by Susan Faludi
The Fortune story originated from some cocktail chatter at a Fortune editor’s class reunion. While mingling with Harvard Business School classmates, Taylor’s editor heard a couple of alumnae say they were staying home with their newborns. Suspecting a trend, he assigned the story to Taylor. “He had this anecdotal evidence but no statistics,” Taylor recalls. So the reporter went hunting for numbers.
Taylor called Mary Anne Devanna, research coordinator at Columbia Business School’s Center for Research in Career Development. She had been monitoring MBA women’s progress for years—and she saw no such trend. “I told him, ‘I don’t believe your anecdotes are right,’” she recalls. “ ‘We have no evidence that women are dropping out in larger numbers.’ And he said, ‘Well, what would convince you?’” She suggested he ask Fortune to commission a study of its own. “Well, Fortune apparently said a study would cost $36,000 so they didn’t want to do one,” she says, “but they ended up running the story anyway.”
Instead of a study, Taylor took a look at alumni records for the Class of ’76 from seventeen top business schools. But these numbers did not support the trend either: in 1976, the same proportion of women as men went to work for large corporations or professional firms, and ten years later virtually the same proportion of women and men were still working for these employers.
Nonetheless, the story that Taylor wrote stated, “After ten years, significantly more women than men dropped off the management track.” As evidence, Taylor cited this figure: “Fully 30 percent of the 1,039 women from the class of ’76 reported they are either self-employed or unemployed, or they listed no occupation.” That would seem newsworthy but for one inconvenient fact: 21 percent of the men from the same class also were self-employed or unemployed. So the “trend” boiled down to a 9 percentage—point difference. Given that working women still bear primary responsibility for child care and still face job discrimination, the real news was that the gap was so small.
“The evidence is rather narrow,” Taylor concedes later. “The dropout rates of men and women are roughly the same.” Why then did he claim that women were fleeing the work force in “disquieting” numbers? Taylor did not actually talk to any of the women in the story. “A [female] researcher did all the interviews,” Taylor says. “I just went out and talked to the deep thinkers, like the corporate heads and social scientists.” One woman whom Taylor presumably did talk to, but whose example he did not include, is his own wife. She is a director of corporate communications and, although the Taylors have two children, three years old and six months old at the time of the interview, she’s still working. “She didn’t quit, it’s true,” Taylor says. “But I’m struck by the strength of her maternal ties.”
The Fortune article passed lightly over political forces discouraging businesswomen in the ’80s and concluded that women flee the work force because they simply would “rather” stay home. Taylor says he personally subscribes to this view: “I think motherhood, not discrimination, is the overwhelming reason women are dropping out.” Yet, even the ex—IBM manager featured on the cover didn’t quit because she wanted to stay home. She left because IBM refused to give her the flexible schedule she needed to care for her infant. “I wish things had worked out,” Witham told the magazine’s interviewer. “I would like to go back.”
Three months later, Fortune was back with more of the same. “A woman who wants marriage and children,” the magazine warned, “realizes that her Salomon Brothers job probably represents a choice to forgo both.” But Fortune editors still couldn’t find any numbers to support their retreat-of-the-businesswoman trend. In fact, in 1987, when they finally did conduct a survey on business managers who seek to scale back career for family life, they found an even smaller 6 percent gender gap, and 4 percent more men than women said they had refused a job or transfer because it would mean less family time. The national pollsters were no help either: they couldn’t find a gap at all; while 30 percent of working women said they might quit if they could afford it, 30 percent of the men said that too. And contrary to the press about “the best and brightest” burning out, the women who were well educated and well paid were the least likely to say they yearned to go home. In fact, a 1989 survey of 1,200 Stanford business-school graduates found that among couples who both hold MBAs and work, the husbands “display more anxiety.”
Finally Fortune just turned its back on these recalcitrant career women and devoted its cover instead to the triumph of the “trophy wife,” the young and doting second helpmate who “make[s] the fifty-and sixty-year-old CEOs feel they can compete”—unlike that selfish first wife who failed to make her husband “the focus of her life” and “in the process loses touch with him and his concerns.” Fortune wasn’t the only publication to resort to this strategy. Esquire, a periodical much given to screeds against the modern woman, devoted its entire June 1990 issue to a dewy tribute to “the American Wife,” the traditional kind only. In one memorable full-page photo, a model homemaker was featured on her knees, happily scrubbing a toilet bowl.
While women in business management received the most pressure to abandon their careers—the corporate boardroom being the most closely guarded male preserve—the media flashed its return-to-the-nest sign at all working women. “A growing number of professional women have deliberately stepped off the fast track,” Newsweek asserted in 1988, an assertion once again not supported by federal labor statistics. Women who give up career aspirations, the magazine said, are “much happier,” offering the examples of only three women (two of whom were actually complaining of self-esteem problems because they weren’t working full-time). More professional career women are “choosing” to be “something they never imagined they would be—stay-at-home mothers,” a New York Times Magazine article announced. It maneuvered around the lack of data to back its claim by saying, “No one knows how many career women each year leave jobs to be with their children.” A Savvy article weighed in with an even more unlikely scenario: “More and more women,” the magazine maintained, are actually “turning down” promotions, top titles, and high salaries—because they have realized “the importance of a balanced life.”
