All Posts Tagged With: "working mothers"

A conversation with my father brought to mind a blog post that I’ve been meaning to write. It’s a question that seems to come up quite frequently. Why has seemingly everyone assumed that a woman cannot have a career AND a family. Are these concepts mutually exclusive? According to many people they are.

Three years ago I posed a question to a group of women about how women can avoid pregnancy discrimination at work and got some interesting responses. Many focused on the legality of anti-pregnancy bias and whether or not it can be proven while others told me that women are fooling themselves if they think that can have both a family and a career. One woman started her own company to avoid the work drama. I got several emails from women wanting to know what kinds of responses I had received because they too were afraid of being discriminated against for having children.

Working women and families are certainly nothing new to me as my mother as well as all of my aunts worked while also having a family. I have also seen people say that women automatically take less stressful jobs with less potential for group after starting a family. I would like to understand if that is because they want to or if it’s because they are expected to. In addition, are these women from families where someone else is the primary provider? This is important to me as many single mothers I know do the same types of jobs they were doing before they had kids. Not only that but they also attend school to advance their education to help their careers. So to me it is a given that a woman can do both. I am a bit taken a back when others don’t see it that way.

What my father said to me was “I thought you were all about your career and not into kids.” I still wonder why he as well as others have said that about me. I know people who are very vocal about their desire not to have kids; I’ve never expressed this. I also don’t know what “all about your career” even means; especially since I hardly ever discuss it. What I am most certainly about is make sure that if I (re)marry and decide to have kids that it’s not for anything other than the right reason. The wrong reasons include my biological clock and the infamous “I’m not getting any younger.” One of the worse things in the world for me would be to be stuck in a stupid marriage because I’m afraid to be alone or because I rushed to have kids because my clock was ticking. When I make that decision I want it to be right. If God sees fit to bless me with children, then I will have them.

Getting back to the issue at hand though, it is assumed that a career-minded woman has no interest in family. A guy friend of mine told me that so many women are single because they spend too much time on their careers. This is unbelievable to me since I’ve always held the belief that you spend time working on self and growing and then the relationship/marriage thing will come. I’ve apparently been living on another planet with that one.

Having supported myself for how many ever years, I do question the idea of needing a man to support me as well as other societal norms that I don’t necessarily subscribe to. Among my problems is the belief that even though my career is just as important as any man’s, society says that I should give mine up should children enter the equation. Am I less of a human because I’m a woman? Maybe I just have less rights as a woman?