The Mommy Track

No Respect

When on Earth are women going to be treated with any respect? Now the newspapers and business magazines are full of articles about discrimination against working mothers. At first it was discrimination against women, then married women, now married women with children.

I remember serving on the School Board of Winona, Minnesota in the 1950s. The board had a rule that married women could not be hired for permanent tenure track positions. They were hired as long term substitutes be cause they might get pregnant. It was as though pregnancy was an event that would suddenly over take the woman and her ability to teach.

Women at a Disadvantage

The current articles are saying that because of the child bearing years, women are at a disadvantage in pursuing a normal career progression through the corporate structure. It is as though the corporation is a school system and promotion has to come on schedule. Once missed, the train pulls out of the station never to return on its way to the top of the corporate pyramid.

The articles are doing them a favor by telling them in advance to be understanding if they do not get a senior position because they have children.

What a choice — gain self-esteem through promotion and lose it through self-denial in the role of wife and mother; or gain self-esteem through the role of wife and mother but lose it on the job. In pop psychology this has to be the classic lose/lose situation.

The Cohort System

Is the cohort system of progression in society really ecologically sound? Ecologically, even aged communities are less stable than communities with all ages represented. Diversity leads to stability—uniformity leads to instability.

There is an assumption starting with grade school and carrying on through college and graduate school that progression through the system is by age. If students are too far out of the age cohort, they are removed from the system. (Of course, pregnant school girls are removed as well.)

In a study done at the University of Minnesota some years ago a freshman class was followed for 15 years (or more). About half the students graduated in the 4 year prescribed period. In the ensuing 15 years 75% completed their degrees. Should schools be open systems? Of course they should.

Golda was a School Teacher

An acquaintance at Ohio State University, a WWII veteran, returned to school after the war on the GI Bill at age 50. Before the war, he was a milkman. He completed a Ph.D. degree in Anthropology and joined the professorial ranks of the University.

Ghengis Khan was 55 when he started on his conquest of the world and died at age 75. Alexander the Great died of debauchery at age 26. Golda Meier was a school teacher in Milwaukee before she became the Prime Minister of Israel.

Rates of maturation differ. Interests differ. Objectives and goals differ as does motivation. All these things differ with age. People are different things at different ages. There are no good criteria to start or end a career which could be suitably imposed on any population of any size.

To tell women that they will not make it to the top because they have taken time out to have children is to use sterotypic criteria to judge useful career development. It has more to do with discrimination than it does with career development.

Nature abhors a straight line. Ecology abhors even aged cohorts.

Why should all the hot-shot executives be men between the ages of 40 and 50, the age when they are the most prone to stress fatigue, sexual doubt and heart attack? Why should all beginning executives be newly minted MBA school graduates? Why not begin them in the executive ranks after they have had some experience doing real things? And vice versa.

A Chief Warrant Boatswain with 30 years of active duty, joined a weapons research laboratory as a civilian in an executive position. He brought experience to the work that no freshly graduated engineer could dream of, let alone handle with familiarity. Not even his commanding officers knew what he knew about weapons.

Why does it make sense for the most prestigious law firms to hire the very top of the class at Harvard, Yale and Stanford, give them $80,000 salaries then fire them if they have not brought "X" times their salary to the firm in 3 years? "X" could be 3 or 5. What a waste. The winners have an exaggerated sense of their worth, the losers an excessive diminished sense of their true value. It is more humane to breed and race horses and probably as profitable.

Cohort progression through school is bad enough, but cohort progression through the corporate structure is ecologically bad business.

Life Cycle

Can we change the schools? Sure we can. We need modified medieval universities, where the student body ranges from 8 to about 25 years of age or more. We have to restructure our notion of the community college, junior college, college and university to make them fit the lower part of the educational system. Even the age at which children start formal education should be variable. We need to eliminate competitiveness for grades. We have to emphasize cooperativeness for comprehension. We need to operate schools to include people — not exclude them. We need the mega-university that encompasses all phases of education from prenatal to post mortem. We need education and career progression based on the human life cycle.

Patriarchy

It's a man's world. It has been for some time. Much of what happens in schools and business and industry accommodates the life cycle of men. In the total world geist it was not always a man's world but it has been one for so long that the accommodations are even enshrined in law. It doesn't have to stay that way.

A Life Cycle Built for Two

Women and men together comprise Homo sapiens. They belong to the same species, but they are not the same. The advocates of ERA are trying to emphasize that men and women are equal. They think therefore that men and women should be treated equally before the law. I subscribe to that, as far as it goes, but even ERA sells women short. Women don't need equality (even men are not equal to each other) but ecological equity. Women need what it takes to allow them to survive and thrive in the society. Men need it too. Equality is not attainable if for no other reason than for genetic differences. But access to the processes of the society that allow persons to survive and thrive must be equal. That's what the unalienable rights and ecological equity are all about.

Women and men have many requirements in common. Women have significant requirements that differ from those of men. A humane society based on the unalienable rights, would recognize the gender and individualistic requirements of men and women and provide for them.

Late Comers to the Vote

A human society based only upon concepts of property is blind to the unalienable rights. In the United States, (the land of the free and the home of the brave and the home of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution), freed black male slaves got the vote before black or white women. They could not exercise it for long after they got it, but they had it constitutionally six decades before women.

In a humane society we would have life cycle planning of education and career based on the unalienable rights. The educational system would be open. Education would be available from Headstart to the Graduate School.

The Literate Society and Job Mobility

The obvious requirements to learn to read and write have to take preference in a literate society. Literacy is the first objective of the literate society. Everybody must have the basic skills to communicate with each other, with society and the world of literature. What people learn and when they learn it should never be limited by society. Society should foster learning at all ages and for all people. People should always be looking for more information and a better job.

