Can Having Children Early Help Women’s Careers Later On?
Posted by Peter Lattman
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There’s a page-one WaPo story on young professionals in their 20s and early 30s who decide to buck demographic trends and have children. It’s the third in an ongoing series about the choices young professionals make. We posted on the last story in this series — about a third-year law student who could not decide between taking a law firm job or pursuing a non profit position or fellowship. - This time around, we have Erin Foley Lewis, a 28-year-old associate at Cadwalader. Foley Lewis (Wake Forest, Harvard Law) talks about how having an early start on having children might help her career. Go Demon Deacons!
- “By the time I’m at a point in my career where I am going to be making partner, my kids are going to be old enough to be playing on their own and sleeping on their own,” said Lewis, who recently had twins. “If I had waited until 33 to have children, I’d have newborns at the time I would be up for partner.”
- O Loyal Law Blog readers, what do you make of this? Does having kids relatively early make work/life balance easier for women to achieve later on?
- For the entire article go to The Wall Street Journal.
I read this article with great interest. It does pose some interesting questions. My wife had her child in her early thirties so that she could best establish her career. She also derived a sense of fulfillment she may not have received had she born children earlier in life.
Since we both came from blue collar families where the children are born early, we both felt our mothers believed their lives were less realized than they may have been if they had waited. Since that was an age and a society where women, if they harbored any ambitions they usually were discrete about them. Social pressures about working were fairly intense and most husbands in that group were not all that happy about their lives being out in the work world.
Yet, what is so odd, is that both my grandmothers worked. This was not a career choice, one based on gut wrenching analysis of their career tracks and their potential. Their decision to work was based out of necessity. One was the “Ma” in the Ma and Pa store, and the other was a divorcee in an era when people often viewed divorced women with suspicion and pathos. But nevertheless, they both worked for the better part of their lives.
In fact, both of their mothers worked. One was actually a huckster in the good old days along the Eastern waterfront, and the other taught music. Again, there was no group help support groups or any encouragement. You just did it.
My one grandmother, the Ma of the Ma and Pa store, was a successful business woman. It was a fur store, at a time when custom fur coats were desirable, expensive and a long way from being socially taboo. She bore two children, my father and my uncle, and everyday went downstairs from the upstairs living quarters and presided over the business while her husband, my grandfather, oversaw the workers in the shop. Since she was most certainly alive and working during the mid to end of the last century, she was most supportive of the women’s rights movement. But she was also mildly bemused by the anguish and the unrest people displayed over the right and ability for women to join the work force. For her it was merely a fact of life. Both grandmothers were too aware of Rosie the Riveter and other working female icons to ever dream the working woman was out of place in society.
My other grandmother worked in a warehouse. She was a clerk who put in her thirty five years, saved her money and retired in relative comfort. She had one daughter, while in her twenties, my mother, and continued working with scant time off. It is doubtful whether having the child negatively impacted her career. For her it was just a job and not a career track. Her advancements were government as much by the union back then as the were by her achievements.
So I grew up taking for granted that women worked. Oddly, my own mother didn’t work during her motherhood years, but later opened her own shop and worked that for a good twenty years. It was just what you did. You had the kids when you could have them, adjusted your life and then went on with working for a living.
As the saying illustrates, “What goes around comes around.” So here we are, after the mid-century icons of the “Leave it to Beaver Mom” have gone by the wayside and the realities, once again, are necessitating both parents work to make a living. The difference is now, with child care centers and access to nannies and hired help, it is easier for a woman to have children and go on with her career. Not easy, but easier.
As the Co-Founder of Corra, a pre-employment background checking company, I encounter a great man women in the human resource departments of anything from small Mom and Pop outfits to the larger corporations. Their work and careers issue varying degrees of happiness. Most have kids, many are ambitious, and most realize above all there is a reason they have joined the work force. Not after an anguishing decision. But because they had to.
