This week, in UK’s The Independent, an article quoting Location, Location, Location presenter Kirstie Allsopp encouraged women to put back going to university in favour of settling down and having kids, because “fertility falls off a cliff when you’re 35”.
The fertility clock, however, isn’t the only kind of clock that exists in women’s minds or bodies.
“At the moment, women have 15 years to go to university, get their career on track, try and buy a home and have a baby. That is a hell of a lot to ask someone,” she told The Independent.
“We have to readjust. And men can have fun after they have kids. If everyone started having children when they were 20, they’d be free as a bird by the time they were 45.”
I’m glad she mentions some responsibility on the man’s part too, but this all speaks to the one irritating stereotype that so many career-minded women have been trying to shake off for years. Namely, that you can’t have children and a career at the same time, particularly if you’re female. It screams somewhat of the comments around Hillary Clinton’s becoming a grandmother and her subsequent 2016 presidential candidate validity. In one word: Ludicrous.
It’s fair enough to suggest that having a child, and then a career, is a valid option. And, certainly, many women might take it. But it’s not healthy to recommend that women who want to get into a job requiring a degree putting off study, as if a career is an aspect of your life that somehow comes below being a mother, or that are somehow irreconcilable.
What message does it give to your children if you tell them that you decided to skip all of that study, that part of your career, to give birth?
There are fabulous women who rise to success in their older years, but what about the magical experience of being in your 20s and building that career?
Think of the substantial benefits that come to starting work early. For instance, if you stuff it up – you can re-train. You don’t want to be 40, finish studying, working for five years, and then realising that you don’t actually like your field (a lot of my friends are suddenly realising that they got more than they bargained for in the area they studied, for instance).
Or finishing at 40 and finding yourself up against 20-something men, and women, who went when they were young and who can, unfortunately, afford to do the same job for much less money.
You want to have the ability to screw it up, change your mind and start over. When you’re in your twenties, this is entirely acceptable. Dependents, and other obligations such as mortgages, change your freedom to make mistakes and mess it up.
Her concept is that women should save up for a deposit, while living at home, and then “find a nice boyfriend” and have a baby by 27.
I am a huge advocate for women and men to take hold of their own financial security, to buy a property if that’s important to them – it is to me – and to take advantage of their younger years (compounding interest is a magic all of its own).
However, I am not an advocate of delaying starting your career – something that, for an increasing number of women, is an aspect of who they are much in the same way that being a mother is for others.
Allsop even suggests, perhaps with some humour, that going to university at 50 (yes, 50) might be more viable. Some careers take decades to build, and much energy, networking and evenings away from your family. Perhaps you will be required, mid-career, to live in another country for a career move. Many of my female role models went alone overseas for an offer and tell me this was one of the most important decisions they made for themselves. With children, such a move is often far less welcome.
Her suggestion that women should have children earlier also flies in the face of a study from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research that found early mothers were the least satisfied and depressed of all those they surveyed, with late mothers being the most satisfied with their lives and the happiest. The reason for this increase in happiness? “[Probably] related to being more career focused and having higher social standing,” said University of Michigan sociologist Amy Pienta.
She said that happiness “only rebounds much later, when the children have left home. So it was surprising to find the highest level of well-being among the group that was most likely to have children still living at home or still in college. It suggests that delaying motherhood may have some benefits for women—probably”.
One analogy sticks with me very strongly. David Sedaris wrote of imagining your life as four burners on a stove.
“One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work,” he wrote in his New Yorker essay ‘Laugh, Kookaburra’.
“The gist … was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.”
Why should the burner you turn off need to be your career?