An Oct. 26, 2011, headline in USA Today tells the story.
The headline boasted, "Number of female 'Fortune' 500 CEOs at record high."
"Great!" you may say.
But read further and here's the record-breaker: "If no women step down before the end of 2011, there will be 18 women running Fortune 500 companies in 2012. Previously, there haven't been more than 16 female CEOs at Fortune 500 firms at the same time."
Pardon my skepticism at the record-breaking year of 2012, but note that I'm not the only woman with a rueful laugh.
Facebook COO and chum of Oprah, Sheryl Sandberg, is not amused. She has a new book, published on March 11, titled, "Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead." That and several Sandberg speeches have touched off a sometimes-nasty debate about the reasons women currently hold just 4.2 percent of CEO positions.
Combatants called to arms by the "Lean In" phenomenon are banned from calling the vicious arguments now playing out in op-ed pieces across the country "mommy wars" and the phrase "having it all" is in similar disrepute. However, to summarize: Ms. Sandberg is a Harvard-degree-wielding multimillionaire telling women to look within and change certain behaviors that tend to make them "lean out" and choose the slow lane. (The term "mommy track" is verboten on most feminist blogs.)
She has been attacked by other Ivy-League-degree-wielding overachievers for shifting the blame for the dearth of women leaders from the unforgiving workplace to the shoulders of struggling career women. Princeton professor Ann Marie Slaughter writes in The Atlantic, "... look back to the 1980s, when women now in their late 40s and 50s were coming out of graduate school, and remember that our classes were nearly 50-50 men and women. We were sure then that by now, we would be living in a 50-50 world. Something derailed that dream. Sandberg thinks that 'something' is an 'ambition gap'- that women do not dream big enough. But I fear that the obstacles that keep women from reaching the top are rather more prosaic than the scope of their ambition.
"These 'mundane' issues - the need to travel constantly to succeed, the conflicts between school schedules and work schedules, the insistence that work be done in the office - cannot be solved by exhortations to close the ambition gap."
In between the pro-Sandberg or pro-Slaughter op-eds, some writers have adopted a third line of attack: To wit, both Ms. Sandberg and Dr. Slaughter are hopelessly out-of-touch 1-percenters who know nothing about the burdens of a single mother toiling in a dead-end job.
I find there's one common element bubbling up through the vitriol: Mothers matter. At the heart of each argument, be it in praise of "lean in" or in support of Dr. Slaughter's "you can't have it all" thesis or even from the folks decrying both as whiny elitists, is an agreement that it is the demands of child-rearing that have us at this impasse. Moreover, any way you approach the argument, all parties tacitly acknowledge that the demands of child-rearing impact the career choices of women far more decisively than they do men's.
In fact, the business world may be interested to learn that academia has noticed a similar problem. Last year, two Cornell University researchers published a paper that explored why in "math-intensive departments, women full professors number only between 4 percent and 13 percent." The study found that, once again, the common denominator was motherhood.
"Female post-docs are twice as likely as men to choose to leave the academic pipeline once they have children. For those women in math-based fields, who had the ability and commitment to persist through doctoral and post-doctoral training, this loss to the academy is especially salient," said Wendy Williams, co-author of the study. "Moreover, we found that childless women fare as well professionally as men with or without children, while women who remain in the academy after having children fare worse. Motherhood - and the policies that make it incompatible with a tenure-track research career - take a toll on women that is detrimental to their professional lives. Even just the plan to have children in the future is associated with women exiting the research fast-track at a rate twice that of men."
This echoes Ms. Sandberg's contention that women "leave before they leave," meaning they slow down well in advance of an actual maternity leave.
The message I take from all of this renewed examination of the trials of working women is that in the 50 years since "The Feminine Mystique," women have decided through their documented career choices that children must come first.
Highly educated and well recompensed women like Dr. Slaughter and Ms. Sandberg choose to put their children first and all the populist writers attacking them want their blue-collar sisters to be able to do the same.
In my own personal experience as a working woman with two now-grown kids, I believe that Sheryl Sandberg has it exactly right when she says, "Motherhood needs to be recognized as the most important job."
My own solution to the conundrum was to work part-time. On my days at home, I wasn't languishing on the couch channel surfing. I had my fingers in the paint, "Hop on Pop" in my hands while two little noses peered over them, or my feet in the kiddie pool on a summer's day while two potential scientists splashed, sprayed and poured out their experiments with water.
Yet despite the fact that I was busy doing perhaps the world's most important job, the attitude of everyone around me was that I could be pressed into doing any errand or chore on those days because I was free and "wasn't doing anything."
This is the attitude that Sheryl Sandberg and Ann Marie Slaughter and all of their detractors agree must change.
Nothing of significance - certainly not the structure and culture of the American workplace - will change until it does.
ELIZABETH ZYGMUNT is editor of the Northeast Pennsylvania Business Journal. Visit the journal's website at biz570.com and contact her at ezygmunt@ timesshamrock.com.