Bill Cammack

Penelope Trunk: “For example, sixty percent of women with MBAs are working at home, and an epidemic number of women are leaving corporate life when their children come. Women approaching age thirty face these statistics.”

Children are incredibly influential on women… biologically… This was used a lot in passing over women for promotions because the company didn’t want to lose a manager to maternity leave. That’s probably been changed now, by law, but there’s a tremendous effect on women simply when they realize that they’re pregnant. Their focus and priorities change immediately, as they well should. I think a lot of women underestimate their ability to handle the situation differently from men. Obviously, since men don’t get pregnant, there are no internal biological changes tugging their lives in a different direction than “career”.

Work and Family by 30 is a pretty lofty goal to begin with. Work should be pretty easy, since the average person who doesn’t get left back in school graduates @ 21, that leaves nine years to get it together….. assuming that the person is content NOW with the career they have because of what they took in college, which they decided on when they were 17 years old. Family, on its own, is easy as well by 30… at least getting INTO family is. I don’t know about age/divorce correlation, so I’m not aware of how many couples married before 30 are still married by 40.

Doing both together is a longshot unless the woman knows ahead of time what her plan is and is able to focus on and be effective in starting/maintaining a satisfying, progressive career while looking for and corralling “Mr. Right”, who happens to A) want to get married to her and B) have kids with her. This is why it makes sense that women would leave the workforce entirely or work at home, because it’s much tougher to work on Family after 35. They can get back to Career when their family life stabilizes….

… hehe assuming they’re not already pregnant again. :)