News Flash: The Dilemma

In today’s society, many women face a huge dilemma. They struggle with having the desire and dream in becoming a successful woman which ultimately competes with the norm or expectations from society to settle down and start a family. Women are faced with a lot of challenges in their life that men often either do not experience or simply do not sit down and worry or even have to think about some things. Educated women are often faced with the reality that if they want to become a successful women, the likelihood of doing so and raising a family at the same time is slim if not impossible. Looking at the evidence from some blogs online and class readings, women in today’s society are struggling to find the balance between building their careers and having a family. In the first blog that I came across, the author is discussing the struggles that women face in their lives. This blog was created by the Transcend Strategy Group and they discuss the importance of getting to know employees through client workshops which define tough personal dilemmas that people go through day by day. Companies use this strategy to strengthen their teams because it creates sympathy for one another and good group communication. Transcend Strategy Group discusses how they notice there is a reoccurring dilemma with women in their classes. The first, is having the feeling of needing to do too much with not enough time in a day to complete. Women are constantly struggling and they feel torn between work and family. The blog emphasizes how women struggle with dealing with commitments to their husbands and children along with their career goals and job demands. As seen in “Stories from the Sidelines” by Megan Pinand in Leading The Way, women constantly work very hard to maintain their professional stature at their job while also balancing their responsibilities and obligations that they have at home. Ultimately what happens is women feel like their lives are insufficient when they are not able to fulfill or meet the expectations of a particular area in their life. An interesting fact that was mentioned in this post was the fact that since 1972 American women are generally less happy according to the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Council. Ironically, despite the fact that women are becoming less happy, in recent decades men are actually becoming the complete opposite. Men are often seen as being more joyful, especially as they get older. Maureen Dowd explores the phenomenon and finds that children actually make people less happy. This theory applied for both men and women. Other issues were sex role differences, emotions, mixed cultural messages, and choice. Choice is a huge factor that puts a lot of stress on women. For the most part, women face an unhealthy amount of choices when coming to meeting expectations and excelling as a worker, wife, and mother. I totally agree with Dowd’s statement in the piece when she commented on how women become very stressed when they take job positions that are placed for male-dominated realms because they put more demands on themselves. As seen in Douglas’ Enlightened Sexism, women are becoming more dominant in the work force and are no longer taking the traditional female roles of being a stay-at-home mother who cleans and maintains the house. Women are already self conscious enough and are dealing with judging themselves about their looks to taking care of their kids to how the house looks to arranging dinner plans etc. Stressing about issues such as grad school or completing office deadlines, on top of all the above becomes very overwhelming. Part of the reason why I thought this post was useful was how the author described these dilemmas. Essentially it all comes down to balancing the needs of oneself vs. the needs of the family, home and work. This blog organized the demands and dilemmas into a chart like format: Basically this chart is a guide for women to ultimately be in the ideal situation or balance, which is according to this chart, high family and high career which means you are putting in enough effort to be a successful woman in the work force but you are not hurting your family bonds and relationships. As a woman, you have reached a point where you can balance both the demands you face with work along with ones at home. When women are really focused on their careers they become what the diagram refers to as “super career woman”. Most of their time and effort revolves around their job and solely their job. Thus, family life and other obligations begin to fall. People that are low in both areas of family and career are in a rut and their feeling of happiness is not found in the work place or at home. Women who are high with their family but low in career often are happier and feel more satisfied but in the end are poorer. When finding the ideal balance, Pinand argues that support in a women’s life is also important to achieve work and family balance (LTW, 205). Another post that I found online was actually posted a few days ago and is titled “Woman want a pay rise, men want a baby”. This post talked about a recent study by market research company which studied young people in their 20’s and results indicated that young women are increasingly finding their self-esteem and identity outside the traditional family structure of marriage and family. This post emphasized on the point that women are putting off having children because they are focused on their careers and that women prefer getting a pay raise or a compliment at work and feel this is more important than getting married or having kids. Ironically, the findings also showed the exact opposite for males. Young men would like to become dads earlier if they had the opportunity to find a woman who was willing to settle down. Overall, in the end, roles between men and woman are beginning to be reversed where women are the ones who want to be the ones that are successful while men are concerned about having a family. In Pinand’s piece, she talks about her experience and how in her first job after college her boss basically implied that it is impossible to have both a successful career and a happy life. Her boss explained to her that one or the other will suffer. At first, she did not agree with this point because she had grown up being taught that women can have successful careers and at the same time care for their children (LTW, 206). In the end, she agrees that her boss was correct and one or the other will eventually suffer. Women are constantly struggling when trying to find the balance between success and family life and ultimately in the end, most successful women would rather choose their career over having a family. Blog Links: http://www.transcendstrategy.com/?p=715 http://www.mercatornet.com/demography/view/8883/