Let’s Hope Pleas to Put Family First Will Sink In

It was an interesting counterpoint to the usual commencement address, one that was especially timely for a city that seems awash in the blood of its children.

Barbara Bush, the ultimate comfy-cozy maternal figure, was not about to lecture the Pepperdine University class of 1992 about corporate bottom lines, how to burnish a resume or the heroes and villains of the political season.

“You invited the mother of five to speak,” she said, “so I want to talk to you about families.”

There was no controversy on Thursday; no Wellesley College-style protest that the speaker was a woman who had become famous on her husband’s coattails, a woman who dropped out of college after two years to marry. Pepperdine is a different kind of school than Wellesley. Affiliated with the Churches of Christ, it is clearly more conservative, less prone to feminist political outbursts.

Bush’s speech was, essentially, a warmed-over version of her 1990 Wellesley address and can be summed up by a paragraph virtually unchanged in each: “Remember, at the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a parent or a friend. You will regret not reaching out to lend a hand.”

In truth, the Pepperdine speech lacked some of the sparkle she brought to the Massachusetts ceremony. She didn’t joke, as she did at Wellesley, that, “Who knows? Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps and preside over the White House as the President’s spouse. . . . And I wish him well.”

But what Bush had to say was important. We can’t be reminded too often that family needs to come first.

The problem is, we don’t exist in a world structured around that ethic.

Working parents don’t usually get the opportunity to choose between children and work. For men, work has always come first. For women, there are penalties when it does not.

Two researchers at Ohio’s Wright State University, Ann Wendt and William Slonaker, studied 2,000 employment-discrimination lawsuits filed between 1985 and 1989. They found that nearly a quarter of the women who took maternity leave had no job waiting for them when they wanted to go back to work. By contrast, only 2% of women taking leaves for other medical conditions lost their jobs. (This, incidentally, violates federal law. Employers are not supposed to treat maternity leaves less favorably than other medical leaves.)

Another recent study, by economics professors Laurence Levin and Joyce Jacobsen, found that women who interrupt careers for family never make as much money as female peers who stay on the job.

“The negative effects of a break in earnings,” write Levin and Jacobsen, “are quite persistent, being discernible even 20 years after the last break has ended. Further, the effect of a gap on a woman’s lifetime earnings is significantly larger than just her foregone wages during the time of the gap.”

What’s curious, and upsetting, about the second study is that the so-called “gappers” had only one or two work gaps of at least six months over two decades . Think of that: Six months off in 20 years and a woman may be doomed to lower pay forever.

At Pepperdine, where you could have hardly imagined a more promising day on which to begin the rest of your life, I was a bit disappointed by some of Bush’s omissions.

The word wife was conspicuously absent from that list of people with whom one might regret not spending enough time.

I wish she had urged the business leaders of tomorrow, sitting in their gowns and mortarboards today, that one day they may be in positions to shape how business responds to the needs of the family.

And I wish she had been a little more emphatic about the need for shared parenting. More men than women could use Bush’s encouragement about family primacy, and I could not help but feel her message was directed more at the aspiring career women in the audience than the aspiring career men.

After the ceremony, I spoke to graduates Cathy Roberts and David Reynen, both of whom hope to pursue careers in biology.

Bush’s speech, said Roberts, “was really inspiring for all of us who are going to be getting married and having kids in the future. So many (children) have come from a family where their parents aren’t there for them.”

Reynen found the speech refreshing: “At graduation, a lot of people are worried about what they’re going to be doing as far as professions and careers and which company they’re going to be working for. And hearing something that really means something, about the heart of life--the family--that was a really nice change.”

It was. And I hope Roberts and Reynen know that as they pursue careers and create families, they don’t have to be bound by the old roles and expectations.

Their destiny may be biology, but it doesn’t have to be the other way around.