Why Is It Brave to Want It All?

Reproduced from
Camilla Cavendish From: The Times April 10, 2010
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/why-is-it-brave-to-want-it-all/story-e6frg6zo-1225852004961


SO here I am, "fresh" back from maternity leave but feeling about 102, gripped by a vertiginous fear that the third child was a step too far. I am standing on a cliff edge marked "woman who failed".
My baby is blessedly robust and easy, yet I can't remember the names of colleagues, have lost my security pass and need a thesaurus to write. My brain is on the blink.

With the first two children, I managed to cover up for deficiencies by wearing mascara and cultivating an air of efficiency.

It is a maddening aspect of modern life that most careers take off when we are in our 30s. Many of us hit a period of acceleration at 30, just when we are thinking about children. If you miss the moment, it's almost impossible to catch up.

The early 40s are prime time for men. British political leaders David Cameron and Nick Clegg are 43, the age at which Tony Blair became prime minister. Many men are at the top of their game when many women are waylaid by teething, phonics, lunch boxes and childcare.

These things seem to clog up the brain's easy access account and push other information - the size of the deficit or the news from Tehran - into some kind of remote cognitive overdraft facility. Hands-on fathers are better able to compartmentalise than many working mothers, because we are the ones who get the call when the shoes are lost or the child is ill.

This shouldn't matter so much. In a working life that might span 40 years, it seems absurd that a few middle years can be make or break. Yet downsizing temporarily can have a devastating effect on female careers. In the US, the writer and thinker Sylvia Ann Hewlett has found that women lose about a third of their earning power if they take even three years out to care for children or relatives. Some drop in earnings is inevitable. What is scary is the permanent relegation of many older women to the sidelines.

In her book Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success, Hewlett finds that 37 per cent of highly qualified American women voluntarily leave their careers at some point. Another 30 per cent take what she calls the "scenic route", working part-time and/or from home. A whopping 93 per cent of those women try later to get back on to the career highway, but half fail to find an "on-ramp" back to mainstream jobs. Some become self-employed. Many end up in jobs for which they are over-qualified. This is an extraordinary waste of talent. What employers see as a "gap" in a resume has actually been filled with learning how to parent, negotiate with small irrational people, remain patient and alert on almost no sleep - surely all valuable management skills.

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Well ladies, what have you got to say about that???