Strollerderby
Motherhood Is Not Career Suicide.
The authors, who also have a book called, “Back On The Career Track: “A Guide for Stay-at-Home Moms who Want to Return to Work”, claim there are more options for mothers than the two (dismal ones) Bennetts lays out. According to Bennetts women can either, juggle a full time career while raising a family or choose a lifetime of financial dependency on a spouse who might leave, die or be really annoying about taking out the trash.
The third option is what they call a career “Relaunching”, women taking a break from their career and resuming it later. Employers are, according to Cohen and Rabin, more open to alternative employment arrangements (remote work, flex time, non traditional career paths) as they face the Baby Boomers starting to retire.
It’s an interesting look at the issue which, unlike Bennetts book, won’t require a Xanax and a brown paper bag to breath into after reading.
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4 Comments
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amPingBack from http://selfmademom.net/2007/06/04/straight-from-the-on-ramping-gurus-mouth/
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amI’ve taken a year and a half off to raise my baby girl and finding a job now is TOUGH!
Before I was pregnant I had excellent credentials. Mind you, I was a college student, but a very well qualified college student with a beaming GPA, Volunteer services, and excellent references.
However, when I apply to jobs or staffing agencies now, and the interviewer or staffer asks “Why the long break?” I tell them, I wanted to take an extra long maternity leave. All of them get a furrow in their brow and say, “That’s interesting-but why the long break?”
I guess they are all sexist asses who believe that the only time a woman needs to raise a baby from birth til finish, is six weeks. While six weeks may be good enough for some, I took the personal option to do a little longer than that.
Now that my baby’s father and I have split, I am actively seeking employment-now I’ve finished college but it gets tougher and tougher to tell employers that I have a small child.
BOOOO! To them for being so prejudiced.
Am I not going to be a good parent because I have a baby?
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amOh, and I forgot to add- it makes good business sense for companies to want to hire moms who used to work for them and take time off- it has to mean lower recruitment and “ramp-up” costs I would think to hire someone with organizational knowledge!
here’s my post- it has a link to that NYTimes “advice” article. Ok, enough rambling here!
http://selfmademom.net/2007/04/30/my-humble-opinion-on-how-easy-it-is-for-a-mom-to-reenter-the-workforce/
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amThanks for writing this post. I actually just blogged about this very topic based on a recent New York Times article I read about women going back to work after they’ve spent time at home raising their kids. I’m not 100% on Bennetts’ side, but I am not 100% convinced it’s as easy as these authors and experts you mention say it is for moms to get back into it. Yes, Lehman Bros does a great job trying to get women back to their ranks, but other than that and some other really large financial companies (Ernst and Young is a good one) I haven’t seen a lot of other case studies on women actually getting a similar job back in a similar career after they’ve taken time off to raise their kids. I wish the experts, who have good advice, would show us a couple of “real life” moms who have achieved this in careers like marketing, advertising, PR (what I’m in)… because I don’t have many role models to look up to on this one, and frankly, that’s why I’m still working. I don’t think I could ever get back into what I do now if I took time off. I’d love to hear more thoughts on this.
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