The Fork in the Road

The Fork in the Road: Can Women and Wall Street Live Together? By Jenny Anderson (B1, NYT, 8/6/06)

The cover story in the Times’ Sunday Business section focused on the work-life balance dilemma playing out on Wall Street. Not surprisingly, it’s the same story, different location - successful women at the top of their game, opting out to raise families, leaving an industry willing, but unsure how, to modify a 24/7 workplace.

The protagonist, one Elizabeth Stoeber, formerly of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, is trying to carve out her own solution. In anticipation of “on-ramping” when her two sons are older, Ms. Stoeber is “absolutely determined to stay professionally attractive.” She started a consulting company, works for a boutique investment bank and is shopping around a proposal to job-share a full-time position at a major bank.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that Wall Street’s current environment doesn’t really support part-time work or flexible hours, despite good intentions to accommodate these arrangements. Countering this reality is evidence that the workforce of the future simply won’t bite at the tempting apple of huge salaries in exchange for unlimited hours of work.

The entire piece is well worth the read, but here are a few favorite quotes to whet your appetites:

“The first generation was about access of opportunity. It worked. It got us here. Now we have to learn how not to lose that talent at 35.”
Sylvia Anne Hewlett, President, Center for Work-Life Balance.

“The work force of tomorrow is at home. They are not old or retired. They are in their 40’s and 50’s.”
Patricia David, Global head of diversity and talent management of Citigroup’s investment banking unit.

“The real difference between today and 5 or 10 years ago is that now everyone recognizes that there is a true business case for having a diverse workforce. You don’t have to justify that diversity is good.”
Alice Wang, a managing director at J.P. Morgan who has enjoyed both flextime and telecommuting during her career there.

Here’s a final hopeful note. Lucia Bonilla, a superstar Princeton grad, will start her career at USB this fall because:

“ I saw pregnant women on the trading floor, three or four of them. . . . Not all women want to have children, but in the future I may want to and it was reassuring to walk around the floor and see that it was possible.”

It’s all about those precedents I mentioned in my last post, “Pay it Forward.” Those of us who can stake a small claim toward increasing flexibility in our own workplaces inspire and embolden those coming along behind us.

Flexibility: Pay It Forward

A couple of years ago, the American Association of Law Libraries published profiles of several librarians as a recruitment tool for the profession. I was among the librarians profiled in a piece entitled, “Change is Good . . . Even if You Love What You Do”. In it, I described my decision to balance my family and career by switching from a full-time law firm career to a part-time academic one.

As a result of this profile, other librarians contact me for advice on this option. Clearly, this is a very personal decision working women need to make with their partners, but I’ve always encouraged those who call to at least consider trying meaningful part time work for one simple reason:

Whatever we do to increase flexibility in today’s workplace will make it that much easier for our daughters and sons facing these decisions in twenty years.

In last December’s American Prospect, Linda Hirshman published an article, “Homeward Bound,” in which she revealed the results of her research on couples whose weddings were announced in the “Sunday Styles” section of the New York Times in 1996. To her horror, she discovered that the vast majority of these highly educated, elite women were home raising children. She criticized this “opt-out phenomenon” and set off a firestorm that continues to play out in the media. (See Judith Stadtman Tucker’s “Everybody Hates Linda”, “A Working Girl Can Win” by Meghan O’Rourke, and Ms. Hirshman’s own account of the last few months in “Unleashing the Wrath of Stay-at-Home Moms”) The original research is now a controversial new book, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World.

I’ll be taking this book to the beach with me, but from what I’ve read so far, some of Ms. Hirshman’s real message may have been lost in the backlash. The choices educated, wealthy women make have repercussions beyond their own circles. They have the power to serve as role models for their less-privileged peers as well as for their successors. By opting out, these women diminish the contribution women can make to improve the world.

That sentiment is, in part, what motivates the advice I give the librarians who contact me. I believe that the workplace can change, but not without guidance and definition from the women with the most at stake. Those of us who reach certain professional levels have the power to negotiate for flexibility, and although it means endless juggling and constant vigilance, I feel we owe it to the past and the future to do so. These small contributions can have a profound effect over time because they set precedents in individual workplaces.

Ms. Hirshman is not enthusiastic about part-time work, stating, “If my interviewees are working, they work largely part time, and their part-time careers are not putting them in the executive suite.” However, she acknowledges that many women had become so alienated by a workplace designed by and for males, that “[n]ot surprisingly, even where employers offered them part-time work, they were not interested in taking it.”

I think that’s where librarians are lucky – and why we should work toward creating meaningful part-time library employment. We really like what we do. Yes, there are difficult bosses and colleagues, threats of downsizing, and incursions from other professionals, but most of knew we were choosing careers burdened by such problems. We did so anyway because librarianship is fulfilling, and it is that fulfillment that can support the creation of small, but satisfying, work along the entire continuum of a librarian’s career. If we embrace the notion that flexibility in the workplace is for everyone – parents of young children, children of aging parents, women, men, old and young – we can have the opportunity to do good now and in the future.