Retirement plans which tie people to companies should be outlawed. Pension plans which are manipulated in corporate take over arrangements should be outlawed. Pensions should be vested early and should be portable. Individuals should have flexibility to use their knowledge and skills any place in the job market. Career tracks and professional development in government, corporations and academic institutions should be based upon ability, not age or marital status.

Women are also the Sovereign

Life cycle educational development and career progression for women begins with the understanding that women mature earlier than men and live longer. Child bearing is not the obligation of women but is an option they have the right to exercise. Women nor their children are the property chi of men or of the state. Women, like men, are the sovereign and as the sovereign are endowed with the unalienable rights, among which, I am now convinced, we must include privacy.

Women have the unalienable right to the privacy of their bodies. Men have the unalienable right to the privacy of their own bodies. Men and women are different temperamentally. They have different body sizes and shapes. They have different genders and the different hormones that go with them. All in gradations of course. The differences lead to more variation and undoubtedly contributed to more survivability of the species. Women and men collectively have more skills and survivor capabilities than either gender has alone, (leaving reproductive capacity out of it).

The 25 Year Career

Women have babies. They give them their basic biological immunities. They nurture them and imprint them to humanness. The child bearing and child rearing years come in the interval that includes high school, college, and graduate school or on an alternative track high school and the first 10 years of career employment. This is about a 15 year period out of an average life span of 75 years. A woman educated in present day society, who takes out time to have and raise a family and rejoins the work force at age 40 still has a full 25 year career span ahead of her.

Most women will not elect to take out ten years to have a family but will combine work and family. For them the career path is longer. With age discrimination illegal, the career spans of women can be even longer.

What is needed?

• We need more flexibility in the educational system. We have to expand our education system from staffing the local economy to the educational development or individuals. The role of higher education has to be reassessed. The university has to reach farther down into the community. We need equitably funded public education, not just the education the local community can afford. The educational system has to be open from top to bottom, We have to give up the false notion of standards. We have to accept students and educate them, not exclude them because their previous educational experience was not up to standard. Our educational system has to be able to accommodate any one who enters it.

• More flexibility has to be built into the work place. Full time work will remain the mainstay of the work place. The computer, the telephone and the fax, will allow many variations on full time work. Part time work, either a few hours a day or a few days a week can easily be integrated into the work place. Work in the home is now re-entering the garment industry. Somewhat exploitatively according to the Lady Garment Workers Union, but it need not be exploitative. A friend with a small child, trained as a lawyer, with experience as a prosecutor, works several days a week in her home for a local law firm. The computer and the telephone make this possible.

• We need affordable housing. Many women in the work place are single heads of family. Women-led households on the average have less income than single or married men-led households. Housing is an essential ingredient in the ecology of family and affordable housing is necessary to good family ecology. Women with children need decent housing. Low cost doesn't preclude choice.

• Working mothers, even those working part time, need day care. Day care serves two purposes. It frees the mother to work and it promotes the socialization of the child. Day care needs to be part of the social fabric of society. Day care is in part substitute for the extended family and in part an extension of the educational system of society into the lower ages of life

• Persons not in the work force for family or other reasons should have refresher training available to them at little or no expense. The local high schools, area vocational schools, colleges and universities can provide such training.

• Women bearing and raising children should be compensated with extra social security benefits at least until the children are school age. If she receives benefits under a spouse's survival benefits she should receive child bearing and rearing benefits in addition to her spouse's benefits.

Exploitation

The sixty hour week is exploitative. Men work such hours at the expense of their families. Women may work such hours at the expense of having families. In either case such hours are abusive and cannot be fully compensated for. Even if they are considered in the class of "paying dues," chronic long hours are not justified by the negative social and biological cost. Substance abuse and divorce are common outcomes of such working arrangements. The question is not whether women should work such hours but why should anyone work such hours.

I worked long hours as a graduate student and as a university researcher and teacher. In retrospect it was not worth it. I missed valuable time with my family and growing children, which be cause of the nature of things I can never experience again. I was fulfilling technological obligations at a time in my life when the biological obligations were more important. I was caught in an ecologically unsound cohort progression, when in fact I should have been discharging biological life cycle obligations. In the end I abandoned the academic career for a different career in government.

Government workers have long since learned that if they are in a car pool they must depart at the close of the work day. The work gets done. The crisis can wait till morning. Everybody should be in a car pool.

Competitive Burnout

The difference between middle management and top management is training and experience. Why do corporations choose to be hotly competitive, demanding extra hours and extra devotion, for the short run when they should be nurturing executive talent for the long run? They are as bad as schools that are intensively competitive. In the end, the only thing the competition leads to is early burnout. The system produces meteoric success for a few and is accompanied by arrested development.

In the sciences Nobel laureates seldom achieve anything of significance after they have received the award. Young scientists who have received the award are stuck with star qualities which they can not sustain. To get the most out of the Nobel prize it should be awarded posthumously. The prize then will never become the limiting factor in the development of scientific genius.

Staffing the Humane Society

The identification of the "mommy track" simply points to the inadequacies of our system for staffing society. That the experts identify such a career track is crystal clear evidence for the lack of understanding of the ecology of the work place in the context of the life cycle.

The cost to society is enormous in lost skills and ideas, lost talent and lost productivity. The negative costs to society in alcoholism and drug abuse, divorce and social disintegration are also high. The "mommy track" is exploitation of both women and men. It favors the technological properties of the human ecosystem at the expense of the biological properties. It is part of human society, but not part of a humane society.

. . . Ted Sudia . . .

© Copyright 1989
Institute for domestic Tranquility