I Just Had a Baby, I'll Call You Back

Thomas Barwick / Getty Images In an excerpt from Womenomics, Katty Kay and Claire Shipman say the career ladder is crumbling and women need to forge new paths that can accommodate personal ambition and family.

Look—having been shoehorned into an inhospitable, male-created work fork environment for all these years, it should be no surprise that our attitude toward work is so conflicted. Bu the real headline isn’t that women re quitting in droves, as was the big news ten years ago. It’s how much we’re modifying our professional goals and work habits in order to stay in the workplace.

Whether we’re finally coming clean, or we’ve simply learned the perils of top jobs (or some combination of the two), most women clearly don’t aspire to make that straight climb to the summit anymore.

And this downshift in career ambitions is just as true for the top dogs among us. The same Family and Work Institute social scientists [who released a study concluding that women don’t usually want that promotion], picked out ten top-tier companies (think IBM, Citicorp) and talked with the top one hundred women in leadership positions at those firms. They kept after them for weeks, determined to get an accurate read. In the end one-third of those high-flying women admitted they’d voluntarily scaled back their career aspirations. Why? Not because they weren’t up to the job—but because the sacrifices they would have to make in their personal lives were just too great.

Read Womenomics authors Claire Shipman and Katty Kay on looking for a “pink lining” to the recession.

In her twenties, Christine Heenan could clock the hours with the best of them. As a senior policy analyst in the Clinton White House, the long days, the challenge, even the stress were simply steroids for her ambition. “I loved being at the office at 7, working with smart, fast-thinking people till 10 at night, going out after work, talking about work, and getting up and doing it again.”

In 1995 she moved to Rhode Island, where she took another challenge—head of government and community relations at Brown University. It was slower than the White House and there were days when she missed the old pace. Until she got a wake-up call, literally, hours after her first child was born.

“I got a call from my boss in my hospital room as I was holding the baby! There was a major thing happening at the university and she needed to talk to me about it. I told her, ‘There’s a doctor walking in the room, I’ll have to call you back.’ And she said, ‘All right. Well, try to call me by 10 a.m.’”

In retrospect what shocks Christine more than the request was her own response.

Womenomics: Write Your Own Rules for Success By Claire Shipman and Katty Kay 256 pages. HarperBusiness. $28. “I said, ‘Okay’” remembers Christine, chagrined. “If I look back, it’s one of those conversations I would most love to have a do-over on, and say…‘I’ll call you when and if I can.’”

A few years later, after trying work “flexibility” at the university, and with a second child in her family, Christine quit to start her own company, a company where she offered her employees the same freedom she gives herself.

“Plateauing” is what Wharton Business School calls this lack of appetite for the climb. “Women are no longer willing to step into the ‘high-potential’ pool of employees in part because they want to be sure they have time for their families,” explains Monica McGrath, a professor at Wharton. “These women aren’t lacking in ambition and they want to make a difference in their jobs. It’s a question of ‘how much more responsibility can I take on.’”