When I lived in New York and worked in finance the question of whether or not to dress up for work wasn’t a question: Yes, looking business sharp was a must. I still have a full collection of suits — well, to be honest, I hate suits, so I only have three — blazers (now those I love), shirts and numerous black pants hanging in my closet from those days. The company where I worked didn’t require us to be fully decked out in suits but you wouldn’t see jeans or t-shirts in the office unless it was the middle of the summer and the bosses were definitely out golfing networking.

Since those days we moved to Boston — a much more casual city, I find — and I now work for a software company where the office uniform is jeans with a t-shirt. (For some reason our group, myself included, are also into funky sneakers, which make our workplace uniform even more relaxed andunformal ). For the first few months after I started this job I was happy to work in such a casual environment. Getting dressed for work required a lot less planning and effort than what I was used to and I was really comfortable during the day.
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The opening sentence of Sue Shellenbarger’s piece in the WSJ caught my eye:

Has the workplace become so pro-family that if you don’t have a child, you have to make one up in order to get fair treatment?

I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot recently. At my job, there are many parents, but I also have many colleagues who don’t have kids. I’ve found that I’m often conscious about how I might be perceived as a working parent and careful to not expect or demand any special treatment from my boss or colleagues. For example, when we had a product release coming up, I knew that it would mean several very late nights in the office. So I lined up some extra babysitting (from my dad, thank you!) and asked my husband to please be home on time — I wanted to make sure that I was there, with my colleagues, as a team during that important and stressful time. I thought it was important that if I could swing it, that I not use the “I’ve got a kid at home” excuse to leave the office early.
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For the first time in a VERY long time I work at a company where many of my colleagues are also friends. Not the best, close, share everything, talk all the time friends, but friends whose company I enjoy and whose lives I’m happy to be a part of.

I’ve definitely had friends from work before. (One of my great life friends is a woman I worked with for five years at a small firm — even though we now live in different cities and don’t see each other often, we’re still good friends.) But what I’ve missed during the latter parts of my career is working in an environment where I have a lot in common with many people — vs. just a few — and where people do spend time together outside of work. I’m now realizing just how important it is for me to be in a social work environment and how much I missed this energy during the last few years when I worked from home.
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I am a sucker for any report or new story about working moms — not surprisingly, obviously — so of course I checked out the recent report from the Pew Research Center titled The Harried Life of the Working Mother. It is filled with all sorts of interesting (although predictable and somewhat obvious) data but the section that jumped out at me was about full time work and motherhood.

Overwhelmingly, moms and dads don’t think that working full-time and being a mom is an ideal arrangement.

This chart says it all:
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A friend recently told me that she is afraid to get a promotion at work. There are rumors of a reorg in her group and about her getting a promotion and instead of being excited, she is terrified. She already works a lot and her job is fairly intense; she is also a mom to a toddler. She told me that this promotion is the last thing she needs in her work-life juggle and she would be much happier if she could keep her career in a holding pattern for a while.

I bet there are many working moms out there who feel this way and to be honest with you, at times I do as well. I’m a self-admitted type A overachiever but I’ve seen a definite decline in my ambition since becoming a working mom. The most basic reason for this is simple: Exhaustion. As I’ve written about here, I don’t sleep enough and it’s absolutely affecting how ambitious I am in my career. I am not sure at this point I could come up with a lot more mental and physical energy a big promotion would require.
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Image from LA Times

I’m a fan of Diane Sawyer — she is smart, seems to treat her show guests with respect and just stunningly gorgeous — so I was happy to learn that she is taking over the nightly news anchor spot at ABC. Not all, but part of my happiness had to do with the fact that yes, here goes another woman into a highly visible position not often occupied by women. Katie Couric paved the way as the nightly news anchor for CBS and to have another woman in a coveted position is just cool. (If you want to have an “I can’t believe this moment”, consider this: Women occupy only 3% of the “clout” positions in media.)

But then I started to wonder whether we (read, we = women) should be celebrating Diane Sawyer’s new gig, as some women’s organizations are doing.
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My first job out of college was for McKinsey & Company, a super-competitive consulting firm in New York. I worked with really really sharp people and it was a huge learning curve. Many times, I felt like I was hardly keeping my head above water and not doing such a stellar job. Reviews were a big part of the process there and I was genuinely stressed out when my first one rolled around, thinking that my manager would deliver some bad news.

Then I had the review. It was glowing. There were absolutely some areas I needed to work on and improve, but overall, my performance was rated very highly by my manager and my colleagues and I got a nice $5,000 raise, a BIG deal for a 22 year-old just out of college, living in New York City.

This wasn’t the only instance in my career when my perception of how my work would be rated by my boss was worse than what my boss actually thought. Once I talked about this persistent (and annoying) feeling with another woman colleague and she confessed about feeling the same way. It was part of a larger conversation we had about the female impostor complex – feeling like someone would soon figure out that we’re not as great at our jobs as it might seem.

Unfortunately, it turns out that this is fairly common.
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I have an issue: I work too much.

I know, I know, it’s all relative but relative to how much I think I should be working in order to not go nuts I am working too much. For example, I worked about half of this weekend, if you count the hours. I was away on a business trip most of last week and if you travel for business you know that it’s like doing double work — when you come back, you have to catch up on all the work you didn’t do while you did business trip related work. I also managed to catch a terrible sinus infection on this trip, which reduced my productivity to zero when I returned. Oh, and did I mention that I’ve been on this huge, fire drill project at work, which means night and weekend work even without business travel or sinus infections.

Bottom line, I had a ton of work to catch up on and no choice but to do it over the weekend. I made a difficult, but conscious choice that I would be an absent wife rather than an absent mother: I worked Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights after my daughter was asleep and during her naps (thank someone for her being tired enough to take them!) Result? We got a bunch of fun family time together but whatever time I’d usually spend with my husband I used for work. (This is yet another sad example of the trade-off I find myself making in favor of being a mom vs. a wife and it absolutely makes me feel like I am terrible at being a wife.)
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So here’s my dilemma with all this technology and connectivity that we’re able to have today with our laptops, the Internet, mobile phones, synchronized folders, and so on:

On the one hand, these tools let me work any time and from anywhere, which means that I can leave work at a reasonable hour, see my kiddo, and then get my work done at night from the comfort of my living room. A big, big plus.

On the other hand, because I am always connected, I think I end up working more. Technology has blurred the line between my work time and non-work time, so I feel the need to catch up on work from home if I have some extra time. I wouldn’t be doing this if I couldn’t log on to work email from home, for example.
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According to this WSJ article, during a recent speech, Jack Welch, the famous former CEO of General Electric, told the audience that there is no such thing as work-life balance. Instead, there are trade-offs: If you want to take time off to stay home with your kids the trade-off is that you’re unlikely to get to the corner office. The article has several quotes from high-powered women executives who disagree with this notion of no work-life balance, and I’ve read some great blog posts of disagreement as well.

But having been a working mom in the business world (aka world that has corner offices to aspire to) I am here to say that I completely agree with Mr. Welch. It’s not possible to have it all. It’s not possible to work your butt off, go to all the networking and schmoozing breakfasts and dinners, fly to meetings at the last minute, stay late at the office, be under constant stress and pressure that a high-powered corner office-bound career has and have any significant time or energy left to be a mom. This might sound old-fashioned to some and as with every rule, there are definitely exceptions in the form of absolutely exceptional women who have figured this out, but I feel confident in saying that for most of us, there is definitely a choice between an intense career and living a life that has some kind of balance between work and family.

I speak from experience.
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