She's speaking theoretically. But it's the cold fact for women: have kids before you're 40 and disrupt your career (if you're going for an intensive career where goals must be met) or don't have (your own) kids. I'm a woman and whatever way I look at it, it sums up to that.
I'm a man, and I have observed a similar situation ("disrupt your career") holds if I take into account my own vision of how I want to raise my kid. I have had to make some re-adjustments, compromises, changes to the objective function of my life. And that's OK.
If I didn't want to deal with difficult-to-foresee, potentially life-altering consequences of factors outside my control, probably having a kid would not be a good idea.
This is serious stuff, but I don't understand the sense of gloom that seems to pervade these choices, which are, after all, rather joyful in both cases ("fully-realized and consequential career" vs. "parent of a child"). Is it the pain of saying goodbye to a version of yourself that will never be actualized? What about the version that will be?
That's a really good comment you make, and in the exact spirit to the article. She's right - you do have to just decide not to 'play the game'. We, as a society, can make a difference here by hiring parents with young children or ready to have families, being generous where we can, and making time flexible. The issue at hand really only applies to the status quo which we know can topple at any moment given the right circumstances.
"Let's say gravity suddenly shifted a little making everyone a little bit lighter. It would likely make the news circuit for a while and make movers and other professional lifters particularly happy. But after the scientists had explained again and again why it happened and all the potential story lines had been exhausted by newspapers and television pundits, religious zealots and idle conversationalists (“How about that gravity?”), we would accept it, perhaps with a individual joy all our own.
Which is to say, even though a slight shift in gravity on Earth literally changes everything on our home planet, after awhile we’d adjust. Occasionally we might think back to the days before gravity changed with wonder and even nostalgia, but we’d know that everything being lighter is just better on one of those annoyingly and truistically difficult-to-communicate levels and continue with the practice of everyday life, with appropriate changes to this new state of lightness.
Yep. And if you have kids and disrupt the career you're an argument for why women shouldn't be paid as much or selected for the leadership track and if you don't have kids you'll still be judged as if you could pop one out at any moment (and so be paid less and not selected for the leadership track).
It is kind of odd to work for something for years and then feel like you're pouring gasoline all over it and throwing a match: that's how I feel about my career and its collision-to-come with kids. It sucks. Oh well.
