To judge by the public reception of Sylvia Ann Hewlett's much-hyped Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, you might think it was the first time American women had been admonished not to pursue high-powered careers when they could be having babies. Hewlett argues that the more women achieve in the workplace, the less likely they are to marry or to have children. Sound familiar? It was news to Maureen Dowd, who devoted two NewYork Times columns to the book and proclaimed a "baby bust" among well-educated women. Time magazine produced a worry-inducing cover package centering on Hewlett's book and posing its message in the starkest possible terms: "Babies vs. Career." In The New Republic Online, Michelle Cottle described how a friend of hers "burst into tears halfway through the Time article and had to stop reading." It wasn't long before a full-fledged "Baby Panic" was declared on the cover of New York magazine. "Honestly," Dina Wise, 29, told New York, since Hewlett's book came out, "I've never felt worse."
At the center of this ruckus was not only a centuries-old antifeminist saw buta figure who has spent two decades fixated on proving that feminism hurts womenandfamilies. Since the mid-1980s, Hewlett, an economist, has repeatedly attackedfeminism for undermining the traditional family and forcing women to make painfulchoices between childbearing and professional work. Wrote Hewlett in her 1986 A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America: "The chic liberal women of [the National Organization for Women] have mostly failed to understand that millions of American women like being mothers and want to strengthen, not weaken, the traditional family structure. For them, motherhood is not a trap, divorce is not liberating, and the personal and sexual freedom of modern life is immensely threatening."
Although you wouldn't know it from the credulous reception of Creating aLife, Hewlett's first book was roundly criticized and debunked by feminists, including Betty Freidan, who called it a "deceptive, backlash book." In her 1991 bestseller Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, Susan Faludi recounted how Hewlett's work, which approvingly cited the Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly, was to become a cornerstone in the antifeminist edifice. "For the next several years," wrote Faludi, "hundreds of journalists, newscasters, and columnists would invoke Hewlett's work whenever they wanted to underscore the tragic consequences of feminism." And the pundits would have no shortage of material to point to: Hewlett's 1991 book, When the Bough Breaks: The Cost ofNeglecting Our Children, and her 1998 volume, The War Against Parents:What We Can Do for America's Beleaguered Moms and Dads, co-authored with Cornel West and Eric West, would promote a bleak message nearly identical to the one in her first book. The only difference was that by the time she'd teamed up with West and West, Hewlett had managed to reinvent herself as a pro-family centrist, winning accolades from liberals and conservatives alike.
The message of her work, however, remains wholly consistent, and it stilldeserves close scrutiny. More than 10 years after Faludi and Friedan's harshcritiques, Hewlett writes in Creating a Life, "Nowadays, the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful a woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child." Whereas her previous books focused on abandoned housewives thrust cruelly into the marketplace by feminist social changes, this one, originally titled Baby Hunger, examines high-achieving career women who find themselves bereft of children in middle age. Once again, Hewlett concludes, women have been hurt by their movement into the workforce. Indeed, with women's accomplishments comes an epidemic of childlessness and epidemic unhappiness. "Almost half of all professional women are childless at age 40," Hewlett writes. "By and large, these high achieving women have not chosen to be childless. The vast majority yearn for children." It's a yearning likely to go unfulfilled, Hewlett predicts in an interview with New York, since after age 35, a woman's fertility simply "drops off a cliff."
Hewlett, now a board member of David Blankenhorn's Institute for AmericanValues and head of the National Parenting Association, says her goal is femaleempowerment. She wants to help younger women "avoid the cruel choices that doggedthe footsteps of their older sisters." Young women should be "highlyintentional," "give urgent priority to finding a partner," and try to havechildren in their late twenties. (Hewlett had her own first child at 31 and herfifth and last at 51.) Young women shouldn't focus so much on building theircareers, and they should be prepared to plateau for a while in order to havekids. Otherwise, Creating a Life proposes, they'll face old age alone, with nothing but regrets for company. "My concern," writes Hewlett, "is that many of today's young women seem convinced that their circumstances -- and choices -- are vastly improved ... . But is such easy confidence warranted? I think not."
Hewlett's attack on young women's "obnoxious" "sense of entitlement" does notappear to have had an empowering effect on many readers. New York's Vanessa Grigoriadis summarizes another message that comes through loud and clear: "husband hunting, settling for less, trading in a high-powered career to maximize the returns to our ovaries."
