Rolling Along the Mommy Track

By Janice Castro

Should women have to choose between a career and a family? Most business people would probably say the question was settled years ago with a resounding no. And yet beneath the placid corporate consensus on that issue lurks considerable anxiety about the double pressures on working mothers. For many ambitious women, a nagging fear persists that having children may cost them a chance at the top jobs. Despite the new outpouring of corporate benefits for working parents, professional women justifiably suspect that some bosses now categorize their female employees into two classes: mothers and achievers. "The idea is really offensive," declares Maryellen Cattani, a partner in a San Francisco law firm, whose Volvo carries her daughter's child seat in the back and a car phone in the front.

Workingwomen's resentment of the two-track notion has burst into the open, sparked by a management expert's proposal to introduce a formal basis for such a discriminatory system. Put forth by author Felice Schwartz in an article in the January-February issue of the Harvard Business Review (title: "Management Women and the New Facts of Life"), the plan suggests relegating most working mothers to a gentle career path, which wags have dubbed the Mommy Track. Only women willing to set aside family considerations would be singled out for the fast lane to the executive suite. The startling idea has raised concern that corporations will find a new justification for passing over women, this time not for alleged inability but for lack of time and commitment.

Schwartz, who heads Catalyst, a Manhattan research organization that focuses on work and family issues, offered the two-track plan as a way to help companies make the most of the vast numbers of women entering the managerial ranks. The author contends that women managers cost companies more to employ than men do. Turnover is greater among women managers, she says, because some of them quit high-pressure jobs when they cannot reconcile the conflicting needs of work and family. As a result, Schwartz claims, companies lose the time and training invested in such managers.

To cut their losses, Schwartz believes, companies must find a way to segregate "career-primary" women from "career-and-family" women. She argues that most working mothers would gladly trade advancement and high pay for the chance to spend more time with their families, and corporations would benefit from retaining them in less demanding middle-management positions.

Critics of the Mommy Track fear that employers might accept the notion that it is a bad investment to groom working mothers for high-level jobs. In fact, such corporations as Corning Glass and Merck have found that the costly career-track disruptions of parenthood can be reduced when companies help their employees balance the demands of work and family life. Thus the emergence of a formal Mommy Track strikes many people as archaic, especially at a time when companies are offering working parents a helping hand in the form of flextime, parental leave, day care and other programs.

Many major employers have been quick to reject the Mommy Track idea. Says James Cohune, a spokesman for McKesson, the San Francisco-based pharmaceutical and health-care-products distributor: "I can't imagine a company keeping someone down who wanted to move up, just because she had a family. That's the Stone Age." Another California giant, the Chevron oil company, offers flexible work schedules for working mothers but does not shift them to a slow career lane. Says Dave Hufford, manager of employment policies for the firm: "We all have to balance our personal lives with our career demands, but to try to put that on a track system wouldn't be easy or realistic."

What particularly grates about the Mommy Track is that it hews to the old- fashioned notion of singling out women rather than men for complete parental sacrifice. Another problem is that the system could put a woman on a slow track for a whole career, even though the critical child-rearing years constitute only one brief phase of her life. Says Jayne Day, mother of a six- year-old daughter and a partner in the Manhattan office of the accounting firm Peat Marwick: "How, at age 25, is anyone going to make a personal decision about what track to be on? Firms need to be more open and flexible."

She speaks from experience. At Peat Marwick, Day worked part time for two years, starting in 1984, when her daughter Jacqueline was one year old. After Day resumed her full-time duties in 1986, she was promoted to partner. Says Day: "If the Mommy Track becomes a slower track for certain periods in your career, well, I am willing to accept that. What I am not willing to accept is that it totally turns off my options later to get back on track."

Schwartz seems surprised that her article provoked a storm of criticism. Says she: "Companies aren't looking for ways to keep women down. They are looking for tools to help women surface." Even if Schwartz's methods have met a resounding "ugh," meeting that goal is crucial for women as well as their employers. Nearly two-thirds of all new workers in the labor force over the next decade will be women. That is the most compelling argument against any notion that companies can afford to sideline the millions of workingwomen who will decide to become mothers as well.

With reporting by D. Blake Hallanan/San Francisco and Melissa Ludtke/Boston