In 1986, just five months before Fortune claimed that female managers were leaping from the company ship, Newsweek was sounding a more general alarm to “America’s Mothers,” as the cover teaser put it. The May cover story was entitled “Making It Work: How Women Balance the Demands of Jobs and Children.” But the headline turned out to be ironic; the accompanying article hammered home its real message, that the balancing act is destined to fail. The inside headline, A MOTHER’S CHOICE, more accurately expressed the article’s sentiments. The choice offered America’s mothers was, as always, a prescribed one—go home or crack up.
The Newsweek story opened with a morality tale:
Colleen Murphy Walter had it all. An executive at a Chicago hospital, she earned more than $50,000 a year, had been married for a dozen years and had two sons. . . . But there was a price. Late at night, when everyone else was sleeping, she would be awake, desperately trying to figure out how to survive “this tangle of a lifestyle.” Six months ago, Walter, thirty-six, quit, to stay home and raise her children. “Trying to be the best mother and the best worker was an emotional strain,” she says. “I wanted to further myself in the corporate world. But suddenly I got tired and realized I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
“Today the myth of Supermom is fading fast—doomed by anger, guilt and exhaustion,” Newsweek proclaimed. “An increasing number” of mothers are working at home and “a growing number” of mothers have reached “the recognition that they can’t have it all.” If Newsweek was vague on the actual numbers, it had its reasons. The magazine did commission a survey to prove its point—but the poll found that 71 percent of mothers at home wanted to work, and 75 percent of the working mothers said they would work even if they didn’t need the paycheck.
That women might have less trouble “balancing” if they had fewer dishes and d
iapers in their arms—and their men had more—was not a point that Newsweek dwelled on. “Fathers are doing more at home and with their children,” the magazine insisted. It made much of its one example, “Superdad” R. Bruce Magee, who boasted to Newsweek that he had recently changed one out of every two diapers, cooked 60 percent of the meals and washed half the clothes.
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The media jumped when Felice Schwartz, the founder of Catalyst—a consulting firm to corporations on women’s careers—claimed that “most” women are “willing to trade some career growth and compensation for freedom from the constant pressure to work long hours and weekends.” Not only was Schwartz a bona fide expert, she was taking her stand in the esteemed Harvard Business Review.
The “mommy-tracking” trend, as the media immediately coined it, became front-page news; Schwartz personally fielded seventy-five interviews in the first month and her words inspired more than a thousand articles. It wasn’t as dramatic as women “bailing out” of the work force altogether, but it was better than nothing. “Across the country, female managers and professionals with young families are leaving the fast track for the mommy track,” Business Week proclaimed in a cover story. Their numbers are “multiplying.” It offered no actual numbers, only a few pictures of women holding children’s books and stuffed animals, and quotes from four part-time workers. The woman on the cover was even a mommy-tracking employee from Faith Popcorn’s client, Quaker Oats. (In another photo inside, she was posed next to three different Quaker Oats products.)
If the media had no evidence that the mommy trackers were multiplying, neither did Felice Schwartz. She merely speculated that the majority of women, whom she called “career-and-family women,” were “willing” and “satisfied” to give up higher pay and promotions. Corporations should somehow identify these women and treat them differently from “career-primary” women, allotting them fewer hours, bonuses, and opportunities for advancement. That this would amount to discrimination didn’t seem to occur to Schwartz. In fact, at a conference sponsored by traditional women’s magazines, she proposed that young women ignore Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and review their child-rearing plans with prospective employers; women need to move beyond “insistence on the rights women achieved in an era when we weren’t valued,” she told her audience.
Women with this mommy-track mind-set were, in reality, vastly in the minority in the workplace: in the 1984 Newsweek Research Report on Women Who Work, for example, more than 70 percent of women interviewed said they would rather have high-pressure jobs in which advancement was possible than low-pressure jobs with no advancement. And a year after Schwartz’s article was published, when the 1990 Virginia Slims poll specifically asked women about “mommy tracking,” 70 percent of the women called it discriminatory and “just an excuse for paying women less than men.”
Corporations, Schwartz asserted, had cause to be impatient with female employees; as she put it in the first sentence of her Harvard BusinessReview article, “The cost of employing women in management is greater than the cost of employing men.” As evidence she vaguely alluded to two studies, neither published, conducted by two corporations which she refused to identify. One of them, a “multinational corporation,” claimed its rate of turnover in management positions was two and a half times higher among top-performing women than men. That company, Schwartz reveals in a later interview, is Mobil Corporation—and its women managers were fleeing not because they were mommy tracking but because “until the last few years, it was a company that was not responsive to women.” Only in 1989 did Mobil even get around to modifying its leave-of-absence policy to allow its employees to work a reduced workweek temporarily to care for sick children or elderly parents, Mobil’s employee policy manager Derek Harvey concedes. But, Harvey maintains, Mobil is very accommodating of its women: “We’re a very paternalistic company.”
