It is one of the issues that Anne-Marie Slaughter documented in her recent essay titled, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All,” which ran in The Atlantic. The article describes the frustration she felt as her husband served as primary caregiver for their two school-age boys while she worked long hours at the State Department. She left her job in Washington, DC, after two years and returned to her tenured position at Princeton. “What shifted were my own feelings about what I wanted,” Slaughter said during a recent speech at Harvard Business School. “I wanted to be at home.”
Late-bloomers and power couples
Women who occupy the C-suite today tend to fit into one of three models, according to Bentley’s Myers. The categories are fluid, but in general, they include: the late-bloomers, whose careers hit their stride later in life after they have taken care of children; the one half of a power couple, where both partners are in demanding jobs; and the breadwinners, who often have stay-at-home husbands or spouses who work in flexible jobs.
In the first model, “the woman may have stayed home with her kids when they were little, or she worked part-time,” says Myers. “But then when her kids are older or out of the house, her career takes off.”
Take, for example, Brenda Barnes, who left a top job at Pepsi to spend six years at home with her three kids, and was named COO and eventually CEO of Sara Lee in her early 50s. These women were always ambitious, but – by choice, necessity or because of their husband’s expectations and needs – they spent more time in a traditional mother and wife role when their go-getting peers were putting in long hours at the office or volunteering for special assignments.
Judy Forsley, the mother of two daughters ages 19 and 22, is CFO of Shipyard Brewing Company, one of the largest craft beer companies in the US. Her title is relatively new, however. When her children were young, she worked in the accounting department at Shipyard. Her first marriage ended in divorce, and she was a single parent for much of her daughters’ childhoods. “I did much more of the kids’ stuff – the daycare pickup, the arranging of the play dates, the piano lessons and the soccer games,” she says. “I kept work at 40 hours per week. My kids were my priority. My career was second.”
It is a choice she doesn’t regret, but she recalls struggling with it at the time. “When I graduated from college in the 1980s, there was this feeling of ‘Women can do anything.’ There was an expectation that we would be working 60 hours a week, raising perfect children, having the perfect house and being great wives. I felt like a failure only working 40 hours per week. It took a lot of discipline and control to leave work at 5 every day. Looking back, I put a lot of pressure on myself.”
Forsley, 50, is remarried and now works more than 60 hours a week. “The kids are in college, and I’m growing the business. It feels good,” she says.
The second model, according to Myers, is one of “power couples”. These include Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo who recently had a baby, and her husband Zack Bogue, who just launched a new VC fund; and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, who is married to David Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey. These partnerships are built on a mutual understanding of the pressures of work and an appreciation for how much the other values his or her career.
