CEO Moms, Trophy Husbands... why don't we try for balance instead?

I just read an article in Business Week 9/01/2012 titled, « Behind Every Woman, the rise of the CEO mom has created a new kind of trophy husband », written by Carol Hymowitz.  

In the article, Hymowitz portrays a number of families in which the male partner has put his career on hold to enable his wife or, in one example, male partner, full availability to build her/his career.  Hymowitz notes some of the satisfactions (success, greater hand in parenting by the father) and frustrations (lack of balance, missing out on the kids for the women, missing out on career for the men, alienation of being an at-home husband, difficulties for getting back into the workforce), as well as some of conclusions being made (woman or man, you need a “wife” to be a CEO and parent, and the corollary need to choose a spouse who won’t mind staying home – “marry down or marry older men who are ready to retire”, cites Hymowitz of one author). 

Hymowitz counter-balances these familial examples with quotes from “Get to work” author Hirshman who reminds the need for both professional and personal happiness and Kathleen Christensen’s warning that a simple role reversal risks leading to a “masculine mystique” by 2020.

It’s a fine article and I’d like to build on it.

Before I get started, I want to celebrate the fact that pioneering women are making strides, showing it increasingly possible to be a woman, make it to the top, be taken seriously, and stay there… all while also having children.  They are still few but growing in number (Hymowitz notes 18 women CEOs among the Fortune 500 vs. 0 in 1970), and, as the world’s opinion of women’s leadership capacity evolves and improves, every additional “member” may potentially create in-roads for other female contenders who have yet to make it.

That said, of the world’s 500 biggest companies’ CEOs, only 13 are women… and while there are increasing numbers of women executives (in 2010, 45% of executives and managers in the US were women, and 5% of top management, according to a Pew Research Center study, May 2010), the salary gap remains considerable (17.9% in France and 24.1% in the US). 

So we are making strides, but we still have a long way to go… giving us just enough leeway to proactively decide the system we actually want to put in place for our society and that of future generations. 

For starters, a simple reversal of roles doesn’t make much sense for the mid to long-term.  It doesn’t make sense for men.  It doesn’t make sense for women… or for children… or for society at large. 

• We know the frustrations women have experienced with such a model.  Who could possibly benefit from thrusting them onto men?  It’s a dead-end street and we know it.  We need to switch from a sum zero game to building together as partners.  We shouldn’t be in retaliation mode but rather constructive mode.
• We also know the frustrations of staying home with the kids was at times (and is now increasingly so) mirrored by a frustration of not getting to take care of the kids at all.  At long last, men are coming a little more into their rights as fathers whereas for so long they were confined to their breadwinning roles.  We as women should be wary of giving up those rights entirely just for the sake of “making it”.
  Meanwhile, it remains questionable as to whether women should integrate the 20^th century masculine model of work and management or if women can catalyse the implementation of a new, 21^st century model.  Especially considering the new profile increasingly expected form upcoming generations seeking leaders enabling better work-life balance, giving more meaning, inspiring more, leading by example and greater ethics (les echos, 24/01/2012, “le dirigeant de demain?  L’inverse du profil actuel”)
• We also know too that more and more men (joining many, many women) are raising their children alone (in France, at the end of 2010, 10% of children aged 0-6 in single parent families were being raised by their father and 18% of 17-24 year olds – france soir, 14/12/2010).  For neither of these growing populations of single parents can we decide having a “wife” is the only key to “having it all”!  This population already proves that the “wife” model is not a model of the future.
• Going further, I don’t believe it sustainable for the nuclear family of 2 parents with kid(s) either.  I just saw the movie, “I don’t know how she does it” which depicts our Western expectation of equality-based relationships with our spouses and in which everyone must play their full role.  The happy ending with which she narrowly escapes the collapse of her marriage thanks to the fact that, after selling her soul to her employer, she finally asks for a weekend off, feels very short lived and unlikely to really resolve any of the issues at hand.

