On this Mother's Day we are thankful to our mothers and all mothers of the women's liberation movement for enduring the misery that comes from trying to do it all.
After all, who wants to work 40 hours a week at a job, come home and work another forty hours a week raising her kids? Who thinks getting by on four hours of sleep for eighteen years sounds like fun? Only a mother.
Don't want to stay on that sleep-deprived treadmill? That's what we thought. We're part of the next iteration of women's movement that says, "Yeah, I could do it all but I'm not going to." We're the women who have decided it isn't such a bad idea to take a few years off of work to raise our kids, go part-time or change career gears to something a little more kid friendly. We're the women some traditional feminists like to call backwards, throwbacks and traitors.
But you know what? Deep down we think those traditional feminists are just a little bit jealous. It ain't a bad gig to work from home, make your own hours or take a yearlong hiatus. Don't we all wish we could do that?
We know some of you will tell us that it can't be done. That once you take time off your career is ruined. We say don't believe the hype. We interviewed a hundred or so women for our book, Comeback Moms and you know what the consensus was? It can be done. It isn't easy but neither is child rearing and a lot of you are already taking that on.
We found lots of women quitting their jobs and using the time they had off to reshape their careers. Some became entrepreneurs. One woman started a maternity store in LA that now grosses a couple million annually. Would she have gotten out of her salaried position and built a small empire if she didn't have kids? No, in fact we could argue that children are spurring a mini boom of female entrepreneurs at the moment. This new feminism is good for economic growth.
We talked to lawyers and accountants who left their firms because of the lack of flexibility. You know what? Those firms are wooing the same women who were albatrosses around the businesses necks back. They've experienced such a brain drain that they are now offering things like part-time partnership tracks and flextime for executives.
No one ever thought things like part-time partnership tracks would happen. But they have because we women now make up fifty percent of the graduating classes in law schools and medical schools. We're not just highly educated - we're typically well trained because most women work for five to ten years before they decide to have children and stay home with them. We are valuable assets to companies and we have the sheer numbers that when we as a group don't like something about the workplace we can change it. Look what we've already done to law firms and that wasn't even an organized effort. Imagine what we could do if we focused. Can you say corporate-sponsored daycare, more flexible hours, and better retirement benefits for those who took time off? Maybe we have some new topics to discuss on the playground.