That message is dangerous, and not just because of its antifeministprovenance. If young women take Hewlett's advice seriously, more of them may havekids -- but so, too, will more get divorced, become single moms, or opt not tobecome high achievers in the first place. Why? Because Hewlett isn't justideologically motivated -- her predictions are just plain wrong.
The problem with Creating a Life begins with Hewlett's data. She compares high-achieving women with high-achieving men, then blames differences in life patterns on women's high-powered, baby-hostile jobs. But the variables that determine people's life choices are infinitely more complex. How do high-achieving women compare with other working women? How do married women compare with single women? Had Hewlett asked even these simple questions, she would have found a very different set of answers to the question of why high-achieving women have fewer children.
I had Heather Boushey, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute inWashington, rerun Hewlett's analysis on a larger sample of women. Whereas Hewlettrelied on a 520-person National Parenting Association study of women between theages of 28 and 40, we used the March 2000 and 2001 Current Population Survey(CPS) data representing 3.8 million high-achieving women and 29.8 million otherwomen working full-time in this age group. Jointly conducted by the U.S. CensusBureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the CPS is routinely used by socialscientists to get up-to-the-minute snapshots of American work and family life.Just as Hewlett did, we counted as high achievers women who worked full time andeither earned more than $55,000 per year or had a graduate or professionaldegree, such as an MBA, Ph.D., J.D., or M.D. But we also did something Hewlettdidn't do: We compared high-achieving women to their less accomplished sisters,instead of to men, so that we could distinguish the effect of achievement fromthe simple effect of being a working woman.
The CPS data yield a much more optimistic picture than the one in Hewlett'sbook. High-achieving women between 28 and 35 are just as likely to besuccessfully married as other women who work full time, according to the nationaldata. Fully 81 percent of high-achieving women between ages 36 and 40 had marriedat least once, as had 83 percent of all other working women, though only 62percent of high-achieving and 60 percent of all other working women remainedmarried, thanks to America's high divorce rate. In other words, there is noachievement-related marriage gap. When Hewlett writes that "the more a womansucceeds in her career, the less likely it is she will ever have a partner," sheis dead wrong.
Not only is there no significant achievement-related marriage drought amongwomen 36 to 40, there isn't a baby bust, either. The CPS clearly shows that manyhigh-achieving women who marry and have children delay childbearing until afterage 35 and then successfully start families. Because of this late-thirties babyboomlet, married high-achieving women are exactly as likely to have had kids byages 36 to 40 as are all other married women who work full time. (The figure is78percent for both groups.) Hewlett's data obscures these facts by lumping womenbetween 36 and 40 in with the under-35 set and failing to separate women intomarried and never-married subsets.
The division by marriage is crucial, because it reveals the real disparitythat Hewlett's data elides: High-achieving women are far less likely than womenin the general population to have children out of wedlock. Only 7 percent ofnever-married high-achieving women between 28 and 35 had had children, accordingto the CPS. In contrast, fully 32 percent of other never-married working womenhad done so. One hardly need look farther afield to explain why only 60 percentofhigh-achieving women had children at ages 36 to 40, whereas among working womengenerally the figure is 66 percent. High-achieving women are simply much morereluctant to take on single motherhood.
The so-called baby bust thus has far less to do with female accomplishment orage-related infertility than it does with the persistence of traditional valuesamong economic elites. For high-achieving women, it might as well still be theEisenhower era, which was the last time the nation as a whole had such a low rateof unmarried births. Because of high-achieving women's greater behavioralconservatism, it is marriage -- not degree of professional success -- that is thesingle largest determinant of whether they will have children.
So why don't these women just get married? The answer is, they do. Remember,high-achieving women are just as likely to be married at 28 to 35 and at 36 to 40as are all other working women. And once they marry, they are just as likely tohave kids, though they tend to do so somewhat later in life. The difference isthat the ones who don't marry rarely have kids.
According to Hewlett, however, delayed childbirth is a serious problem -- notleast because women who choose it may falsely believe that technology will helpthem overcome the natural decline in their fertility as they age. She recountscautionary tales of regretful women in their late forties trying unsuccessfullyto turn back the clock with increasingly invasive rounds of fertility treatments.Young women, warns Hewlett, have been "lulled into a false sense of security"that assisted reproductive technology will "let them off the hook." "Warm, fuzzymedia stories about miracle babies," she told People magazine, "mean bigger queues of 42-year-olds with deep pockets lining up to do in vitro fertilization [IVF] seven times."