For our 21^st century society that we are building, we need to pursue a more balanced ecosystem.  Everywhere I turn, there are studies bringing evidence to this need.  Companies are better managed and more profitable when there’s good mix of gender.  Families are reportedly better balanced and happier when there’s a good mix of masculine and feminine (a subject upon which I’ll elaborate in another post).  Society flourishes and progresses more when both men and women are (equally) empowered (I put equally in parentheses because it’s debatable as to whether there’s equality in any country…).  And, in our Western temples of individualism, let’s remember that individuals also thrive on personal balance.  Further, the collective makes progress when individuals are healthy and balanced in order to be able to share and cooperate with others.

It seems so obvious but the way we are living is unintentionally preventing it from being our reality.  In a study published last week, the greatest discrimination experienced among professionals in France is age and maternity.   From experience, I’m prepared to vouch that it’s increasingly the case for parents in general (at least for the parents who expect to play a major role in raising their children vs. outsourcing it entirely to nannies).   As companies increasingly require total availability of its employees, employers panic at the very thought of someone not being at their full disposal, heart and soul.    The dominant managerial model demands hyper-availability, mobility (often at maternity age), minimal personal infringement on professional aspects, networking, and, in certain countries like France, “presence”.  Perhaps as a result, there is a worrisome, albeit unsurprising, rise in burn-out with pretty much the same diagnosis across the board:  work overload and pressure, exhaustion caused by the sprint-marathon our performance society is demanding of men and women.  In France, it has even caused a series of suicides.

The shareholders are most certainly delighted…  but, as far as I’m concerned and concerned for future generations, I think we must demand a different model and reconsider the way we work.

The way we work, what we understand as the new keys leading to profitability and performance (plus, perhaps, some considerations as to ethics and responsibility!!!) and… beyond corporations’ performance, we need to consider the new keys to a healthy, sustainable society.

For this, we must start by revaluing life outside of work.   The whole conception of doing nothing but work when we’re executives makes little sense.  Lydie Salvaire, psychiatrist in France and author, says she sees people who are no longer the subjects of their work, they’ve just become pawns that are moved around without a second’s thought… she notes their feeling of loss of self as they give their all to companies’ culture of results without developing themselves otherwise (muze oct nov dec 2011).  Indeed, I recently met a woman who was greatly deceived and disappointed by the company model when she found herself fired after 11 years of total devotion to her job, allowing no time for reomance, family, or life in general.  Companies cannot be expected to “care” for us – we need to look out for ourselves and make sure we’re not getting a bum deal.

That said, it is evident that both refreshing our minds and building our competences by way of other activities and discoveries are key to doing a good job professionally.   We, as a society, have accepted that for children, realizing that much of their learning is acquired through play.  It seems foolish to not accept that, with the diversity of our brain functioning and so forth, that we can improve the quality of our work, input, and innovation thanks to external stimuli… and rest (ah, but in a performance society, need for rest seems a weakness!).

We also need to revalue all the unpaid work within that ‘out of office’ life.  And most urgently,   to re-value the work of child rearing… by both the mother and the father. 

What I’m getting at is:  maybe we shouldn’t be applauding the fact of structuring families so as to perpetuate lopsided-ness in which one parent meets with burn-out and the other meets with isolation or the ugly realities of getting back into the workforce (such has been the case for women for decades and, according to Hymowitz’s article, stay-at-home dads seem to have similar barriers). 

Yes, women and men should be able to develop their careers, make it to the top, etc.  And yes, they should simultaneously be able to have children and/or hobbies, etc. 

Hopefully at-home husbands’ acts and testimonies will help Western societies become more aware of this precious contribution as well as how hard it is to accomplish.  Oftentimes our society tends to see the “feminization” of professions as a way of gutting them of their roles and attractiveness (cf. Eric Zemmour’s Premier Sexe)… hopefully the “masculization” of home economics will help those fields gain in legitimacy and importance.   At the very least, we seem to be waking up to the positive and negative realities of child rearing.

And with this knowledge, we should pursue changing the myth.  Shift from the hero myth in which we can only devote energies to our singular self… to the motherself myth with which men and women can still develop themselves… but with others, not against them or without them.

Rendez-vous next week for another bite from the apple!

Experiencing life creation thanks to a dress?!

Hello and Happy New Year!  To start off this new year, I would like to jump in with a piece about new life... as in the experience of creating new life.  As of next week, I will resume my piece about integrating quantum mechanics into our 21st century lives and mentality.

Experiencing life creation thanks to a dress?!

