Mothers On The Fast Track Analysis

1. Until recently, the idea of parenthood was not vastly different from that of motherhood. This is because parenthood affects men and women’s careers in different ways. Motherhood is associated with less prestigious careers and lower income, while fathers see little to impact of parenthood on their careers. The reason for this lies in the different ways in which society perceives motherhood and fatherhood. It is almost always understood that motherhood will become an obstacle in a woman’s career path, and in the event that a woman successfully navigates the complications of personal and professional life to excel at both, she is hailed as the exception. In Mothers on the Fast Track, authors Mary Ann Mason and Eve Mason Ekman explain that upon
becoming mothers, “highly educated women rarely leave their chosen profession entirely. Instead, they become caught in a ‘second tier’ within or allied with their profession where they take breaks for family needs but return to work, sometimes on a reduced schedule but frequently full-time, until retirement.” Professionals believe that women are just not cut out for the kind of dedication their roles demand, especially in careers like medicine and law. As one faculty member at a medical school explains, when speaking about women, “‘It’s not that they’re not smart – they’re really top-notch – but they don’t have the stamina for the long run – you know, the grants, tenure, and all that. They make their choices; we all make our choices.” Mason and Ekman explain that women start off on a fast track in which they complete many years of education and apprenticeship that some of these respectful careers demand. In the workplace, however, they are faced with a world where they must choose between their family and success in their careers, and in the process of balancing both they enter this second tier, from where it becomes nearly impossible to get back onto the fast track. This idea coincides with that of the pipeline problem, discussed in lecture on November 22, 2016. The pipeline problem portrays a woman’s professional life in the form of a pipe. It explains that while most women enter into the pipe hoping to establish dependable and successful careers, many “leak out” of it at different points in their lives, so that only a few remain in the pipe at the end. Interestingly, those women who have leaked out are all mothers. Mason and Ekman depict the Science Pipeline for Women, which shows that in the path from entering graduate school to becoming a fully tenured professor, women continue to leak out along the way. At the end, women are 20% less likely than men to become a full professor within 16 years.
Women enter their student years with great aspirations and hopes for the future, but by the time they reach their thirties they have entered their “make-or-break” years, in which they must make some of the most difficult choices of their lives: whether to enter the fast track, have children, remain on the fast track after having children, or leave the fast track upon motherhood to find a less competitive role. In the event that women are able to remain on the fast track after having children, very few reach high, management level position, and this is due to the structure of the modern workplace. Gender discrimination still exists in the workplace, and those in management level positions, especially men, believe that hiring women is futile, because once they decide to have children, they’ll leave. While women’s struggles differ depending on which field they are in – law, medicine, business, media, etc. – they are faced with a glass ceiling that hinders their progress. Another reason for this is because in many of these careers, women approach the peak of progress at the same time as the end of their fertility
curve. Ultimately, they are forced to choose between the two, and it during these years that mothers fall into the second tier.
Clearly, society sees motherhood and career progression as two mutually exclusive events – one of the two can certainly happen, but both? That seems to have remained just a dream of many women thus
far. I do believe, however, that this situation is likely to change in the future. Many firms have recognized the talent pool they are missing out on by hiring fewer women, and are already acting upon it as well. As evidenced in Mason and Ekman’s work, “The accounting firm Deloitte & Touche recognized in the early 1990s that women were rapidly leaking out of the partnership pipeline. They considered this a bad business result and put in place practices that encouraged women to stay with the firm…Recently the firm was singled out by the City of New York as one of the five best employers for women.” Even as more women are choosing motherhood over careers, there are also “more women in top leadership positions that ever before, and others coming through the ranks.” Not only that, the interview summaries from this semester’s Cal Students’ Family Plans assignment show that women are more determined than ever to find the balance between their professional and personal lives. Sure, things may not always go as planned, but today’s women are looking to their partners, families, friends, and outside institutions for support in navigating the course of their lives, and they are confident that their hard work will yield them their desired results.