[☁️ Reflections] Thoughts of starting a family
Thank you to Ashley Chang for reviewing and editing this piece!
As someone who recently turned 30, I’ve started thinking about starting a family and all of the planning needed beforehand. I’m asking myself the following questions: should I buy a place before having a family? Should I move closer to my parents? Should I be married? (I’m in happy long-term relationship) Am I already behind in saving?
I explore the context and considerations to keep in mind when considering starting a family below, hoping it might be helpful as you consider your journey yourself.
What is work-life balance?
I’ve been someone who has been so focused on my career and working hard during my twenties that it’s hard to imagine how to “balance” my career and having children… I also have a hard time believing that there’s a “work-life balance”. Even without a family, it's not possible to do 1-2 things perfectly without dropping everything else.
I’ve been worried about the professional cost that having a child would have on my career. I worry about the disruption of my work life, the assumption that I’m going to slow down, and how I might weave family and work together. I’m someone who values transparency and sharing who I am with people I am close with. I can’t imagine hiding my journey into motherhood from co-workers. However, I fear I might get penalized for having to show others that there’s in fact something more important to me that doesn’t involve work.
I’ve asked a few mothers in my life how it impacted their lives, and I’ve had a wide variety of responses: one woman said they were able to handle their career and having children, someone was even promoted during maternity leave. O the other hand, someone told me they slowed down at work during the first few years of their child’s life and a mentor of mine mentioned their wife intended to leave the workforce once they had their 3rd child.
I previously wrote about finding female role models in tech and I still feel like we need more role models. I would love to hear more stories of the different paths women took to weave in career and family. I still am inspired to push myself harder in my career while having a child, I’m inspired by my mother who was a full-time physical therapist while taking care of children under the age of 5.
History & role models
In Career & Family by Claudia Goldin, there are 3 phases over the last ~100 years for how women have thought about family, career, and the balance between both.
1850-1920, the “either-or” era: For women born in the late 1800’s it was an either-or equation: You either chose to have a family or you chose a career. For women born between 1878 and 1897, 30% of college-educated women didn’t get married, and 50% of college-educated women didn’t have any children. It wasn’t only that women working were culturally frowned upon, even married women without kids were less likely to be working. At this point in time, household chores were manual and time-intensive: there was no electricity and no way to easily refrigerate goods, clean the floors, and keep the house clean. With the lack of time, it’s clear that women had to choose between a family or a career. Considering most jobs had gender discriminatory laws, men had higher salaries, this meant once married, it defaulted to women taking care of the household.
1920-1960, the family first, job second era: By the early 20th century, things changed. Households went through “electrification”: most households had fridges, laundry machines, and vacuum cleaners. The women born in the 1920s were college graduates and were able to have a family and professions. There was a lack of supply of labor with most men participating in the war, there were higher university graduation rates. Women would marry young (23-24 years old), they would graduate with degrees, go on to have children, and then come back into the workforce 10 years later once their children were passed a young age. However, there are some caveats to thinking about how women “balanced” family and career. These women had jobs, not careers. They held down a role that would allow them to hold financial independence (the most prevalent job was becoming a teacher) but there weren’t any other prevalent jobs open to women, where they could continue to grow their skillset, get promoted, and build out a career.
1950-today, integrating family and career era: By the 1950’s, more women started graduating from frequently from college. By the 1990s, we had seen more female than male college graduates. We want careers, and we value having a family. Many women no longer want to choose between career and family (if they want a family, and this is a personal choice) and they want to be able to choose a career that they’re passionate about. However, we continue to see a wage gap that doesn’t promote equal opportunity to pursue both. With wage gaps, you will always see a rational decision for one parent’s career to be optimized over another.
You must have heard the refrain 81 cents: women get paid 81 cents for every dollar that a man earns. To me, this seems exacerbated once a couple has children. I volunteer at an organization with the same name. I give a recommendation for salary range and benefits requested to women in the process of negotiating their salary, mainly in product management. The more women I help, the more I’ve realized that this gap is because of the parent tax.
The parent tax
We have seen wages grow the most in industries where there has been a lot of innovation (technology) or where there is intellectual differentiation highlighted (law), relationships heavily emphasized (business, revenue). However, these tend to be “time-greedy” roles. To be able to succeed, you need to be on-call for your profession. That results in two penalties for the parent who is the primary caregiver: 1. Taking a long break from the industry when things move quickly means you find yourself losing context to succeed, and 2. Lowering the number of hours you work might mean you can’t operate at the pace of the company. In industries such as finance, law, and technology, some women mention going “part-time” if they work 35 hours.
Now, let’s go back to my original question of when I should have a family. I’m in a stable relationship, and I’m in a privileged position to be able to support myself financially, however, my main concern has been the cost of having a child and what impact it will have on my career.
I have a few choices: 1. Delay having a child, 2. Change priorities and consider having a family more important, 3. Finding help in childcare.
These are the options I’ve considered:
Delaying having a child. This is a reasonable consideration, however, I’m hesitant about waiting too long because of the energy it takes to raise a child and the fact that fertility in women drops considerably by the age of 35. To consider this option, I will need to work at a company with fertility benefits since the costs are prohibitive. Having IVF or egg freezing also takes a considerable toll on the body, as I will be put on a few weeks of hormone shots. I will also need to somehow have a boost of energy later on.
Changing priorities from career to family. Though I’ve heard of the mother instinct that takes over once someone becomes a mother, I honestly can’t reasonably see myself changing my priorities that much, to the point that I would be comfortable being passed over for a promotion, going part-time, or dropping out of the workforce completely. I’ve had a great role model in my mother.
Finding help in childcare. To help parents be present at work, they need support with childcare. I live in the Bay Area, and neither my partner nor I have family in the area, this means that when we choose to have a child, we will either have to find childcare or move closer to our parents. I already know that childcare is extremely cost-prohibitive here.
What companies need to do
I haven’t really made a decision yet on what I’ll do, and I struggle to think about what the “right” decision is, however, I think employers have a job here to do. If we want to seriously consider gender parity for women in tech and other industries, we need to seriously consider offering fertility benefits and childcare for all employees. The top thing I would emphasize is for companies to start innovating and providing: 1. Fertility benefits, 2. Equal maternal and paternity leave, 3. Childcare.
Fertility benefits: We know that the risk of infertility increases significantly as we age, and yet we don’t recognize that we put an increasing investment in our careers and that’s why we’re willing to take the risk. Employers should consider this when they talk about wanting to retain a diverse workforce.
Equal paternal and maternal leave: We start seeing a gender pay gap when people have kids. As the primary caregiver, typically women, will start working less hours than men. Men will work the jobs that are “time-greedy”, however, once they work 2x as many hours, they get paid 2.5x as much to compensate the sacrifices they make. If we start acknowledging that there are two parents in a child’s life, that we need to both take turns to take care of the child, we will start moving toward a future where women don’t need to take over more of the household chores from an earlier stage. That starts with equal parental leave.
Childcare: Recognize that childcare is extremely expensive in most urban cities where people are hired. Childcare is singlehandedly the most expensive cost for a household once they have children. Parents need as much help as they can get.
At the end of the day, to stay dedicated to our jobs requires an acknowledgment that we are more than our jobs. Those companies that invest in fertility benefits, childcare, and equal parental leave will be the first ones to see the gender equality, if we want to hire the most qualified people for the role, no matter the role they play at home, we need to have a concrete action plan for it.
My choices
As for myself, I am excited about having a family. I also acknowledge that not everyone feels the same way, and I debate on the idea of timing and whether we need to time having a family and how can we change the impression for a future generation that it’s possible to weave in family and career.