Oprah Winfrey has an impressive resume by anyone’s standards. She was the supervising producer and host for The Oprah Winfrey Show, which ran for 25 years and was the highest-rated TV talk show in television history, and is now the owner and producer of OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network. She has won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, over forty Daytime Emmy Awards, and has been on TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World list for eight years. She was the first black female billionaire in world history and is valued at $2.7 billion as of September 2011. Author, actress, talk show host, producer, philanthropist, billionaire…some would say she is the most powerful woman in the world. However, one thing Oprah Winfrey cannot claim to be is a wife or mother (though she gave birth to a boy at the age of 14, he died shortly afterwards and Winfrey has not had children since).
Winfrey’s status as a single, childless, and extremely successful woman may remind us of a current dilemma many women struggle with: the perceived choice of whether to pursue a career or have a “traditional” family, since having both can seem daunting. Now, Oprah is not the perfect actualization of this phenomenon: she may have not wanted children and may have not faced this choice. However, it is interesting to note that one of the most influential and inspiring women on the planet whose main audience is women reflects one outcome of this choice.
Many women ponder how their career will play out when they enter the workforce and therefore begin to make career choices on the assumption that they will have children. In considering the issue of “having time” to both be a mother and have a career, women may not pursue or accept promotions in their career, even years before they have children, as a way to plan for the future. This consideration is visible in the careers women choose: women are less likely to be employed in tech start-ups science or engineering positions, which require substantial amounts of time and individual work to get off the ground. They are less likely to be published in academic journals, receive tenure, or hold fast-track and time-intensive corporate positions. Only 3.6% of women are CEOs and 13% are shareholders. Strangely enough, this does not only extend to the worlds of finance and technology. In the medical field, women make up a higher proportion of dermatologists compared to other, more time-consuming medical professions such as internal medicine.
Women also see motherhood and childcare as a barrier to career success because of the time and development lost with maternity leave, and this belief has empirical support. The wage gap between mothers and non-mothers is currently larger than the wage gap between men and women: non-mothers earn 10% less than men, while married mothers earn 27% less and single mothers earn between 34% and 44% less than men. That averages out to working mothers making only 77 cents to a man’s dollar, and 77 cents to their childless coworkers’ 90 cents. Additionally, women face motherhood wage penalties of 9-18% per child, and a Cornell University study in 2005 showed that women without children applying for a job would earn $11,000 more than mothers with the same qualifications. These accumulated factors enforce the belief that women can’t really ‘have it all’ and must choose.
Though Oprah is an example of a successful woman without a traditional family, there are many women, both in Hollywood and otherwise, who are very successful and are married with children. Take, for example, Sheryl Sandberg, the second-in-command at Facebook and #5 on Forbes’ Most Powerful Women 2011 list. This Harvard graduate is married with two daughters and is poised to make around $1.6 billion after Facebook’s public offering. Female celebrities, including Angelina Jolie, Heidi Klum, Victoria Beckham, and Beyoncé (though she has just given birth to Blue Ivy Carter) also demonstrate the possibility of a successful work-family balance. Apart from celebrities with money and staff, many regular women, including my own mother validate that women can have both a family and career.
It is not impossible to be a successful working mother, and more women exemplify this every day. However, women perceive a choice between work and family because the two, in spite of huge leaps women have made in the past decades, still do not seem compatible. Why is this important? Women currently make up half of the workforce, even more so during the recession when more men became unemployed. In purely economic terms, it is beneficial to make women feel able to both have a career and a family so that their choice does not make productivity and the economy suffer, either by women working less or completely leaving the force. Women should also be encouraged to enter into typically “male” fields and contribute their skills and viewpoints to those industries. America’s approach to child care and alternative work arrangements for families with children, which is far behind many other industrialized countries, is a good place to start to address this issue. Though we can’t all reach Oprah Winfrey-level wealth and power, women shouldn’t have to choose between career success and family.