Stanford Report, April 25, 2001
BY BARBARA PALMER
If there's one thing Laraine Zappert would like working mothers to know, it's this: You're not the only one eating dinner off your dashboard.
"Everyone struggles," said Zappert, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the School of Medicine and author of Getting It Right: How Working Mothers Successfully Take Up the Challenge of Life, Family and Career, published by Pocket Books in February. At Stanford, Zappert also directs the university's sexual harassment policy office and women's support programs in the graduate schools of business, law, medicine and engineering.
Zappert has talked to many women struggling to combine work and family responsibilities who assume everyone else has everything under control. They imagine others are blithely heading up companies and raising small children, "all while doing a little brain surgery and building a house on the side," Zappert said. "That's a fantasy. One doesn't know what goes on in other people's lives."
After two decades of clinical and research practice, however, Zappert knows more than most. In addition to the experience of the women with whom she's worked in her private practice, Zappert drew on a 1996 research study conducted with three generations of alumnae of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. For the study, more than 300 women answered 10 pages of questions about their home and work lives.
Since more than half the women she surveyed work more than 40 hours a week, Zappert had worried that the questionnaire's length might discourage women from responding. Instead, more than half the women who received the survey returned it with the margins covered with scribbled comments or accompanied by more pages filled with comments. "We touched a nerve, " Zappert said. "These are issues women love to talk about."
Her book is not just about the experience of MBA moms, but includes experiences of female teachers, engineers, writers, doctors, lawyers and stay-at-home mothers, she said. But it doesn't address the problems faced by working mothers with lower levels of education and expertise, she said.
"I think what it says is that there's a certain universality of experience that women have. If you make a decision to have children, whether you have an MBA or an M.D. or not, they are a potent, important aspect of your life."
Along with the rewards of motherhood, "working mothers feel despair, anxiety, anger and conflict. But we are not alone in doing this. And too often we try to deal with this in isolation."
It's a common assumption that psychologists research their own neurosis -- and Zappert, the mother of two grown children, said she's no exception. The first woman in the organizational behavior doctoral program at Cornell University in the 1970s, she already had developed an interest in women's issues when she came to Stanford in 1977 with a 3-year-old daughter. Her second child, a son, was born in 1981.
"I remember walking into the VA hospital as an intern, with a cookie plastered to the back of my skirt. We used to laugh about the 'Cheerio line,' which is how far up your suit leg the kids could reach."
Most moms report 'great stress'
Juggling parental and professional roles was difficult for most of the women Zappert surveyed. More than half said they suffered "a great deal of stress" in meeting the demands of career and family. Even so, the mothers in the sample were overwhelmingly happy with their decision to have children -- virtually all of them said it definitely was the right decision. "Clearly, children are primary in the life of professional women," Zappert said.
The women in her sample were making tremendous sacrifices, often at their own expense, Zappert said. "What we do is really hard and we do it well. But we pay for it in terms of our own psychological well-being."
Zappert devotes an entire chapter to guilt, from the "driveway remorse" working mothers feel as they leave their house in the morning to the guilt stay-at-home mothers feel about not using their education. "That's the chapter that most women are focusing on," Zappert said, judging from the e-mail messages she's gotten from readers.
The women in the study wrote to Zappert lamenting their messy houses and the pressure they felt to do things like hosting elaborate birthday parties for children, "to stage Ben-Hur while working 60 hours a week," Zappert said.
Women are likely to feel guilty no matter what they do -- or don't do, Zappert said. Guilt is "very hard to escape, but it wastes a lot of time and energy." The key is to determine for yourself what you and your family need, she said.
The advice that mothers in the survey most frequently offered to other women thinking about having children was to be prepared to spend money to get the childcare and household help they need. Some even suggested that it was worth going into debt to get adequate help, Zappert said.
Finding good childcare was the most significant stressor for many of the women in the study, who earned on average $100,000 a year. "Childcare was a tremendous strain," she said. Even for the high-earning women in the sample, it was not uncommon for women to spend a significant portion of their after-tax earnings to pay for childcare, she said.
Not everyone in the sample was highly paid, Zappert said. Many of the women talked about the stress of diminished financial resources after cutting work hours to part time or having not gone after top-flight positions because of their children.
But even when resources are short or there is very little money, people can allocate resources differently, she said. "Do whatever you can do to take care of yourself. Indulge yourself in ways that aren't financial," she suggested. "Put more money into childcare or household help, if it's at all available, instead of saving it for a rainy day. This is the rainy day."
Parents also should "keep up the pressure on institutions to do better on childcare," she said. Although many organizations and corporations now give childcare issues serious consideration, it takes time to turn talk into action, Zappert wrote.
In the study, the women who had worked the longest were most optimistic about the chances of women successfully integrating work and family, Zappert reported. "Everything doesn't have to happen at once," a Business School graduate from the 1960s wrote. "Taking a longer-term perspective on things is important."
Most women surveyed said that there is no definitive "right" time to have children, although the prevailing wisdom is that women should get their credentials out of the way first, Zappert said.
The youngest women in her survey were planning to have children when their careers are established, but early enough to avoid fertility problems. Many women wrote very poignantly about trying to get pregnant later in life, Zappert said. "It's a huge issue for many women."
Many Stanford women suggested a "sequencing" plan, where women establish their professional credentials first, gear down to less demanding or part-time work while raising children, and then ramp up their careers again later. There's not much information about how that works in the long term, since part-time work wasn't a practical reality for women until recent decades, Zappert said.
In spite of the difficulties they faced, 80 percent of the women in her sample reported being in excellent spirits, Zappert said. "This was a very positive group. Most professional women have an enormous store of energy."
Zappert
will discuss her research and clinical experiences
related to the challenges faced by professional working
women at a noon to 1 p.m. workshop Wednesday, May 2, in
the Cypress Room at Tresidder Union. The workshop is
sponsored by the Help Center and the Work/Life Office and
is open to university and hospital faculty and staff.
Call 723-4577 to register to attend.
Laraine Zappert
