Life/Work - Issue 30

Ten years ago, the "Harvard Business Review" ran an essay called "Management Women and the Facts of Life." It began with this provocative sentence: "The cost of employing women in management is greater than the cost of employing men."

The reason for this difference, the author argued, was that many women were interrupting or else entirely giving up their careers after they had children. In turn, companies were losing the considerable investments that they'd made in recruiting, training, and developing those women. The solution, the author suggested, was for corporations to become more responsive to the needs of women looking to combine family and work. The essay offered a number of suggestions, including providing options like longer maternity leaves, part-time work, job sharing, and more flexible benefits.

At first, the essay produced only modest reaction, most of it positive. Then, roughly nine weeks after the essay was published, the "New York Times" ran a story that prompted a firestorm: It reported that Felice Schwartz, author of the HBR essay, had advocated a separate "mommy track" aimed at the sort of woman who is "valuable to the company for her willingness to accept lower pay and little advancement in return for a flexible schedule that allows her to accommodate family needs." The "Times" piece also included outraged responses from prominent feminists, including Betty Friedan and then-Congresswoman Pat Schroeder.

A prominent feminist herself, Schwartz was the founder and president of Catalyst, a nonprofit organization that spent 30 years working with businesses to facilitate upward mobility for women. She was also my mother.

Her life was forever changed by the controversy she prompted. My mother believed that she was simply exhorting corporations not to squander their investment in a huge pool of talented women by refusing to be more flexible during their child-rearing years. Her lifelong mission had been to increase women's options -- a word that she used so frequently and passionately in our household that my two siblings and I rolled our eyes whenever we heard it. But in the aftermath of the "Times" article, my mother was pilloried as an enemy of women's progress and a stalking-horse for sexist CEOs.

Nearly 500 articles were written about the controversy, including an excoriating editorial in the "New York Times" (despite the fact that the "Times" itself had virtually no women in top management positions at the time). My mother was interviewed more than 75 times -- for newspapers and magazines, as well as for television and radio. The idea of being a celebrity didn't interest her; explaining her mission -- and trying to set the record straight -- did.

Three years ago, my mother died. One of her very few regrets was that she felt so misunderstood by many of the people whose cause she'd championed for so long. On the 10th anniversary of the publication of my mother's essay, I decided to revisit it to figure out what she had really said -- and to see to what extent her prescriptions have been heeded, for better or for worse.

With the benefit of distance, I realized that the "Times" article had vastly oversimplified my mother's essay, casting one small part of what she had said in a very negative light. At the same time, she had made herself vulnerable to criticism by suggesting that one way for corporations to address women's differing needs was to divide women into two categories: "career primary" and "career and family."

It was an inflammatory notion, but more important, it wasn't an especially realistic one. Who knew which category a woman in her twenties might eventually choose -- and how her priorities might change over the years? The irony is that by polarizing people, my mother's controversial suggestion prompted a national debate about the more fundamental issue raised in her essay.

The central argument that my mother made was that companies needed to provide women with more flexibility, rather than force them to choose between work and family. To make this case, she had the courage to speak out loud at least two truths that virtually no one else -- male corporate executives or women -- had been willing to acknowledge openly. First, men and women are different. And second, women are far more inclined than men to give high priority to raising their children, even if doing so requires making sacrifices in their careers.

My mother was a pragmatist. She appealed not to the conscience of male corporate executives but to their bottom line. Companies are already losing productivity and profit, she said, by not finding ways to meet the needs of women with children. It will become increasingly difficult, she insisted, to attract and retain such women without offering them more support and flexibility. Because women represent an increasing percentage of the workforce, and because the bidding for the best of them is intensifying, companies won't be able to compete unless they find ways to make women happy.