s seemed equally focused
on academics. I don’t remember thinking about my future career differently from the male students. I
also don’t remember any conversations about someday balancing work and children. My friends and I
assumed that we would have both. Men and women competed openly and aggressively with one
another in classes, activities, and job interviews. Just two generations removed from my grandmother,
the playing field seemed to be level.

But more than twenty years after my college graduation, the world has not evolved nearly as much
as I believed it would. Almost all of my male classmates work in professional settings. Some of my
female classmates work full-time or part-time outside the home, and just as many are stay-at-home
mothers and volunteers like my mom. This mirrors the national trend. In comparison to their male
counterparts, highly trained women are scaling back and dropping out of the workforce in high
1
numbers. In turn, these diverging percentages teach institutions and mentors to invest more in men,
who are statistically more likely to stay.

Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the first woman to serve as president of
an Ivy League university, once remarked to an audience of women my age, “My generation fought so
hard to give all of you choices. We believe in choices. But choosing to leave the workforce was not
2
the choice we thought so many of you would make.”

So what happened? My generation was raised in an era of increasing equality, a trend we thought
would continue. In retrospect, we were naïve and idealistic. Integrating professional and personal
aspirations proved far more challenging than we had imagined. During the same years that our careers
demanded maximum time investment, our biology demanded that we have children. Our partners did
not share the housework and child rearing, so we found ourselves with two full-time jobs. The
workplace did not evolve to give us the flexibility we needed to fulfill our responsibilities at home.
We anticipated none of this. We were caught by surprise.

If my generation was too naïve, the generations that have followed may be too practical. We knew
too little, and now girls know too much. Girls growing up today are not the first generation to have
equal opportunity, but they are the first to know that all that opportunity does not necessarily translate
into professional achievement. Many of these girls watched their mothers try to “do it all” and then
decide that something had to give. That something was usually their careers. ▼本▼作▼品▼由▼▼網▼提▼供▼下▼載▼與▼在▼線▼閱▼讀▼

There’s no doubt that women have the skills to lead in the workplace. Girls are increasingly
outperforming boys in the classroom, earning about 57 percent of the undergraduate and 60 percent of
3
the master’s degrees in the United States. This gender gap in academic achievement has even caused
4
some to worry about the “end of men.” But while compliant, raise-your-hand-and-speak-when-called-
5
on behaviors might be rewarded in school, they are less valued in the workplace. Career progression
often depends upon taking risks and advocating for oneself—traits that girls are discouraged from
exhibiting. This may explain why girls’ academic gains have not yet translated into significantly
higher numbers of women in top jobs. The pipeline that supplies the educated workforce is chock-full

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