groceries. She evidently hadn’t stepped foot in a major retail store in years.
#2: The second panelist does have kids, but she “waited until her forties.” That way, she could focus on her career in her 20s and 30s, and then raise kids when her schedule afforded her more flexibility and free time.
#3: The last panelist also has kids and, unlike #2, had kids in her 20s and 30s, while achieving success in her career. However, her husband “had the flexibility to stay at home and was able to raise the kids” while she was working demanding hours.
When I later told Jane about this panel, we both laughed out loud. Having both worked at large law firms, these stories were familiar to us. Jane, for instance, attended a similar panel where a female attorney panelist said, “Having it all means doing nothing well.”
Women in particular seem to be fixated on this elusive notion of having it “all.” It’s a bitter pill to swallow when you grow up expecting you can have it all despite being a woman, but life turns out otherwise. Judging from my own personal experience, I can tell you that men don’t harbor the same illusions. We almost take it for granted that in order to climb the corporate rings you need to work long hours and make big sacrifices. If you want to be the family man, the modern day dad who attends all the soccer games, you either need to have kids later in life (#2 above) or take a step back in your career, while the younger guy behind you gets the promotion.
I’ll be the first to admit that “the choice to work” is far easier for men than women. On top of our non-existing biological clocks, society still accepts and rewards the hard-working dad who puts his nose to the grindstone to provide for his family. Moreover, there’s that neurochemical, physiological kinship between mother and child that I’ve blogged about before that makes it extra hard for moms to spend long periods of time away from their kids. My only retort is that, at the end of the day, it’s still a choice and a sacrifice that’s not always easy to make. Any one of those panelists above could just as easily have been male. It’s true that society may not frown upon hard working men, but missing out on watching your children grow up in favor of long, grueling hours in a stressful work environment is a form of misery that is decidedly gender-neutral.