Unlike their mothers, today's women plan career breaks

Two generations after women entered the business world, it can still be hard for women to work. Some younger women believe today's economy has made it

Beginning in college, years before she planned to have children, Yi Gu began strategising about how to have a career that was flexible enough

to fit in family responsibilities. She knew that arrangement wasn’t realistic in her first two jobs:banking, in which she worked very long hours, or consulting, in which she travelled often. Instead, she saw those as preparation for the more flexible job she took last year at age 31, in strategy at a majorpharmacy company. She became pregnant soon after.

 “The definition of work-life balance keeps on changing,” she said. “Outof business school, not being married and not having kids, anything less than 80 hours a week to me was balanced. Then in consulting, it was if I travelled or had time during the week to hang out with friends. Now with a kid, the definition has changed again.”

 The youngest generation of women in the workforce — the millennials, age 18 to early 30s — is defining career success differently and less linearly than previous generations of women. A variety of survey data shows that educated, working young women are likelier than those before them to expect career and family priorities to shift over time.

 The surveys highlighted that even those with the highest career ambitions are likelier than their predecessors to plan to scale back at work at times or to seek out flexible jobs. You might call them the planning generation: Their approach is less all or nothing — climb the career ladder or stay home with children — and more give and take.

Millennials look for a balance

 In surveys of millennials who are college-educated professionals by the Center for Talent Innovation, a research group, the young people said they saw their parents struggle while working full time or leave the workforce altogether, and wanted another option.

 “They felt as if they were learning from generations before them, and saw all of the downsides in both choices,” said Laura Sherbin, the center’s director of research. “Millennials are looking for more of a balance.” A survey of Harvard Business School alumni, released as part of theschool’s new gender initiative, found that 37 per cent of millennial women and 42 per cent of those already married planned to interrupt their career for family. That compared with 28 per cent of Generation X women and 17 per cent of baby boomers.

 The surveys also revealed that some younger women believe today’s economy has made it harder to be a working parent. In the Harvard survey, fewer young women than older ones said they expected to successfully combine work and family or have a career equal to that of their husbands.

 Half of women 30 and younger said they thought their gender was a disadvantage at work — equal to the share of baby boomers who said the same. Women were less likely than men to say they were satisfied with their careers.

 A study of women graduating from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found that while 78 per cent of the business school graduates in 1992 said they planned to have children, that share had dropped to 42 per cent by 2012. In some cases they did not want to, and in others they did not think they could make it work because of a lack of organisational support, according to Stewart Friedman, director of Wharton’’s work/life integration project.

 That belief extends beyond the narrow world of business school alumnae. A broader Pew Research Center study found that 58 per cent of working millennial mothers said being a working mother made it harder for them to get ahead in their careers, compared with 38 per cent of older women.

“With the boomers, there was a real ascendance in this idea of having very egalitarian partnerships and the ability to have high-powered careers, and that has diminished with Generation X and even more so with this millennial generation,” said Colleen Ammerman, assistant director of the Harvard Gender Initiative.

Beyond Lean In

Harvard Business School alumnae are an elite group on an ambitious career path. And they are also likely to earn enough that both partners would not need to work. Young women do not seem to be lowering their ambitions — or “leaving before you leave,” as Sheryl Sandberg described it in Lean In. Their career goals, and their accomplishments in the years just after business school, were indistinguishable from those of men. Rather, they say, they are thinking ahead to potentially tough decisions.

 “Just as we look at strategies of companies, a lot of HBS people are putting together strategies for their life,” said Cheryl Han, 33, an alumna of Harvard Business School and co-founder and chief executive of Keaton Row, a fashion startup. “If I build that into my strategy, then I won’t feel like I failed, and maybe it makes you feel more certain about your future.”

 Their approach is different from that of the women who paved the way for their generation to enter the upper tiers of business. Baby boomer women were the first to work in professions in large numbers, and they were less likely to say they planned to interrupt their careers and more likely to say they expected to successfully combine their work and family lives.

 Younger women say they learned from the experiences of older generations and are determined to avoid their pitfalls. They are much more likely than women in older generations to say that women in senior leadership are critical to their success, both in navigating their careers and in figuring out how to incorporate family responsibilities. “They are anticipating that in some way they are going to have to dial down or integrate their career and their life,” said Caroline Ghosn, chief executive of Levo, an online professional network focused on millennial women. “This reality is something that people are a lot more transparent and open about.”

By age 30, nearly half of the women in the Harvard study who were married said they had chosen a job with more flexibility, 26 per cent had slowed down the pace of their career and nine per cent had declined a promotion because of family responsibilities. Many of those interviewed cited Sandberg, a fellow alumna.

 Kwany Lui, 31, co-founder of Bundle Organics, a nutrition startup, said: “The Sheryl Sandberg book says don’t lean out in advance. How I think about the message is currently I’m sitting here without children and I don’t have intentions to say, ‘OK, next job I find, let me make sure it’s 40 hours a week.’ I think when I have kids I might change my mind, but until I get there I honestly don’t know.”

Women’s expectations have declined: 66 per cent of millennial women said they expected their careers to be equal to those of their spouses, compared with 79 per cent of baby boomers. Three-quarters of millennial women said they expected to succeed in combining their careers and family life, but that is a drop from the 86 per cent of baby boomer women who said the same.

Men’s attitudes are also beginning to change. Eventually, that could lead to more shared responsibilities, although it is happening slowly.

For example, 13 per cent of millennial men said they expected to interrupt their careers for children.

That is more than the four per cent of Generation X men and three per cent of baby boomer men who said the same —but significantly less than the 37 per cent of women who said so.