Today’s female students are lucky to be studying at university. Not so long ago, female students were a rarity – while men have been going onto higher education for centuries, universities only started accepting women in the nineteenth-century.
In our modern age, however, we’ve been raised in a society where there is an expectation that most women will pursue a degree and a career afterwards. In fact, recent figures from the Higher Education Statistics Authority suggest that women are beginning to outnumber men at UK universities – some university institutions reportedly have twice as many female students as they have male.
It seems that the modern female can have it all: career, family, money, and whatever else we desire to pursue…or can we?
Comments made last month by the UKIP leader Nigel Farage suggest that to succeed in a high-pressure career in the City, women will have to sacrifice ambitions of having a family. “In many, many cases, women make different choices in life to the ones that men make simply for biological reasons,” he states, “I think that young, able women who are prepared to sacrifice the family life and stick with their careers do as well, if not better, than men.”
If you feel offended by his assertions, then you’re not the only one. Maternity Action group director Rosalind Bragg commented how she was “very disappointed at the criticism of working mothers.”
Some statistics, however, depict a depressing reality. Only a tiny proportion of women compared to men hold a CEO position in top companies. In America, only 4.6% of CEOs at companies ranked in the 2013 Fortune 100 List are women. Yet, do these facts really highlight that women are still faced with an either/or decision between career and family? Do these figures reveal that most women pick the latter?
Not always, it seems. As figures from the Office of National Statistics show, the number of childless middle-aged women has almost doubled since 1940. One of the reasons cited for the increase is that women are often “delaying having children until it’s biologically too late” (which is 27-years-old, according to recent studies by National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina and the University of Padua in Italy).
Another reason women are being put off the idea of starting a family is the “the perceived costs and benefits of childbearing versus work and leisure activities”.
These studies highlight the existence of a culture in which women have to decide what to prioritise in their twenties – and, for some, it’s their career over having children.
As a student at university, huge life decisions may seem daunting. However, if you envision a career and children in your future, then perhaps you could view it in these terms: after graduating at the average age of 21, you will have six years to fulfil your career aims and aspirations to have children before your fertility declines. Or choose just one: career or children.
Does anyone else find that pressure enormous?!
Of course, I am presenting the issue in very rigid black and white terms. Women successfully have children in their thirties, and there are plenty examples of hugely successful career women having a family too.
Cherie Booth – wife of ex- PM Tony Blair, mother and barrister in what is still a male-dominated profession – is one of the most vocal advocates for career women with families: “My mother, who gave up her career as an actress to look after my sister and me, was abandoned by her husband,” she wrote in the Observer last year. “With no maintenance forthcoming, [she] took a job in a fish and chip shop to support us…This experience, as well as my professional ambition, instilled in me a strong feeling that maintaining a career and a family life was both desirable and necessary.”
Cherie, however, discloses how behaviour towards her in the workplace altered during her first pregnancy in the 1980s. As she relates, “I noticed a perceptible change in the attitude towards me of my colleagues, who were all men.”
This was 1983 – it’s now 2014, and Nigel Farage’s comments suggest that women of the past and present are meeting the same cultural assumptions about the career versus family dilemma. Despite progressive changes to maternity and paternity leave and more flexible childcare available, women are still not expected to be able to manage a career and a family simultaneously.
Is this the state of affairs that we female students will be faced with once we graduate? I sure hope not. We shouldn’t have to look upon our future with a sense of foreboding. We shouldn’t feel as if one day we are going to have to choose before our adult life has barely begun.
Even though society has opened many doors for women over the last few decades, the battle for changing attitudes over women in the workplace isn’t over yet. Soon enough, the mantle will fall upon us to bear this struggle.
Sources:
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/20/cherie-booth-women-family-career
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-112136/The-female-fertility-clock-starts-ticking-27.html
http://www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-fortune-1000
http://www.oneupweb.com/blog/women-on-top-celebrating-women-in-business-…
Edited by Harriet Dunlea