Mommy, Me and an Advanced Degree

On a recent evening at Lilly’s French Cafe on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice, Andrea Stanford, 35, joins four other mothers at an outside table for a book club dinner. The evening’s selection, “Midwives,” is aptly titled, for the women are in the process of birthing new lives not only for their young children, but also for themselves.

You might say that Stanford and her book club friends are thoroughbreds of the U.S. economy. Each invested prodigious amounts of time and money to acquire an advanced degree in business or law from a top university. Each built an impressive work resume.

And, then, after bearing a child in her 30s, all but one in recent years decided to lay aside the prestige, adventure and income of her professional life to raise a family from home. The one working mother in the group has a part-time job. In Stanford’s case, this meant reducing the number of household income streams from two to one, just after buying a house. She isn’t alone in taking this course. At Stanford’s other book club, seven of the eight members--all women with advanced degrees--are stay-at-home moth- ers who are postponing their career goals. Says Stanford, “We feel like we’re doing something really important. I don’t think there’s a lot of regret. We all see this as our second career.”

A similar phenomenon is at work on the other side of the country in Cambridge, Mass., among a slightly younger group of women in their late 20s to early 30s. In the second-year class of MBA candidates now at Harvard Business School, it appears that two to three times as many students as usual are pregnant. The increase is anecdotal; the university doesn’t keep track of whether its female students are expecting. But students say a typical class will have one or two pregnant students. This year, there are at least five pregnancies or births, and a rumored sixth, among the 200-plus female students.

In addition, other women in the class say they hope to follow suit, opting out of the rush to interview with a dwindling number of recruiters on campus in this economic downturn. Says one woman who is trying to get pregnant, “I’m amazed by the number of pregnant bellies I see in class.”

Is something afoot? Perhaps. A combination of forces, from the lagging economy to a shrinking number of flexible job positions to the psychological fallout from the World Trade Center disaster, is pushing some of the country’s best-prepared career women toward stay-at-home motherhood. And that could magnify a trend detected by the U.S. Census Bureau and detailed in its “Fertility of American Women” report, released in October.

The report surveyed 30,000 women and found that between June 1998 and June 2000, the percentage of women in the workplace with infant children declined from 59% to 55%. It was the first such drop since the periodic survey began in 1976.

Vicky Lovell, a study director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, D.C., speculates that the drop may simply reflect the exit from the work force of a well-off group of women who joined it between 1994 and 1998, the time of the last Census Bureau report.

“We saw sort of a bubble,” Lovell says. “My interpretation of it was that this was a group of women who were unusually privileged and who entered the labor force at a vigorous time in the economy. The opportunities may have been too good for them to give up.”

Even at the peak of the boom, however, in the 1998 to 2000 period, many of more than two dozen women interviewed say they began trading economic opportunity for time at home with the children. In some cases, they did so because their husbands were making enough to offset the loss of their salaries. And many found the dot-com ethos of long hours and endless work weeks incompatible with effective child-rearing, no matter how tempting the financial reward.

Once the downturn started, in spring 2000, layoffs began and job opportunities dwindled. Some decided the time had come to make a change they’d been contemplating for months or even years. “From an economist’s point of view, it’s very rational,” Lovell says. “They’re guessing the recession will not last very long and thinking that the salary they’re giving up now is probably less than what they will get later.”

It is unclear whether this decline will continue as the economic doldrums force more fiscal austerity on U.S. families. “We won’t know for a while where the trend will settle down,” Lovell says. But for some with the means to opt out of the work force, the new realities of recession-era workplaces and a shift in the national mentality have put a brighter gloss on motherhood.

Back when the nation’s crop of 2002 business school graduates sent in their applications for MBA programs, job opportunities were plentiful, with employers dangling enticements ranging from huge signing bonuses to plum assignments for recent grads.

If the job market were still strong, Belen Aranda-Alvarado, a member of the Harvard Business School class of 2002, suspects it would be difficult to embrace the prospect of motherhood. “I would be feeling, ‘Oh, I’ve got to get out there,’” she says. “I would have considered a big media company career in New York, and we [she and her longtime boyfriend] would have been in a long-distance relationship.”

Instead, Aranda-Alvarado, 28, plans to marry soon. She gave birth Dec. 14 to a daughter. Two days later, she finished her final exams. The pregnancy was welcome but unplanned.

“Probably when we entered business school, [pregnancy] wasn’t what any of us were thinking,” Aranda-Alvarado said of herself and her classmates. “It certainly wasn’t what I was thinking.” But the recession, combined with the horror of watching so many working professionals perish in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, has shifted Aranda-Alvarado’s priorities.

