Juggling Job and Family: Balancing Home Life and Careers

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Juggling Job and Family Balancing Home Life and
Careers

• Susan Steinberg, MD Columbia University

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THINGS THAT MADE A DIFFERENCE ALONG THE WAY

• Being an MIT coed growing up as one of the
  guys.
• Attending Harvard Medical School.
• Medical Residency and having a child.
• Taking a year off.

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THINGS THAT MADE A DIFFERENCE ALONG THE WAY

• - Having a mentor in my department someone to
  run interference in my institution.
• Having a supportive husband
• Having a wife the same housekeeper for the
  last 19 years
• Knowing what I wanted to do when I grow up.

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LESSONS LEARNED
Prioritize Plan ahead when possible, avoid
crisis intervention Multitask Set realistic
goals Compartmentalize Lose the guilt Keep your
sense of humor Find balance
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WHAT CAN OUR DAUGHTERS EXPECT? SANDY YULKE
PRESIDENT MIT ALUMNÆ ASSOCIATION SPRING
2006 What I hear is that the world for MIT women
is (still) not the same as for men. For some
time, we were encouraged to believe that all we
had to do was to increase the numbers of women
and that would be sufficient to change the
landscape. But after more than 30 years of such
increases, it is clear that this alone, is not
enough. Women are not reaching positions in basic
and applied sciences in the anticipated
numbers. Its not just a pipeline issue.
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WHAT CAN OUR DAUGHTERS EXPECT? THE MESSAGES FROM
CURRENT ROLE MODELS
Nancy Hopkins the woman who forced MIT to take
a hard and honest look at the question of gender
equity (for salary, teaching load, and
representation on influential University
committees). Nancy Hopkins was quoted in the NY
Times as saying that she viewed success in her
career at MIT (or a similar elite research
university) incompatible with having children.
Shirley M. Tilghman a molecular biologist, mother
of two and Princeton's president universities
should do a great deal more to create an
environment that legitimizes the choice to be a
scientist and have a family. The first step, she
said, is to recognize, 'It's day care, stupid!'''
Princeton offers one-year tenure extensions for
each child, men and women. Princeton found that
men were more likely to take advantage of the
tenure extension than women, who were afraid that
requesting the extra year would be interpreted as
a sign of weakness or lack of confidence.
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Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to
Motherhood There has recently been a spate of
news and opinion articles telling us that women,
especially graduates of the best universities and
professional schools, are "opting out" in record
numbers, choosing the comforts of home and family
over careers. Stretched to Limit, Women Stall
March to Work For four decades, the number of
women entering the workplace grew at a blistering
pace. But the growth in the percentage of adult
women working outside the home has stalled and
even slipped since the mid-1990's. Are mothers
deciding that they prefer to stay at home and
take care of their children? The broad
reconfiguration of women's lives that allowed
most of them to pursue jobs outside the home
appears to be hitting some serious limits. Since
the 1960's, women have extracted more time from
every nook and cranny of the day. They married
later, had fewer children, and paid others to
help handle household work. Mothers with
children at home gained the time for outside work
by taking it from other parts of their day they
sleep less (3.6 fewer hours than mothers not
employed outside the home) and have stretched
life to the breaking point. The research suggests
that they may have hit a wall in the amount of
work that they can pack into a week. A former
Silicon Valley business executive pines to go
back to work, but she has not figured out how to
mesh work with caring for her three daughters.
''Most of us thought we would work and have kids,
no problem. But really we were kind of duped.
None of us realized how hard it is.'' ''What
happened on the road to gender equality?'' said
Suzanne M. Bianchi, a sociologist at the
University of Maryland. ''A lot of work
happened.''
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THE SPIDER-MAN CONFLICT In my fantasy life I
wear a cape - the cape says ''SuperMom'' and in
it I fly effortlessly from office to home,
computer screen to children. In my cape, I am
heroic and strong. No deadline conflicts with any
vacation no child gets sick while I am leaving
to give a speech. The central conflict in the
Spider-Man series is not Spider-Man versus some
supervillain. It is Peter Parker's attempt to
balance a normal life (getting Aunt May her heart
medicine) with his work as a superhero (going
after the supervillain endangering innocent lives
that he encounters while walking out of the
drug store). In the ''Spider-Man 2' movie,
Peter Parker (Spider-Man's conflicted alter ego)
can't make it to his beloved Mary Jane's play
because of an emergency at the ''office.'' She's
performing on Broadway my children perform in
the middle school auditorium. But putting those
minor differences aside -- been there, done that.
If superheroes can't find balance, what hope is
there for mere mortals?
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Balancing life and work is like riding a
teeter-totter. Sometimes it's life that is
heavier. Sometimes it's work that pulls you
down. Once in awhile, for a fleeting moment,
everything aligns, parallel and in sync. And
then the ground opens and swallows the entire
playground.
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MAKING HISTORY (HERSTORY) ONE DAY AT A
TIME March is Womens History Month a time to
look back at those who have swept us along from
the past to the present, changing the world in
the process.
But history is sweeping and purposeful only in
hindsight. In realtime it is the accumulation of
small steps taken mostly by averages Joes (or in
this case Janes) who simply did what needed to be
done. Tomorrows history is being quietly made
today. Lisa Belkin NY Times 2006