Every week my summer research program has a Friday lunch talk meant to enhance our career preparation. Today it was about “Balancing Work and Family.” I was interested to see how they’d address the subject - I often get frustrated with these talks because they’re generally put on by women’s associations and feature only female speakers, which perpetuates the idea that only women have to worry about balancing work and family (because they’re the ones deciding to add work to their traditional task of running the family, presumably).
This one was actually quite good. It addressed the issues faced by dual-career couples, which is really the way to look at it. The issue isn’t being a woman who works, it’s being a person who works while your spouse also works. Men who don’t have stay-at-home wives also have to deal with it. Accordingly, there were two speakers, a male surgeon and a female gastroenterologist, both married to fellow physicians.
Unfortunately there wasn’t a whole lot of advice given (somehow they had the impression that the audience was largely made up of undergraduates and that nobody was actually trying to plan out when to have children or how to manage staying in the same city yet). But there were interesting statistics: apparently 22% of male physicians are married to physicians, and 44% of female physicans are. (I’m not totally sure how that works, maybe the percentages of physicans who are married, and fewer female physicians are married at all?) Comparing physicians in dual-doctor marriages to physicans married to non-physicians, the dual-docs were more involved with their children, made a little less money individually but more as a family, and felt their careers didn’t take precedence as often. I think that makes sense - when the other person is just as career-oriented as you are, things have to be equal and you can’t push all the childrearing duties onto the other person.
Both of the speakers were very encouraging, and I thought it was great to hear from people who were happily and successfully living in dual-career families. The surgeon mentioned that he and his wife make sure to be home by 6, they leave work at work on the weekends, and so on. And it sounded like maternity leave and that sort of thing is becoming standard even during residency.
At one point an audience member asked whether it’s common for people to take some time off while their kids are young. Both speakers said that it can be done if that’s a priority. Then the female speaker talked about the fact that women tend to feel a lot of guilt about not being there as often as their friends or neighbors who stay at home are. She said you just have to work that out and realize that nobody spends 24 hours a day with their kid, and children never get confused about who’s their mom, dad, nanny, or other caregiver. They love them all, but parents are always special. I thought that was pretty reasonable.
Then the male speaker said his wife had found it really difficult to deal with the guilt feelings, and ended up cutting down to working three days a week so she could be home with the kids some days, rather than always feeling guilty that she wasn’t taking them to play dates or whatever like the stay-at-home mom next door. He said she was very happy with her decision, which is great (and heaven knows three days a week as an academic surgeon is still a far more high-powered career than most people will ever have), but I think it’s really unfortunate that women still so often feel such guilt about having a career. It’s not like she was neglecting her kids before, but there’s still such a big cultural push for women to be primary caregivers that it’s difficult to ignore that.
Anyway, it was a good presentation and I found it mostly very encouraging. Though this was the second time a speaker told us they had brought in a newborn to sleep under the desk while they finished a grant application! I guess that is definitely a way to combine work and family.