I recently read about a dress developped for men to be able to pretend they’re pregnant in La recherche, sept 2011,n° 455.

At first glance, you might think, “we have made great progress for men to actually be interested in knowing what it’s like (used to be dismissed as woman’s work),to be prepared to take the time to follow the slow progression of a pregnancy (used to be the boring part or hassle), to be prepared to be invested in the child already, before it even arrives (used to be woman’s private sphere ordeal with the man doing little more than kissing the clean, quiet, and still child before bed), and to be prepared to get more in touch with his ‘feminine side’.”

But that is not how I see it at all.  I actually balk at the idea.  And for a number of reasons.

First of all, having a pregnancy dress is NOT what it’s like to be pregnant. 

That’s pretty obvious: 

·         They don’t undergo the hormonal changes that go haywire in a pregnant woman’s body, leaving her without control over her emotions or her physical development, which is terribly disconcerting and unpleasant, especially in an age when we are trying SO hard to control our own lives. 

·         They can take it off when they want to, which is not an option for the pregnant woman dealing with morning sickness or swollen ankles and water retention or sore breasts or back pains or trouble putting on shoes, etc., etc., etc. 

So who’s kidding whom?  What’s the point?  Pretending to be artificially pregnant does what exactly?  It certainly doesn’t give any indication of what pregnancy is like…

However it does, potentially, give the impression to someone who will never be pregnant to THINK he or she knows what it is like, having them falsely assimilate a misconception of the reality of it all.  I shiver to imagine the person having used the dress pretending, I mean believing, they know what it’s like to bare life.

Baby-wearers don’t go through the positive displacement of gravity from the “egocentric me” to the “me and other” duality of conscience.  9 months of pregnancy is, for a woman, a kind of Copernican revolution and awakening to being keen to more than one person’s acts and lives.  Gradually she takes on awareness that she will henceforth be wholly responsible for another than her own life.  And that her life is no longer only her own.  That dawning gestates with the growth of the fetus…   Donning a dress cannot represent this major transition within the life of a woman who carries a child. 

They also don’t deal with the social stigma of it.  I have heard young colleagues in France complain that pregnant women think they rule the world and that they suddenly have EXTRA RIGHTS… But in speaking with new mothers around me across Europe and somewhat in the US, announcing a pregnancy to an employer is more likely to REDUCE their rights and their status.  “Once I announced I was pregnant, my boss pretended like I was good for nothing,” told me a woman in Spain.  “As soon as I informed them of my pregnancy, I shot from promising talent to a woman with 2 neurons,” confided a French woman, whose sister lived through similar abasement.  “When I told them I was pregnant, they just presumed I would stop working to raise my kid, and therefore stopped putting me on the interesting projects” explained a German friend.  And I won’t even go into the trouble women live through once they come back from maternity leave, which I’ll comment on later!  Let’s leave it on the point that Western society has yet to be convinced that women can have children and still be sharp, dedicated professionals ( I’ll expound upon that in a future article too).   That’s why so many are obliged to demonstrate their loyalty by practically answering professional phone calls while in labor.  I’m not even sure what that proves…

Plus baby-dresses gracefully side-step the ordeal of labor.  I’ve been through 2; it’s indescribable pain, like your whole body being cracked open.  Even when you have an epidural.  Or a C-Section.  There’s the Exhaustion.   Plus the nursing or feeding before anything.  Plus the lion’s share of work at home – sometimes because the man doesn’t participate too much, most of the time simply due to the child who wants its mama and no one else.  And so on and so forth.  The point here is not that labor is labor, but rather the labor is just a middle stage between an exhausting pregnancy and an exhausting infant-raising plus all the bewilderment and life-alteration it entails.  People don’t often mention the duress of selflessness and empathy that it thrust upon as with this sudden “survival of two”.  Birthing is a miraculous, perhaps one of the most beautiful, acts of nature.  While the baby-dress expresses this admiration and wonder… it cannot come close to experiencing the real thing, neither the awesome nor the terrible.