Yet again, however, the data does not support Hewlett's panic-inducingconclusions. Older women are not flocking to health clinics to have their clocks turned back. In 1999 only 3.8 percent of women who had assisted reproductive technology (ART) cycles, most of which involved IVF, were 43 or older, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many clinics won't even conduct the procedure on women over 44 because the success rate is so low and the odds of miscarriage are so high. Nearly ... 13 percent of ART users in the 1999 study were in their twenties; the majority fell between the ages of 33 and 37 and had medical conditions that impeded their fertility. Moreover, more than twice as many couples sought ART to overcome male-factor infertility as "diminished ovarian reserve."
Fertility, after all, is not an absolute property but a capacity that existswithin couples and that varies in an individual depending on his or her partner.Hewlett's book focuses entirely on female fertility, but nearly half of allinfertility problems fall on the male side of the equation. In May, for example,scientists definitively demonstrated for the first time that male age has apowerful impact on a couple's fertility. "[Thirty-five]-39-year-old men hadsignificantly reduced ... pregnancy probabilities relative to younger men,"reported a team of American and Italian scientists in Human Reproduction. Sperm banks have known for years that genetic defects and health problems accumulate in men as well as women over time. To protect clients from the "potential hazards related to aging," the American Society of Reproductive Medicine recommends that sperm banks avoid donations from anyone over 40. Just to be sure, some banks set the age bar for donors as low as 35.
Just as a man's fertility may appear to increase if he partners with a youngerwoman, an older woman will see her fertility jump if she selects a younger man.Human Reproduction reported that 35-year-old women whose partners are 40 or older have a significantly decreased chance of conception each month. Having an older partner can shave a 35-year-old woman's chance of conceiving each month, from a best-case shot of 29 percent to a worst-case chance of 18 percent -- the equivalent of tacking years of decline onto her reproductive capacity. That shouldn't be any great surprise, because she is adding years -- her partner's.
This new research suggests a tantalizing proposition for single womenlistening to a loud biological ticktock: To boost their odds of childbearing,they should date men their own age or a couple of years younger. Instead, mostwomen marry men about two years their senior. Though your average 36-year-oldfemale executive might not find it socially acceptable to date a 29-year-old man(or vice versa), she could still very happily work things out with, say, somenice, stable 34 year old. In the end, this could make a world of difference forher childbearing capacity -- and make her marriage more egalitarian to boot.
Preliminary studies predicting these findings were available when Hewlett waswriting her book. But not only does she never consider male fertility, she seems,at times, to attribute all fertility problems to female aging. Such is the casewith Hewlett's story of 47-year-old Holly Atkinson, a "Grace Kelly look-alike"and physician working in the e-commerce sector. When Atkinson was about 30, shemarried a man who was not only 17 years her senior but had also undergone avasectomy. He got the vasectomy reversed, but soon afterward Atkinson discoveredthat she too had a fertility problem -- a non-age-related medical conditionhavingto do with a ruptured appendix. The couple was told that IVF was their only shotat having a child, but they did not pursue it. The marriage foundered whenAtkinson was in her late-30s; the couple divorced when she was 40. Now remarried,Atkinson is too old to have kids even if she didn't still have her otherimpediment to childbearing. It's a sad story. But what it demonstrates about theconsequences of the "cruel tradeoffs" between career and family is less thanclear.
Hewlett's message, she insisted in a late-May letter to The New YorkTimes, is a "a profoundly feminist" one. That claim is nothing but spin. Rather, Hewlett's pessimistic message to women remains as antifeminist as when she explicitly went on the warpath against women's groups: If you want kids, you need to give up your ambitions.
She writes: "Knowing for a fact that only 3 percent of breakthrough generationwomen got married for the first time after age 35, and only 1 percent had a childafter 39, does serve to focus the mind and makes it easier to address thereal-world compromises involved in actually getting married and having children."She recommends that "young women wanting both a career and children should thinkabout avoiding professions with rigid career trajectories."
Unfortunately, virtually every career that requires a graduate or professionaldegree has a rigid career trajectory: law, medicine, and the academy among them.In fact, young women, like young men, often choose such fields precisely becausethey want a clear career path.
Business is a more flexible arena and MBAs have much less rigid trajectories,but Hewlett sees no hope for women there either. "Childlessness haunts theexecutive suite," warns Hewlett in Creating a Life. Corporate America is a must-avoid if you want kids, because "42 percent of high-achieving women in corporate America are childless, and this figure rises to 49 percent among ultra-achievers." These figures are "for many ... fraught with pain and loss."
