"Rethink What You “Know” About High-Achieving Women"

"These results indicate that Harvard MBAs aimed for and continue to value fulfilling professional and personal lives. Yet their ability to realize them has played out very differently according to gender. Among those graduates who are employed full-time, men are more likely to have direct reports, to hold profit-and-loss responsibility, and to be in senior management positions. Setting aside those measures of success, since not everyone aspires to them, we found that women are less satisfied with their careers...

For years before Lisa Belkin’s 2003 New York Times Magazinecover story added the term “opt out” to the cultural lexicon, senior executives were assuming that high-potential women who quit their jobs were leaving to care for their families. In the early 1990s Mike Cook, then the CEO of Deloitte & Touche, thought this was why only 10% of partner candidates in his firm were women, even though Deloitte had been hiring equal numbers of men and women for the preceding 10 years. But when Cook convened a task force to look behind the numbers, he learned that more than 70% of the women who had left the firm were still employed full-time one year later. Fewer than 10% were out of the workforce to care for young children...

It simply isn’t true that a large proportion of HBS alumnae have “opted out” to care for children. When we asked Gen X and Baby Boom women (who are most likely to have children under 18 living with them today) about their current status, we learned essentially what Mike Cook’s task force did: Only 11% are out of the workforce to care for children full-time. The figure is even lower (7%) for women of color...

Even for HBS women who are currently out of the workforce to care for children, “opting out” is not an accurate description of their experience. Our survey data and other research suggest that when high-achieving, highly educated professional women leave their jobs after becoming mothers, only a small number do so because they prefer to devote themselves exclusively to motherhood; the vast majority leave reluctantly and as a last resort, because they find themselves in unfulfilling roles with dim prospects for advancement."
https://hbr.org/2014/12/rethink-what-you-know-about-high-achieving-women

This makes me think about how much men, and systems, are really the problem but how few men or systems take time to think about themselves as contributors. Like, as a woman I constantly am looking at ways I am holding myself back or part of the problem for other women. But I mostly hear men and systems patting themselves on the back for whatever they are doing right (or, like, think they are...). I never hear them questioning themselves productively; at most, sometimes they are sad that they just realized that they did something overtly sexist 10 years ago and they want to know what to do now and they want a woman to tell them.

FB: This study tells a really important story and the results are very informative. And men need to be reading these things too! (looking at you, high achieving facebook friends, some of whom will be part of future HBS studies).

"More than half the men in Generation X and the Baby Boom said that when they left HBS, they expected that their careers would take priority over their spouses’ or partners’. The vast majority (83%) of the graduates in these generations reported being married, and because we don’t have reliable data on sexual orientation, we assume that their partners are of the opposite sex. Thus we call this expectation “traditional,” to denote an arrangement whereby the man’s career takes precedence over the woman’s. Notably, this expectation was less prevalent among men of color than among white men.... Close to three-quarters of Gen X and Baby Boom men reported that their careers had indeed taken precedence—more than had originally expected this arrangement. Meanwhile, many women’s expectations for career equality were disappointed."

Or

"At a certain point the belief that a woman’s primary career obstacle is herself became conventional wisdom, for both women and men. From “opting out” to “ratcheting back,” the ways we talk about women’s careers often emphasize their willingness to scale down or forgo opportunities, projects, and jobs. The very premise seems to be that women value career less than men do, or that mothers don’t want high-profile, challenging work.

Yet framing the conversation like this doesn’t reflect reality—at least not for HBS women, and not, we’d venture, for many other highly educated, career-oriented women...

Women want more meaningful work,more challenging assignments, and more opportunities for career growth. It is now time, as Anne-Marie Slaughter has pointed out, for companies to lean in, in part by considering how they can institutionalize a level playing field for all employees, regardless of gender or caregiver status."