A final thought:  it seems positive for these men to get in touch with their feminine side, even if we should keep in mind that each sex’s role is important and needn’t be confused …  Pregnancy and bearing life is woman’s work that she should continue to appropriate.  This is the way of the “motherself”.  While men can and should hear their feminine side, each has an invaluable role to play in the world, and in the family, with his very own characteristics. 
Just as contraception and abortion has allowed a woman to take back her rights over her own body, such should be the same for pregnancy and birthing, miracles only women can produce.  This point is crucial as we seem to be living in an era in which successful people must follow a very masculine, androcentric approach to life, success, and to living.  In a century in which there is a “flight from woman”.  This has led to many women ignoring or undervaluing their specific attributes such as motherhood as if they were incompatible with individuality and career.  I will argue through-out this blog that such need not be the case.

Rendez-vous next week for the next installment on "When will we accept we are like quarks ?   Part 4:  Identity need not be definitive"

21st Century Challenge: Redefining Motherhood on Our Own Terms

Happy Thanksgiving!  In honor of millions of families gathering today for Thanksgiving, I've decided to take a short break from my quarks series to write about motherhood and our need for a new take on motherhood for the 21st century.  Cheers!

21st Century Challenge:  Redefining Motherhood on Our Own Terms

Katrin Bennhold did an interesting article on women in Germany in International Herald Tribune’s series “Female Factor”.  In it, she cites a book published this year in Germany by Bascha Mika called, “The Cowardice of Women”.  Apparently it has yet to be translated and so I have not read it, and am going to base my discussion on Bennhold’s coverage:

                “…[Mika] thinks women have largely themselves to blame.  According to her, they aren’t putting enough pressure on politicians, are failing to negotiate equal terms in relationships and often voluntarily retreat into a traditional mother role that spares them other hard questions about identity and purpose in life… [Mika says,] “we are collaborating with a system that reduces us to motherhood… we voluntarily choose to be powerless and adjust to self-inflicted victimhood.  That’s cowardice.”

Indeed, German women who try to balance children and work are allegedly frowned upon societally and are highly challenged by social mores and lack of day care, etc.   This I have read about in numerous works as well as hearing first-hand accounts of these types of pressure and difficulty.  The choice of words of cowardice does not seem appropriate to the types of obstacles Germans have to overcome, especially coming from a woman who had to opt out of motherhood in order to pursue a career.  That could be called cowardly too, but I’ll come to that.

Mainly, Bennhold’s article got me thinking about Mika’s ideas in relation to American, English, and French cultures and our strategies for self-realization and self-fulfillment.

First of all, I want to take issue with the notion of “retreat into a traditional mother role”.  There is nothing simple about carrying what she calls a traditional mother role. 

For starters, the “traditional” role hasn’t been quite so comfortable.  Outside of aristocratic families, our current Western conception of mother role in which the mother is devoted only to the child’s well-being is as recent as the late 19^th century.  Women worked and have always worked.  Aristocratic families may have at times carried this torch; Abigail Adams and her concept “Republican Motherhood” comes to mind, with which she pleaded women be afforded good education, et al, in order to better educate their sons… but aristocrats otherwise tended to their own social networks while help or servants cared for the children.  Even in the 20^th century, many “housewives” were everything but “mere” mothers, between the canning and the washing, the buying and the organizing, running a family could and still can be like running a small company. 

In France, as well as other Western countries, stay-at-home fathers are becoming increasingly common.  Their experiences are bringing to light what women have known for decades.  Damien Lorton, who recently published a book called (if I translate loosely), “a father is a mother like any other”, about his experience as a “househusband” and how housework is relentless, with never a moment’s rest, but without the gratification of a paycheck.  A second stay-at-home father has pointed out that socially it isn’t easy and that people’s disinterest can at times be hurtful.  This is an experience corroborated by many women.

Objection #2:  “retreat into a traditional mother role” is its total underestimation of what it means to be a mother today.  It has become its own “rat race”.  Judith Warner describes it well in her recent work, “Perfect Madness” in which she exposes a one-upmanship in which many stay-at-home mothers get entangled.  This is a subject upon which I’ll later expound as there’s much change to make, but clearly, as of today, Warner’s study demonstrates the confines and the expectations of this ‘traditional mother role’ is not such an easy route to choose.

The other point Mika reportedly raises is that opting to be a “traditional mother” “spares hard questions about identity and life”.  It’s a good question.  Perhaps some do fall into the patterns of their mothers because of lack of day care or because that’s the way the country is set up or because they want to concentrate their energy on raising young children or maybe because their husbands have the means for them to not work…  Maybe some really are just coasting.  Maybe.

