Posted on Wednesday, October 22, 2003

Dropping the ball when it comes to doing it all

By Amanda Long (Special to the Chicago Tribune)

If you're one of the millions of working moms who, while taking a call from a client at a soccer game or scheduling play dates between board meetings, realizes this whole "work-family balance thing" is an impossible contradiction, you're in good company.

The former CEO of Palm Pilot, the president of E*Trade, the mayor of San Jose, Calif., a vice president at Hewlett-Packard and the dean of Stanford Law School hear your frustrated cry of "How can I do it all?" and answer it with a sobering, "You can't, and neither could we."

They're among the powerful Silicon Valley executives interviewed in "Beyond Superwoman: 25 Top CEOs Show Us How to Get a Life" (Carmel Publishing, $18) by Karin Strasser Kauffman and Peggy Downes Baskin.

"They decry the Superwoman Syndrome of doing everything for everybody and attempting to juggle various roles," says co-author Strasser Kauffman, a former Monterey County (Calif.) Supervisor, university professor and founding chair of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Council. "Women are constantly told that if they plan carefully, they can do it all. But the women in Silicon Valley made it very clear that this is unrealistic, dangerous to physical and mental well-being and ultimately counterproductive."

The Superwoman Syndrome joined the syndrome list in 1984, with Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz's book of the same title. In the 1989 book, "Second Shift," University of California at Berkeley professor Arlie Hochschild and Anne Machung revealed the domestic toll superhero status takes on women as they punch the clock at home and at work. Since then, the term has become synonymous with the unreal expectations placed on working women who try to be mom, wife and employee in a single bound.

The Silicon Valley CEOs interviewed by Downes Baskin and Strasser Kauffman were not even attempting to perfect the juggling act. Instead, they "sequenced," concentrating on doing one task at a time, and doing it well. There's no right or wrong sequence for what the authors call this "new breed" of working women. Some have their families first, and throw themselves into a hard-driving career later. Others begin by focusing on education and work, planning for some kind of "family" arrangement later on or forgoing children.

This new breed is intent on not becoming a dying breed. They want to drown out the "you can do it all" mantra.

In "Beyond Superwoman," Donna Dubinsky, a co-founder of Handspring, the Mountain View, Calif.-based hand-held computer products company, who began her career early and adopted a 3-year-old from a Russian orphanage in 1995, says: "There is no way you can do it all at once. You have no choice. I tell women to go ahead and spend your time with babies. When you feel confident that job is under control, pick up on your career. Whatever comes first is an entirely personal matter. Just don't do both at once. That's a killer."

But what if your boss isn't as understanding as Dubinsky or your less-than-CEO status doesn't guarantee that if you take a family break your job will be there when that sequence ends?

The authors and the new breed acknowledge the workplace has yet to become as flexible as it should be, but they point to encouraging statistics to show that it's getting there, slowly. Already, 54 percent of women-owned firms with 10 or more employees offer flex time or job sharing, compared with 33 percent of firms owned by men, according to the National Foundation of Women Business Owners.

And if companies fail to adapt, women will start their own businesses or leave for more family-friendly firms.

Although there are only six Fortune 500 companies with female CEOs, women are reaching the upper echelons of powerful companies, according to the advocacy research firm Catalyst. In 2002, more than half of Fortune 500 companies had more than one female corporate officer. And in 2000, women made up 47 percent of the work force, but held 50 percent of managerial and professional jobs.


And those women in power aren't going anywhere soon. The number of working women over the age of 55 is expected to rise by 51.7 percent over the next decade

Source: Chicago Tribune