What are we to make of this odd agreement between career-focused liberal feminists and gender-role-obsessed traditionalists that prospective housewives shouldn’t go to college? Does a woman who wants to be a stay-at-home mother have any business pursuing higher education, even a master’s degree or a PhD? Is a woman who ends up staying home to care for her kids wasting her education?
By every metric the researchers examined, parents lag behind their childless peers, but mothers are affected far more adversely. The numbers don’t lie—not exactly. There is an obvious correlation between having children and the death of what could otherwise have been an uninterrupted, ambitious academic career.
In the real world, meanwhile, ordinary men and women are moving peacefully towards a more gender-equal world. Dramatic economic improvements for women are being matched by a huge increase in the amount of domestic work and child care being done by men. Support for the ideals of gender equality continues to rise. There are more men in our homes caring for kids, and more women in the Houses of Congress, C-suites, and state legislatures.
In my work in ethics and philosophy of life and organisational sciences, a consistent theme is what makes us human, and how those human attributes are challenged by changed social structures and in the development of technologies designed to augment or replace human activities.
One of the least recognised patterns in executive transition is that many high-performing women do not slow down when uncertainty increases. They accelerate.
From the outside, this often looks admirable. They become more proactive, more productive, more visible, more responsive, and even more committed to proving their value. Their LinkedIn becomes sharper. Their networking intensifies. Their positioning becomes increasingly refined. New certifications appear. More conversations are initiated. More effort is invested into remaining relevant, strategic, and in motion.
Yet underneath all of that activity, something very different is often happening internally.
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