Career moms find new ways to make things work
Molly Selvin

Attorney Becky Belke works at a law firm where colleagues regularly toil nights and weekends. But as a mother of three children younger than 5, she wants to work only three days a week — even if it means she can’t become a partner soon.

No problem.

Not only has Belke’s firm agreed to her part-time schedule, it will put her on its partnership track if she wants to boost her hours when her kids are older.

"I know if I were home with my kids every day I’d be insane, and if I were here every day I would not be happy,’’ the 39-year-old said of her part-time schedule. ``It’s a good situation for me.’’

Welcome to Mommy Track 2.0.

The old Mommy Track was a path where up-and-coming women found that having children effectively disqualified them for top positions. They either took themselves out of the running, settling for lower-level positions with more predictable hours and less responsibility, or their male bosses assumed that because these women had children, they wouldn’t or couldn’t give their all to the office.

Now, some employers in high-pressure professions such as law, medicine, accounting and finance — which years ago may have fired women who became pregnant — are giving working mothers what they want: a shot at the top jobs but with flexible hours, part-time schedules or other concessions to their caregiving responsibilities.

Attitudes get flexible, not just hours

They are increasingly willing to change the criteria for young mothers to reach top positions, giving them more time or the ability to leave for several years of child-raising and come back. Breast-feeding lounges, support groups, mentors and sabbaticals have become more commonplace for working mothers seeking to break the glass ceiling.

Years ago, the attitude of male executives was, "OK, let them compete in exactly the same way that men do," says Myra Strober, a labour economist. "What’s really changed is the appreciation that some sort of accommodation is required."

"So what if it takes 15 years to get 10 publications instead of seven years?’’ says Janet Bickel, an executive career consultant, arguing for more flexibility in tenure or partnership tracks for younger working mothers.

By showing that leaving a successful career to care for children did not prevent her from returning to a top job in the corporate world, Brenda Barnes can be seen as a Mommy Track 2.0 pioneer.

Among the first mothers to reach the executive suite a decade ago, when PepsiCo Inc. tapped her to lead its Pepsi-Cola North America division, Barnes’ decision in 1997 to step down to spend more time with her three school-age children generated headlines and considerable angst in the business community.

"I’m not leaving because they need more of me," she said of her children at the time, "but because I need more of them."

Like many women, Barnes depended on full-time childcare and little sleep to make the PepsiCo job work. She said then that she routinely rose at 3:30 a.m. to work a few hours before the nanny arrived. Breakfast with her children was a priority, and she tried to leave the office by 7 p.m. to be with them in the evening.

For many mothers, that full-throttle pace leaves too little time to enjoy their children. Ultimately, Barnes came to feel the same way — at least for a while.

After a year off, Barnes — who declined to be interviewed for this story — returned to the executive suite, this time as interim president of Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. In July, 2004, her children teenagers by then, she was named president of a food company and now is its chief executive.

Indra Nooyi not the norm

But she and other female CEOs — such as Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo, eBay Inc.’s Meg Whitman and Patricia A. Woertz of Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. — are still a rarity. Only 11 Fortune 500 companies have a female CEO, and, as of last year, more than half had fewer than three women corporate officers, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit research group based in New York.

After rising steadily during the 1980s and 1990s, the percentage of adult women who are working has flattened. Overall, 75 per cent of adult women were employed in 2004, down from nearly 77 per cent in 2000, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Although there are many reasons for women dropping out of the work force, or not entering at all, the difficulty of juggling children and a job has been cited as a key factor.

To keep their best women employees, some employers have come to recognise that they need to get creative — even if it means risking resentment from some male workers.

"Men have to come to grips with the fact that a growing proportion of the most talented people coming out of graduate and professional schools are women," says Paul Irving, managing partner at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. "Working with them is a privilege, not a burden, and advancement processes have to be adjusted to reflect those changing demographics."

Although fathers generally are eligible for the same leave programmes or reduced schedules, relatively few take advantage of them, managers say.

— LA Times-Washington Post