Science Sheds Light on Why Women Leave Work

Contributed by Bailey McCann

“If you are seriously interested in a career you don’t have time for children and if you are seriously interested in bringing up more than one child, you don’t have the time, effort, and imagination for getting to the top of a career.”

That quote by British sociologist Catherine Hakim, and her subsequent publications have brought the ire of the feminist community, who would argue that women are not their own barriers to advancement. However, recent scientific understanding of women’s brains seems to support Ms. Hakim’s idea. An excerpt from Susan Pinker’s book “The Sexual Paradox” was featured in the Times of London. Her research examines how having children can cause high-achieving women to turn down prestigious positions in favor of their family’s needs.

As an ambitious woman, the premise of this research bothered me. While I don’t have children and don’t want to, I resent the idea that, if I had children, I would be genetically predetermined to bow out of my career to become a haus frau. Yet the math is hard to contest. According to research by Carolyn Buck Luce and Sylvia Ann Hewlett entitled “The Hidden Brain Drain: Women and Minorities as Unrealized Assets,” one in three American women with a MBA turned down promotion, while their male counterparts turned them down at a rate of one in twenty.

The reason? A complex web of how women’s brains are hardwired, coupled with seemingly endless guilt-inducing scenarios based on being a working mother. As Pinker points out, the traditional view was that if women opted to put the bottles, blankets and diapers down more often and men opted to pick them up more often, we could evolve our way out of the traditional socialized gender roles. But, as scientists have shown, it’s not that easy. When women give birth and bond with their child through those first formative weeks of breast-feeding, our brains release oxycotin, creating a flood of euphoria that women then need and long for when they return to work.

Men also bond with their children, but their higher levels of testosterone allow them to stay in the workforce without constantly looking back. Not to mention that top level positions often require 60+ hour work weeks, travel, relocation and 24/7 availability, which necessarily forces women to be less responsive to family needs in order to fulfill career obligations. As our own “Returners” columnist Jane Curruthers points out, this situation gets sticky. External guilt and internal longing are not trade-offs that all women are willing to make for the corner office.

So are we really imposing our own glass ceiling? Maybe. But there is equally compelling research that points out that the language and customs of the business environment keep women from getting ahead even if they want to. In a different article in The Times, Vanessa Jolly points to research by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox in her book Why Women Mean Business, which was recently reviewed on The Glass Hammer. Her theory can be summed up in one word: “manonomics.”

Ms. Wittenberg-Cox argues that the codes and language of business were established on a different family model without input from women. Men don’t always look first at women because women use different vocabulary and want different things from their jobs. Men are driven to look at salary and chances for advancement. In general, women look more often for meaning, satisfaction, flexibility and personal development putting money and promotions further down the list of priorities. Men then, are less likely to go to a woman first for the promotion because she lacks “hunger” for it.

Both of these books do point out that women look for meaning in their lives more than the ambitious pursuit of goals. Whether that meaning manifests itself in children or a particular career is up to each woman. This can inhibit us in the traditional business world where the focus is on climbing the ladder, not on personal meaning. Perhaps breaking the glass ceiling means defining where the ceiling is for ourselves rather than having it defined for us.