“I don’t need to get onto this treadmill that everyone is on right away,” she says. She suspects she will put her MBA to use from home, starting an entrepreneurial venture while staying close to her baby. In the competitive breeding ground of some of the nation’s top business students at Harvard, her choice is being met with broad support from her peers.

“I was surprised at how many men said, ‘Take a year off. That is what I would do,’” Aranda-Alvarado says. “They kind of see me as having the perfect solution [to the recession] that is socially acceptable.”

She believes that for now, the balance of power has shifted from employee to employer, and “it’s going to get nastier before it gets any better.” But stepping away from the workplace may simply mean trading one set of stressors for another.

Mothers and mothers-to-be find themselves in a particularly existential juncture, says Joanne Brundage, founder of Mothers and More, www.mothersandmore.org, an Elmhurst, Ill.-based national support network for women who alter their career paths to care for their children. Shifting from the workplace to the home in the best of times tends to precipitate an “unintentional midlife crisis.” But in the aftermath of Sept. 11 and smack in the middle of an economic downturn, the tensions are acute. “It’s a fascinating combination of events societally,” Brundage says. “On the one side, women are feeling financially vulnerable. On the other side they’re feeling their values shift.”

Jennie Wong, 35, the director of development for the Southern California office of the Arthritis Foundation, gave birth in September and decided last month that it just isn’t worth it to work even part time if it means missing her son’s rapid growth. Once a week she attends a “Mommy and Me” class with as many as 30 other new mothers. She estimates that about half are stepping out of the work force. She doesn’t envy those compelled to balance work pressure with infant care. Among those who are returning, she says, “there is a lot of anxiety and a lot of depression.”

Long Beach-based interior designer Lisa Kells, 33, whose son was born in October, confesses to wishing she could easily choose to stay at home.

“The recession does not make this easier. I feel I need this job to bring home the bacon,” Kells says. But, she adds, “I want to be a mom and stay at home. I feel guilt about going back.” A longtime weekly airplane traveler for work, Kells recently discovered she feels less inclined to leave home. “I was like, ‘Why am I feeling weird about going to the airport?’ All of a sudden you have another set of values.”

Amy Shohet, who lives in Los Gatos, feels much the same way. Shohet quit her job in October. And she pulled her baby out of infant day-care, joining a large number of Bay Area women who did so after the recession set in last year, which wiped out long waiting lists at the once-crowded centers.

Shohet had spent years working toward a master’s degree in social work and had risen to a management position at a nonprofit catering to the needs of emotionally disturbed children. She wore a pager 24 hours a day and oversaw a staff of 15. “I worked very hard to get where I was,” Shohet said.

So it was with mixed feelings that she made the choice to stay home. But the long hours and cost of child care made it difficult to keep her modest-paying position. The recession hastened her decision to quit. Given the current job climate, she and her husband are afraid to do anything to jeopardize the good standing Shohet’s husband enjoys at his job. If Shohet worked, he would need to leave the office more regularly to handle child care. “We didn’t want to take any kind of chance with him asking for any time off,” says Shohet. And she’s not alone. “A lot of women I know who are pregnant say, ‘I wish I were getting laid off’” to make the decision to stay home easier, she says. But making such a choice can be costly, says Ann Crittenden, author of the book “The Price of Motherhood.” Even women with supportive husbands are putting themselves at enormous financial risk by opting out of the workplace, she says. They won’t be building up savings toward retirement. Should they divorce, courts traditionally do not reward substantial child support to women with advanced degrees, assuming they can easily find work, she says. At the same time, Crittenden says, she’s happy to see women asserting their values with their children.

“Those who can afford it are voting with their feet because given the workaholic climate in most workplaces, it’s the only way they can spend any time with their babies,” she says. “They’re between a rock and a hard place.”

Margot Rabinowitz Eiran, 30, is feeling the pinch. The second-year MBA candidate at Harvard says the recession and the World Trade Center attacks firmly convinced her to put family first. Eiran has yet to become pregnant, but she and her husband recently decided they would start a family sooner rather than later, even if their circumstances aren’t perfect.

The Sept. 11 attacks “gave us the immediate feeling that we should live our lives to the fullest,” says Eiran, who was a highly paid consultant before business school. “My ideal was to have kids when we have more of a financial base. But I’ve lowered my ideal. Now I don’t feel like staying in one of those high-pressure jobs, even though I do have bank loans hanging over my head.”

Eiran wants to stay home with her child. But her husband recently started his first year of a doctoral program and probably won’t make enough money in the short term to support a family. Eiran knows she may have to work.

Even so, she finds that some classmates are urging her to have a child. “They say, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and do it?’ Maybe this external situation has changed people’s attitudes,” Eiran speculates. She has decided she is ready to make financial and professional sacrifices to become a mother. “I am looking at how people raise kids in low-income situations. They do get by. They manage.”