BUT.  Reading articles and books from many Western nations, I have also seen a whole lot of women “sparing themselves hard questions about identity and life” by plunging into work and career.

In French it’s called “une fuite vers l’avant”.   It isn’t only women’s lot but also men’s lot in this “accelerated” world we’re abiding (cf. Acceleration by German philosopher Hartmut Rosa).    It happens quite naturally then ends up a spiral that’s difficult to escape. 

And it’s becoming a societal phenomenon.  Women working so hard that they skip out on relationships and children.  And when their biological clocks hum the “last opportunity” in their early 40s, they discover that media’s discourse of the possibility of pushing back the clock isn’t a reality that can be generalized.  In Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s work, Creating a Life, her study unveiled the great pain upon which some women stumble:  the great frustration of spending tens of thousands of dollars on fertility procedures only to undergo miscarriages and other heart-wrenching experiences.  These women have gone with the worklife flow... without pounding their fists on the table to make politicians and companies change the dynamic as Mika says should stay-at-home mothers.

BUT #2.  Why point the blame?  Instead of pitting ourselves against each other, why not instead push together for greater capacity to really get what we want.  Putting our fists down for the real end goal:  choice.  Informed choice.  Actually empowered choice.  Which leads me to the next BUT:

BUT #3.  Why be so disparaging of mothers and the role of motherhood?  The propos illustrates the groove we have all taken to follow in men’s footsteps instead of calling our own shots and building our own version of work, motherhood, and life.  Maybe part of Mika’s beef is that even the concept of motherhood has been defined in androcentric terms rather than being called by our own shots.  As points out Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi in her great work Motherself, women have folded their pursuit of self-realization into “heroself myths”, individualistic quests for identity that leave no room for others and which wield only domination when it comes to relationships (think Greco-Roman myths, even if Rabuzzi bases herself on myths and tales from across the globe).  What I appreciate about the points she raises is the fact that the “motherself” (pertaining to both genders and independent of whether the person actually has children) requires a self-realization that incorporates others.  We have come to a point in our world, our societies, etc., in which such rigid, taxidermic-like identities are unsustainable and impractical: 

-          Longevity will weigh in on the number of lives we lead… meaning an identity quest at one point in an individual’s life does not exclude the need for further, ulterior “apprenticeship” quests.  For me, this means reconsidering our ideal of “identity” as a springboard instead of a shield, in a way that can swing with life’s evolutions instead of societal clichés/snapshots (more on that in another entry).

-          84% of the world’s developed regions’ population and 66% of less developed regions’ populations will live in cities by 2050, implying restricted territory per person.  For me, this means we need to reconfigure our interdependence and interrelations within our quest for individualization.   

-          Our common need is to ensure our survival as a species.  Zero population growth, for me, should include the full diversity of representation.  This means we can’t entirely accept the idea of no children among the women who have to spunk to have a grand career…

-          …knowing that studies show that diversity, and most importantly a good balance of men and women, in a company is key for productivity and performance in most all sectors.  For me, this means that we need to get a more comprehensive societal contract in terms of work-life balance (I’ll come back to this one because this entry is already too long to cover such a vast subject).

-           …plus other studies show women’s empowerment, thus their education and financial independence, is key to improving the world.  For me, this means that our children must be born into and raised by families/communities who are themselves educated and industrious.

But the real point is: we have to stop denigrating physical realities that are specific to women.  We should reclaim the beauty, importance, utility, and necessity of bearing and raising lives (without, of course, creating a new requirement:  of course we should have the choice!).  Too often, childbearing is defined negatively within the workplace (with extravagant fantasies about absences due to children’s sick leave, problems due to day care difficulties, shorter hours because they need to go pick up the kids, mind divided by other priorities… they have all been named).  I beg to argue that this capacity to bear life is ENRICHING (even for our companies and our added-value) and needs to be valued by our society instead of being dismissed as cowardly or traditional or proof of women being less implicated in their work (this too I will develop).

Let’s stop confusing victims, culprits, and heroes and get back on a more constructive track!

And on to next Thursday for a new installment about why we're like quarks:  individuals needn't be singular