While Sophie Vandebroek has dealt with some extraordinary challenges, the fields of STEM and innovation are filled with working mothers—single, married, or partnered. One of the most difficult decisions high-powered women need to make is how to juggle family and other concerns while building a career. Of course, work/life balance is an issue for everyone, not just women with children. Many midcareer workers are dealing with eldercare or simply have other serious pursuits and obligations they have to juggle with their work. Among the issues that emerge when looking at life, work, and family are:
Different nations provide very different opportunities for women and for parents. Internationally, many developed countries have attempted to address maternity leave in order to remove extended leave as a factor in hiring. Germany has a system called “Eltengeld,” which allows a 67 percent replacement rate for previous labor earnings for either father or mother. If both parents participate, they can receive an additional two months, while single parents receive 14 months alone.[1] Sweden offers equal parental leave pay to both mothers and fathers, although currently men only make up 24 percent of parental leave.[2]
On our discussion boards, many women encouraged this equal policy as the only way to change views on the gender roles within a family. Anne Hartley said, “Until we get completely comfortable with ‘dads’ in roles that have been traditional ‘mom’ roles as the norm, young women who get all the right education and then retreat will continue to feed the gap we are trying to address. When society and cultural norms evolve to where women do not feel that they must ‘choose’ their place in the family over fully applying their education and themselves for the benefit of humanity or that they are ‘bad mothers’ to manage their career at the same level of importance as their family.”
Gender-based parental leave policies, although helping women spend more time with their children, can prevent a change in mindset as to who is responsible at home. They can also impact company’s decisions to hire women who are around childrearing age. “It’s time to create better work environments for everyone, rather than singling out women as the ones who need help,” said Ellen Pearlman. “Programs identified as helpful to moms or dads end up failing. In order to get buy-in at all levels of a corporation, all workers, from entry-level to executive, must see the benefit of flexibility for everyone.” In fact, our Kauffman Foundation research found that 45 percent of female entrepreneurs believe family issues have prevented their female colleagues from founding their own startups.[3]
As we discussed these issues on our online platform, people came forth with stories of inspiration as well as incidents that disgusted them. Rashmi Nigam, a product manager in Los Angeles, recalls working daily from 5:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., twelve hours—hardly the work of a slouch. Then her boss ended a conversation by saying, “You basically want a mommy lifestyle.” She said, “My jaw just dropped; I was shocked that someone would actually say something like that in a professional environment. This was the CEO of the company. I have never felt so insulted. I can’t imagine that working twelve-hour days would equate to a mommy lifestyle. What exactly does a mommy lifestyle mean?” She decided, “I was done with that company right at that moment. It was the shortest employment I have ever had, and I am so glad I was out of there. In my current employer, although I encourage my team members to bring up their kids, personal lives, I find myself cautious in talking about my life with my higher-ups. I am still so jaded from that experience that I almost don’t want anyone to think of me as a mommy.”
Many working mothers, including Nigam, have found means of support—either by paying for it, as Sophie Vandebroek did, or by joining with other working mothers. Nigam said, “My husband, my nanny, and I are the three-legged stool that keeps everything together. I often joke, saying that my nanny is my ‘wife.’ Not sure what I would do without her. The key is to find someone who is just like you are or has the same values as you. I also have an incredible group of mommy friends, without whom I don’t know how I would have survived the earlier years of motherhood. I had joined a mommy’s group when my oldest was born.”
Alice Rathjen said, “I’m a single parent with a ten-year-old boy. The secret to survival for me was to find a core group of parents to help each other out. You get to really bond with more kids than your own and share with others the joy of watching the whole group grow up together.” Technology journalist and social media entrepreneur Beth Blecherman found a health club that has drop-in babysitting for her kids. She takes walking meetings (for exercise as well as enlightenment) and works hard to make her children’s meetings and sports games. But she also realizes she can’t make every one of her children’s events, and that’s okay. Feben Yohannes said, “The never-ending juggling act that we do as mothers is overwhelming at times, but that process, if channeled properly, is what makes us a creative, resourceful, and dynamic bunch.” She is the single parent of a twelve-year-old who she has raised on her own since her child was one. She’s also an immigrant without much family in the United States. “I have come to rely on friends and my community for support,” she said. “About three years ago, a group of us started a young mother’s association, where we meet once a month to ensure that our kids bond and we strengthen our support system. We have a monthly contribution that is set aside for any emergencies. This group and additional other friends have been a huge support in caring for my daughter during my travels.”
The Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Michael R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford studied women scientists and engineers at seven large, publicly traded Silicon Valley high-tech firms. Among its findings:
On our forums, Katie Elizabeth, the CEO of GetGoals, said, “Thankfully, my friends and colleagues (who are all within the entrepreneurial ecosystem) are fully supportive of the (my) entrepreneur’s drive to create a successful, high-impact startup and the human desire for companionship and family. Through the long work hours and ups and downs, I have been blessed to be encouraged to give all I need and want to my startup, and also to make time for family, friends, and dating. Balancing creating an innovative, social impact startup with family, friends, and dating is not easy. And I will continue to forego marriage for my startup if needed. This said, thanks to many amazing women and some wonderful men who are paving the way, I know it is becoming increasingly possible to create and have both a successful startup and a strong marriage/family.”
In some cases, women have found that being their own boss offers much-needed flexibility. Nikki Barua, the CEO of BeyondCurious, a digital design and innovation company, said, “For years, I’ve struggled to figure out a way to balance my career, home, and hobbies. Something always had to give. It was dealing with the guilt of failing someone—a friend, a relative, a colleague, or myself. No matter how well I managed my time and my priorities, I couldn’t get it right. Weekdays were demanding, and weekends felt like time to catch up on my endless list of tasks. Social commitments felt like obligations rather than fun.”
Barua continues, “Finally, four years ago, I moved to Los Angeles, quit my job, and started my own company. I still have an intensely demanding work schedule—long hours and lots of travel, much like most entrepreneurs building fast-growing companies. However, for the first time, I’ve integrated all aspects of my life. Instead of seeking work-life balance, I’ve unlocked the power of work-life convergence. As my company grew, I hired friends who shared my passion for the business. Now I’m surrounded by my favorite people and don’t have to postpone my time with friends. Instead of worrying about dog care, I started taking my dogs to the office every day. My colleagues and I started working out together and planning shared meals that helped all of us to lead healthier lives. I incorporated ways to include my hobbies and personal interests into the workplace. And I created an environment that enabled everyone on the team to converge their personal and work lives. The result is a place where people are happy and thriving. As for me, I finally have a real support system, and I am living guilt-free!”
Elisabeth Hamon, intellectual renewal project manager at SAP, makes it part of her work to support women in general and working mothers. “I’m leading an initiative in the company for women to embrace their careers, and it’s been quite successful. Within eighteen months so far, we have about four thousand women involved from all over the company who live all around the world. Women have less time because very often they have most of the duties at home and with the children.” Hamon herself has children and urges women to use all the tools they have at hand—personal networking, tools like LinkedIn, and especially mentoring. “You have to get a mentor. Your manager in an ideal world should discuss with you every few months, ‘What are you career goals? Do you need any training?’ Things like that.” But remember, she said, “Mentors have their own priorities.” Hamon tells the women she advises to do the homework so that managers can more easily evaluate requests. “Find out what training you need, why you need it. If you’ve already done the homework for them, there’s a good chance that at least they’ll hear it. But if you don’t do that homework, they don’t have the time to do that either.”
Some women, like Holley Zirak, leave their careers for a time and redirect. After receiving an MD in the Czech Republic, she worked at NASA on telemedicine. She met her husband and they had a child together —just as she was ready to start her medical residency. “It was too much,” she said. “I was too much in love with this little guy; I couldn’t leave him. I started residency six weeks after he was born, and I just couldn’t do it. So I left the residency. I was doing family medicine with the goal of doing international medicine afterward, and I had to completely rethink my job and purpose, and what I want, and how can I still really help people in the ways that would really provide me satisfaction and still be a good mum, and still be a good wife and to try to find a balance in all. That was extremely difficult.”
