Word: childlessness
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...argues Hewlett, many women embraced a "male model" of single-minded career focus, and the result is "an epidemic of childlessness" among professional women. She conducted a national survey of 1,647 "high-achieving women," including 1,168 who earn in the top 10% of income of their age group or hold degrees in law or medicine, and another 479 who are highly educated but are no longer in the work force. What she learned shocked her: she found that 42% of high-achieving women in corporate America (defined as companies with 5,000 or more employees) were still childless...
Recent Census data support Hewlett's research: childlessness has doubled in the past 20 years, so that 1 in 5 women between ages 40 and 44 is childless. For women that age and younger with graduate and professional degrees, the figure is 47%. This group certainly includes women for whom having children was never a priority: for them, the opening of the work force offered many new opportunities, including the chance to define success in realms other than motherhood. But Hewlett argues that many other women did not actually choose to be childless. When she asked women to recall their...
...millennium and to look at what forces had shaped their lives. Then she discovered, in interview after interview with college deans and opera divas, a cross section of successful women in various fields, that none of them had children--and few of them had chosen to be childless. Many blamed themselves for working too hard and waiting too long--and waking up to the truth too late. "When I talked to these women," she recalls, "their sense of loss was palpable...
...society that fetishizes fun yet also equates career with identity, young moms are double outsiders. It can be isolating to feel your old cronies are living the Sex and the City life while you're stuck on Yes, Dear. But if their childless, swinging friends see them as old before their time, older moms--especially in communities where putting children on hold for career is common--can look down on younger women as babies with babies. Single mom Kim Howell, 25, of Oak Park, Ill., finds she can't go clubbing as often now that she has a three-year...
...retire to the country, but you don't want to live in the middle of nowhere and have your only friend and neighbor be a squirrel," says Barbara Flom of the Chicago law firm Goldberg, Kohn, Bell, Black, Rosenbloom & Moritz Ltd., most of whose clients are childless...