Why women in corporate America should be less likely to have kids is unclear.The figures seem especially odd given that during the 1990s, pro-family workplacepolicies have been adopted much more rapidly at major corporations such as MorganStanley, the IBM Corporation, and CitiGroup, than at, for example, law firms orsmall newspapers. Furthermore, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), paltryprotection though it is for working moms, doesn't even apply to companies withfewer than 50 employees. Yet in Hewlett's study, women aged 41 to 55 who workedfor small firms with no FMLA legal protection did much better at having kids -- 79percent had them -- than their sisters at companies known to have superiorworkplace protections.
Either FMLA and flex-time don't work or something else is going on here -- aproblem, for instance, with how Hewlett defines "corporate." Her "CorporateAmerica" category includes anyone working for a company with more than 5,000employees, regardless of profession. But working for a massive organization doesnot make a woman what we normally think of as a corporate executive -- namely, abusiness professional, sometimes with an MBA, working in the private sector.Hewlett's so-called executives are culled from all her subcategories and can beanything from lawyers at international firms to human-resource managers atpharmaceutical companies to staffers at the Pentagon. "Obviously it kind of runsthe gamut of sectors," admits Hewlett in an interview. When Hewlett does dividethe women by sector, it turns out that "business professionals" aged 41 to 55 infact have a much lower childlessness rate: 33 percent.
That figure is probably closer to a real-world one, though it still doesn'ttell us what the childlessness rate is among married businesswomen. AfterFortune magazine convened its annual Most Powerful Women in Business summit in March, the magazine decided to test out Hewlett's thesis on a group of real corporate executives -- CEOs, presidents, and managing directors from companies such as Southwest Airlines, Lehman Brothers, and Ford. Fortune's conclusion: "What planet is she on?! ... Hewlett's statistics -- 49 percent of women earning over $100,000 are childless after 40 -- don't jibe with our findings." Rather, the magazine found that 71 percent of the summit's 187 executive women had children. One-third of them even had "househusbands." Wrote Patricia Sellers, "Apparently, Fortune's bigwigs have figured out the having-it-all thing better than the women in Hewlett's survey."
None of this is to say that people with demanding careers don't face relatedpersonal problems. Interestingly, according to studies conducted by the AmericanBar Association (ABA), female corporate lawyers suffer the most grinding workhours and disrupted personal lives among professional women. "Compared to femalephysicians and college professors, women lawyers are less likely to be married,to have children or to remarry after a divorce, and are significantly more likelyto be divorced," reported a 1999 ABA Journal article. This, despite the fact that, according to American Lawyer, every major American law firm now provides some kind of "mommy track," and despite the encouraging news that associates who have worked part time at one point or another have been made partner at 56 of the top 100 law firms.
The ABA Journal proposed this explanation: "Overworked, overburdened and squeezed by time, lawyers ... exhibit communication and intimacy breakdowns peculiar to their professional training and work environment." Female and male attorneys alike, the article reported, suffer from an adversarial conversational style, perfectionism, hyper-developed reasoning skills, difficulty with emotions and hyper-intellectualism. These traits can make them shine in the courtroom but tough to deal with outside it.
Even in Hewlett's data you can see a hint of this effect: 46 percent of hermale lawyer-doctor group is childless, compared with 42 percent of similar women.It's the only one of her subgroups where the men are more likely to be childlessthan the women, but she doesn't bother to mention that in her book. And shedoesn't use it to argue that men should avoid law and medicine if they want tohave families.
If, in the end, Hewlett's book makes women think a bit more clearly abouttheir lives and helps them approach their romantic fates more deliberately, itwill have done a service. But if, at the same time, Creating a Life promotes the false notion that women must stop striving for professional excellence in order to have families, it will have done us all a very grave wrong.
When high-achieving women have children, they do so withhusbands they can rely on. They work at firms with more workplace protections andbetter health care than most women, they can afford to take time out of the laborforce to spend with their infants, and they have major incentives to return towork and to continue their careers. As mothers, they have the highest labor-forceparticipation rates. They pay taxes, own houses, and contribute to the economy,all the while raising kids who are likely to be as smart and successful as theyare. They don't divorce as frequently and they don't have children out ofwedlock. Their lives may not be easy or simple, but they have advantageslower-income, less-educated women do not have. What we need in this country ismore high-achieving women, not fewer, so that one day women will have the powerto reorder all workplaces to be more child-friendly.
A baby panic is not warranted: The evidence shows that once highachievers get married, having children, for the most part, takes care of itself.If young women want something to worry about, they can worry about findingsomeone they love and enjoy spending time with. I suspect that most of them are alreadyon the case.