“Right now, I do need to focus on my family and giving my children the love that they need,” Zirak said. She’s currently a stay-at-home mother. In the past, she had an unusual job-sharing arrangement, one that she thinks was particular to her circumstance more than company policy. “When I was at NASA, they were very helpful in allowing me to work from home. I was allowed to just work half-time. That really worked for me, and it really worked for them. They were able to find somebody else to do the other swing hours a week of my job. I delegated certain responsibilities to allow me to work from home, and it just worked really well.”
But on a macro level, the question remains: are women still judged harshly for wanting to have both a family and a career? Ellen Pearlman said, “The Pew Research Center just released new findings that show that working mothers are now the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of U.S. households with children; this is up from 11 percent in 1960. But how do Americans feel about this change? According to the Pew study, 79 percent reject the idea that women should return to traditional roles, but only 21 percent said the trend of more mothers of young children working outside the home is a good thing for society. There is, of course, a gender gap in attitudes: about 45 percent of women say children are better off if their mother is home, while 38 percent say children are just as well off if their mother works. Among men, 51 percent say children are better off if their mother is at home, while 29 percent say they are just as well off if she works.[5] Since this trend is not likely to reverse, society clearly needs to address new models for supporting families in the workplace. We are still stuck in the old male-breadwinner model and have not adapted the workplace to such a large number of breadwinner moms.”
Nonetheless, innovating working women are finding ways not only to get by, but to thrive as they also face family and life challenges. Sophie Vandebroek believes that Xerox has implemented ways to create a workplace that attracts, retains, and promotes women. It’s easier to bring in recent college graduates in a gender-mixed cohort rather than to engineer that diversity later, she said. “In college hiring, which is most of our engineering hiring, well over 40 percent are women. Some years it was even more than 50 percent of our engineering hires were women. As you know, in college, it’s about 25 percent [engineering and computer science majors], and in industry, it’s about 10-12 percent of engineers who are women. So if you can create a culture and environment where people can truly be themselves, they can not only bring their intellect to work, but also their passion and their heart to work. Number one, they’ll be much more creative, they’ll be much more entrepreneurial. But you’ll also be able to attract people from all different colors, from different genders, different ages. We have a very active research group for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender employees. You have to create an environment where people can truly bring their hearts to work, and that will allow you to attract even more diversity and a wide range of people to come work for you.”
Vandebroek continues, “Ours was the first company of our size that had a woman-to-woman CEO transition, from Anne Mulcahy to Ursula Burns now. The chief financial officer is a woman. Our corporate controller is a woman. Our chief marketing officer is a woman. Our chief information officer is a woman and again, I’m just going off the top of my head here. I just had lunch with the head of our federal government card business, which is a billion dollar business. She’s a woman. So you have many women in leadership roles. Once you’ve reached a tipping point, again, you can bring your own self. You don’t have negative credibility.” In the end, she tells innovating women to “follow your heart, not only your intellect, and make sure you really do what you need to do to both be happy at home and happy at work, no matter what big barriers life throws in front of you.”
[1] Jochen Kluve and Marcus Tamm, “Now Daddy’s Changing Diapers and Mommy’s Making Her Career: Evaluating a Generous Parental Leave Regulation Using a Natural Experiment,” IZA, October 2009.
[2] “Gender Equality: The Swedish Approach to Fairness,” Sweden.se.
[3] Vivek Wadhwa, Lesa Mitchell, Joanne Cohoon. "Women Entrepreneurs in Technology." Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
[4] “Climbing the Technical Ladder,” Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Michael R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, 2008.
[5] Wendy Wang, Kim Parker, and Paul Taylor. “Breadwinner Moms.” Pew Research. May 29, 2013.