By Amanda Bennett, Contributing Columnist for The Washington Post In Theory Opinion
Mythology isn’t very kind to strivers.
Icarus flies too close to the sun and gets melted back to earth. Prometheus steals fire and ends up chained to a rock with eagles pecking out his liver. Adam grabs for knowledge he shouldn’t possess and … well, you get the picture.
For women, the penalty for ambition is infinite torture, which comes at least in part from a series of relentlessly negative myths. The message seems to be that if you are ambitious, you will be punished. If you focus on your career, no man will have you. Even if you do marry, you’ll never have children. And if by some miracle you do manage to have kids, you are going to ruin them. In every case, you will end your days regretting your choices.
Such scary thoughts have been repeated with enough frequency to be considered to be settled truth. Yet none of these assertions — many first raised decades ago — turns out to be completely true. So why are they still important? Because they are scaring a whole new generation of young women away from their ambitions. “I don’t want to be stressed and miserable and not have a life — the way your generation was,” one young woman told me, to my astonishment.
Let’s look at some of the myths themselves, starting with an old chestnut:
MYTH 1: Career women will become old maids.
We all know the fear: Women who postpone marriage to focus on their careers will end up old, crazy and alone. Yet the famous 1986 assertion — that a woman who hits age 40 without marrying has a better chance of being killed by a terrorist than of having a wedding — proved so decisively wrong that even its chief perpetrator (Newsweek, in a cover story titled “The Marriage Crunch”) took it all back 20 years later.
By 2010, the 30-to-40-year-olds who worried about never having a white dress or eating over-frosted cake were 53 to 63 years old — 23 years older than they were when that article ran. And according to the U.S. Census, only 7 percent of women in that age group never married. What really happened is that the increasing number of older singles entering the workforce in the ’70s happened to coincide with a sharp increase in the marriage age. We married late, but we married.
MYTH 2: Even if you do get married, you’ll die childless.
Sometime in the last 30 years the words “biological clock” came to be associated with the looming risk of childlessness.
“A painful, well-kept secret,” is what Sylvia Ann Hewlett called it in a 2002 article in Harvard Business Review. A survey she commissioned and later turned into a book concluded that “between a third and a half of all successful career women in the United States” between ages 41 and 55 were childless. The highest rate of childlessness, Hewlett asserted, was among women in “corporate America”: 40 percent of them were involuntarily childless.
Her survey may have found that, but time proved her survey wrong. This year, Harvard Business School released a survey of its own graduates — people who might reasonably be considered a good proxy for “successful.” How many female baby-boomer MBAs were childless at the time of the survey? A way smaller percentage than that reported by Hewlett — 21 percent.
Of course, that still sounds pretty scary. But the rate of childlessness for all women, regardless of ambition or education, reflects similar trends. So, yes, hard-charging, better educated women are less likely than average to have children. But only slightly, and not by the huge numbers Hewlett asserted.
According to a more recent survey by the Pew Research Center, the rates of childbearing among so-called “successful” women have begun to soar: “Across all educational groups, childlessness has either remained constant or declined in the past two decades, with the biggest declines occurring among more educated women.”
MYTH 3: Okay, you have kids. Now you’re stressed and overwhelmed.
Not quite. Research shows that both men and women have more leisure time today than ever before. What’s more, working women have actually increased the time they spend on child care.
So why the frenzy? The researchers posit that the real sources of the “overwhelmed” feeling are factors other than work. One is the more fragmented ways we spend our time. We also have ever-expanding menu of things we can choose from to do, making us feel as though we’ll never get to them at all, even though we don’t need to. There’s also the fact that a lot of us secretly want to be busy, because we’ve come to associate “busy” with “important.” Women talk themselves into feeling too busy, and into talking about too being busy. Then they feel like they are too busy because they’ve told themselves they are.
Read the rest of Amanda’s myth list HERE.
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This article was reprinted from www.washingtonpost.com where it originally appeared in February 2016.