“I was not writing a research piece,” Schwartz says in her defense. “I was writing as an expert in the field.” But as an expert, she should at least have been familiar with the research. Federal statistics that have compared the cost of employing men and women find no significant differences between the sexes; men and women take about the same number of sick days and leaves. Schwartz herself seems to have come around to that view. In a turnabout that was as ignored in the press as her mommy-track credo was celebrated, she issued a ten-page statement hotly denying that she ever supported mommy tracking. Her recantation didn’t register, even on the Harvard Business Review editors still busy defending the article. “She speaks with a tone of authority,” the Review’s executive editor Timothy Blodgett told Ms. “That comes through.” Later that spring, the Review’s managing editor Alan M. Webber wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times that may help explain why he was so willing to trumpet the mommy-track message in his magazine. In his essay, entitled “Is the American Way of Life Over?,” Webber wrung his hands over “the demise” of motherhood and charged that critics of Schwartz’s article were too fixated on women’s rights and didn’t care about the future of American maternity. Fears over declining female fertility, not cheers for rising mommy tracking, was apparently the trend weighing heaviest on his mind.
• • •
If scaring women with tales of sleepless nights and “emotional strain” didn’t prompt women to leave the full-time work force, maybe they could be flattered into an exodus. That seemed, anyway, to be the premise behind Good Housekeeping’s massive “New Traditionalist” ad campaign, launched in 1988 with double-page ads in dozens of national publications. The New Traditionalist woman wasn’t even real, but she set off another round of trend stories in the national media, similar ad campaigns by publications from the New York Times to Country Living, and similar sales pitches by merchandisers from Ralph Lauren to Wedgwood. The New York Times even held up Barbara Bush as an example of the New Traditionalist trend, a case of a real woman living up to the standards of a fake one.
The New Traditionalist ads presented grainy photos of former careerists cuddled in their renovated Cape Codder homes, surrounded by adoring and well-adorned children. The accompanying text dished out predictable women’s magazine treacle about the virtues and “deep-rooted values” of any woman who “found her identity” by serving home, husband, and kids. But this homage to feminine passivity was cleverly packaged in activist language, a strategy that simultaneously acknowledged women’s desire for autonomy and co-opted it. The New Traditionalist, the ads said, was an independent thinker who “made her own choices” and “started a revolution.” The magazine’s ads assured readers, “She’s not following a trend. She is the trend. . . . In fact, market researchers are calling it the biggest social movement since the sixties.”
Praising women for their “choices” was hardly the purpose of this ad campaign. As Good Housekeeping publisher Alan Waxenberg himself asserted, women today “don’t need all that choice.” The “social movement” that Good Housekeeping had in mind would lead not only to the home but, more important, to the magazine’s subscription office. “America is coming home to Good Housekeeping” was the ad’s final sentence, an assertion that was just wishful thinking. In the ’80s, the circulation of traditional women’s magazines had fallen by about 2 million readers; ad linage was down at nearly all these magazines. And Good Housekeeping was worst off; its advertising pages had shrunk more than 13 percent in the year before the magazine launched the New Traditionalist campaign. But Waxenberg hoped that neotraditionalism would spur ad growth among the magazine’s staple advertisers: “Well-established brands will be big sellers in the future,” once the retrotrend takes hold, he said.
To salvage its profit margins, Good Housekeeping might have tried a more obvious strategy. It could have simply recognized women’s changed status, and changed with it. That tactic worked spectacularly for Working Woman, the only women’s magazine to concentrate on the business needs of career women in the decade. The magazine’s circulation climbed tenfold from 1980 to 1 millio
n subscribers by 1989, making it the most popular business magazine in the country—even more widely read than Business Week or Fortune. Its annual ad revenues (more than half from business products and financial services) increased accordingly, sixty times over, to more than $25 million.
In 1987, Good Housekeeping’s management was, in fact, considering a move in that direction. Maybe, some of its top editors proposed at the time, the magazine should appeal to working women. After all, even 65 percent of Good Housekeeping’s current readership worked. But when the magazine’s managers turned to an outside advertising agency for help, they were quickly talked out of such an unorthodox solution. “The problem, as they perceived it, was that they were considered old-fashioned and they thought they needed to be more contemporary,” recalls Malcolm MacDougall, the advertising executive commissioned to overhaul the magazine’s image. MacDougall, vice chairman of Jordan, McGrath, Case & Taylor, told them to think again; “neotraditionalism” was coming and they’d best be ready for it. His evidence: the counsel of Faith Popcorn and the fact that Quaker Oats’s hot-cereal sales were rising. (Evidence closer to home wasn’t as compelling: MacDougall’s wife works and, as he concedes, she found some of the New Traditionalist ads “kind of sexist.”) MacDougall says he found the oatmeal factor especially telling. “Two years ago, no one thought hot cereal would sell. Quaker Oats came out with ‘It’s the Right Thing to Do’ campaign and literally changed the way America eats breakfast!” (That ad also happens to be his. In fact, in a case of one ad campaign pitching in for another, the copy in one of the New Traditionalist ads, which MacDougall also wrote, murmurs about the delights of “oatmeal on the breakfast table.”)