When I was a much younger woman (oh, 3 years ago), I would look around at my coworkers and think, “where the hell are all the women?” From the moment I decided (belatedly) to major in Economics in college, suddenly I was virtually the only woman in the room. It was perplexing. What were they doing??? (Although I did enjoy breezing by a long line of men outside the bathroom into the always vacant ladies room at conferences.)
Then I had a baby.
Oh.
I see.
As Bertrand’s study points out there are two types of working people in the world. There are men (with and without children) + women without children. And there are women with children. This began to dawn on me once I had my own baby but until I read her study it was hard not to feel (particularly given people’s reactions to this idea) that perhaps I was just biased by my recent descent into motherhood.
Pre-baby I thought it was just a matter of finding good childcare and presto, I’d be back to my old self again. What I didn’t realize was that many of the challenges/changes would not just be mental and logistical, but would be physical. (In other words, much harder to transcend.)
Even if you have the healthiest of pregnancies, odds are you will feel like retching or crawling under a desk to nap for much of 9 months. You will spend countless hours in waiting rooms at the mercy of your ob/gyn/midwife. You will doze through the requisite birthing class to which you frantically race to after work each Tuesday for a couple of months. If you do not have the healthiest of pregnancies … well, let’s just say making your quarterly numbers isn’t going to be top of your priorities. (And that’s assuming you get pregnant easily and don’t have to go through the hell of fertility treatment.)
And then there is birth. Let’s just say you won’t be racing around the office 24 hours post-partum. (And those myths about Super Biz Woman rocking her 40 hour newborn to sleep under her desk while she catches up on emails … people, after you push a honeydew sized human being from your nether regions, you’re going to need a long nap!)
And then there is breastfeeding which may leave you unable to leave the house for a couple of months. But more on that later.
And then there is the moment when it dawns on the babe that you’re walking out the door. And they don’t like it one bit. And they’ve got the lungs to show it.
Point being, I now know that getting “back to work” isn’t just about attitude and egalitarian marriage or a good nanny. And much as I hate to play pessimist here – having a baby changes women’s physical reality in a way that makes in impossible to resume life as normal for a long time, if ever. By my calculation, at the very least each baby wipes out a good year in a woman’s working life, if not several years, no matter how involved her partner is.
When it comes to just a good, solid working life, working motherhood is completely doable. But if your goal is to be truly extraordinary, then it’s going to be a rough road. Excellence requires extraordinary time and selfishness, neither of which accrue in abundance to women who birth humans. Not to mention, getting “to the top” at the expense of this gorgeous little person you created becomes increasingly unappealing.
So, while some radical changes in working life might help mitigate some of these inevitable challenges (and I have some ideas on that front too), as long as women bear, birth and breastfeed babies we are never going to see parity at the top. Never.
It’s not just a matter of time. It’s not just about discrimination or bad husbands or lack of female role models or fear of math (ha 
. It’s just a hard a load to bear for a human being. And the human beings bearing the load happen to be women.
Read the full article: So where are all the women??
