The "Epidemic" of Childlessness

Are high-achieving women doomed to be childless and unhappy? And should young women abandon their careers in their 20s to give birth early? A new book by Sylvia Ann Hewlett titled "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children" claims there is an "epidemic" of childlessness among professional women. The book prompted a Time magazine cover piece with a tag line "Babies vs. Career: The Harsh Facts About Fertility."

It has created what can only be called a media storm, with "60 Minutes," newspapers, columnists, and cable shows jumping on the bandwagon. But is there, indeed, an epidemic of childlessness? In her own survey of 1,168 high-achieving women, two thirds of them have children, while a third do not. Why isn't the story that two thirds of high achievers do manage to have kids-even in a society that has few family-friendly policies?

The fact that women over 40 face declining fertility is hardly a new story. The biological clock has been a huge factor in women's lives for 30 years. Hewlett thinks that many women follow a male career model, blithely cruising along assuming they will be able to have kids. They awake at about age 45 and realize, "Oops, I forgot to have kids," and are stunned to find they are having trouble conceiving. Perhaps some women do this-but you wonder what planet they are on.

For most women, the ticking of the biological clock clangs in their ears. Hewlett presents high-achieving women who don't have children as being unhappy. But are they? Her Harvard Business Review article, based on her forthcoming book, presents no data-only anecdotes-on this crucial point.

Our study of women 35 to 55, funded by the National Science Foundation, found that childlessness did not have a significant impact on a woman's well-being. (Marriage was far more important.) The childless women in our sample often went through a period of adjustment-and sometimes asked "What if?"-but by their mid-40s they were mostly happy and feeling good about themselves. Hewlett focuses on women who do not have their own biological children and presents them as unhappy.

But many professional women in their 40s, married and unmarried, have adopted children and are quite happy with "their" kids. Should we urge women to put their career ambitions aside in their 20s to have children, as Hewlett suggests? No. The chances are that women who do that will never catch up in the job world. And one of the worst things for a woman's mental health is getting stuck in a dead-end job.

Getting married too early and having kids too early is a surefire prescription for divorce.The highest divorce rates are in the Bible Belt, where people typically marry younger than in other parts of the country. Women today are having few children-two at the most-and living longer. Highly educated women who, following Hewlett's advice, have children early may wind up at 40 with many more years of life ahead of them and no careers to go back to.

Most of the women in her survey say they want to be working full-time in high-level jobs. These jobs are easy to get out of, but very hard to get back into. Our own experience tells us that waiting to have kids is a good idea. We both have kids and careers and wouldn't give up either. We believe that if we had had our kids in our early 20s, we wouldn't have been good mothers, and we wouldn't have gotten as far as we have in our professions. Our daughters both recently gave birth to their first children - in their 30s - and are glad they waited.

The trend towards having children at older ages is now well-established for American women. Recently, Massachusetts became the first state in which more women over 30 gave birth for the first time than women under 30. Is this a healthy trend? Yes. It means more women will have good jobs, settled relationships, and will know who they really are by the time they become mothers. Our study of midlife women found that those with the highest levels of well being were married women in high-prestige jobs who had children. Do women need information about the risks of postponing childbearing until it is too late? Of course. But this is very old news.

The real need is for more family-friendly policies and changes in the corporate culture to give women more flexibility. This does work. When Deloitte and Touche grew alarmed at the defections the company was seeing among talented young women, it saw the issue as a systems problem and moved to fix it. The firm instituted more family-friendly policies and flexible work hours, and defections dropped sharply.

The way the "childless" story is being played by the media, however, is as just another scare story. Sound bites are aimed at individual women and their choices, rather than promoting a serious discussion about women, men, families, and work in America. The impression this media feeding frenzy will give to young women is that they are at risk of misery if they spend much of their 20s getting established in good jobs and finding out who they are. That's a message that's really toxic for women.

by Rosalind Chait Barnett (Brandeis University) and Caryl Rivers (University of Boston)