but intense, these pressures are so deeply and broadly woven into each culture's everyday fabric as to be almost invisible to an outsider. Yet unless multinational corporations understand these forces, they will never recognize the real reasons behind a high-performing woman's decision to drop out—or be able to craft solutions to keep her.
THE FORCE OF FAMILY
Anjali Hazarika, head of talent management and administration for Oil India, tells a common story: “I took a sabbatical for two years when I was earning my doctorate and having a baby. But after the two years were over, I had to go [back to work] and leave my son behind. We didn't have flextime. That's when my mother came to stay with me. I had gone through the guilt feelings most women have when they leave their young at home, completely dependent on domestic help. I was fortunate to have my mother, who said, ‘I'm there for you. You go out and do what you want to do.’ Because of her, I could go out and work.” Hazarika continues, “And when my time came, I reciprocated.” Hazarika's mother lived with her daughter's family for the last ten years of her life. Hazarika says, “I was happy I could do a little of what she did for me. Parent care—it's a part of Indian culture.”
Working mothers in BRIC and the UAE are able to think big and aim high because they have multiple shoulders to lean on. Between grandparents, extended family, inexpensive and readily available domestic help, and an increasingly wide range of day care options, professional women in emerging markets are typically able to construct a support system without much difficulty.
Grandparents play a vital role in enabling working mothers to sustain a career, being involved in their grandchildren's care to a much greater extent than most grandparents in the United States and Western Europe. Many come from cultures where it was common to have children early; now that their children are having children of their own, they are still relatively young and in good health. Additionally, in many of these countries, the official retirement age remains lower than in the developed world, and expectations of retired life are very different. “My parents, in the Chinese tradition, are very willing to help,” said a Chinese management consultant. “They don't want to relax and travel like parents in the Western world.” Our research supports this, showing that more than 40 percent of women professionals working full time in Brazil and Russia—and a whopping 82 percent in China and 69 percent in India—have child care help from their parents or in-laws.
There are also fewer grandchildren to care for. Contrary to the prevalent view that all women in emerging markets have children, and lots of them, our data revealed that a significant proportion of educated women in emerging economies do not have children. Access to education and birth control—the same benefits that have lowered birthrates in the developed world—enables women in emerging markets to delay or decline motherhood. Among college-educated women aged twenty-one to sixty-four in our survey, more than half in Brazil, Russia, and India and almost half in the UAE did not have children.
Our earlier research in the United States showed maternal guilt to be a critical pull factor for women in high-pressure, demanding jobs, one that could override the gratification of and commitment to such work. Career women in emerging markets are no less immune to the maternal guilt suffered by their sisters in developed countries, despite the access to affordable child care and the propinquity of grandparents willing and able to take an active hand in their grandchildren's upbringing (see figure 2-1).
Patricia de Paula Braga's job managing product distribution for Latin America for Pfizer is so consuming that she can spend only two hours each day with her eight-year-old son during the week. “He asks me to stop working all the time,” she says. “It makes me feel concerned. I really like my job; I know that he is very proud of my career and I also understand that my professional success will be reflected in his future—giving him the chance to study in a good school and having access to opportunities that would not be possible without my contribution to the domestic budget—but some days I wake up and think it would be great if I didn't have to go to work and if I could dedicate all my time to spend with my son.”
FIGURE 2-1
Percentage of women working full-time who express maternal guilt
The seeds of maternal guilt find fertile ground in traditional cultural mores in BRIC and the UAE. The majority of survey respondents say that it is socially acceptable for women with small children to pursue a career, but traditional voices in their family can be quick to criticize their choices. Many of the professional women we interviewed recall small sharp digs from family members. A principal with an international advisory firm recalls, “My mother-in-law visited when our daughter was one year old and said, ‘I can't believe you're feeding her from boxes you bought in the supermarket rather than freshly cooked food. I guess that's the price of being a career woman.’ That's the sort of comment you have to swallow.” Her daughter turned three soon after she was made a principal. “I know my in-laws are proud that I got promoted, but there's always the feeling that if anything goes wrong with my daughter, it's because of me.”
Such traditional views are persistent, even if in muted form. About one in five of the women we surveyed reported feeling pressured “to drop out” of the workforce when they married. The exceptions are Brazil—at 16 percent, it was the lowest percentage in the group—and India, which topped the charts at 51 percent of women expected to give up their career prospects after marriage. The pressure further ratcheted up after the birth of their first child, nearly doubling in some cases.
“My friends and I grew up in an era when you studied, did postgrad, worked for a year or two, and then got married,” says Jayashri Ramamurti, an Indian woman now in her mid-thirties. Of the twenty women who graduated with her from a prestigious two-year graduate program in management, Ramamurti calculates that only four are working, most of them part-time. “They are intelligent women, but they are pretty much at home.”
Ramamurti herself left her fast-paced HR job in a telecommunications company after the birth of her second child in 2001. Despite a robust support network—her father lived nearly full-time with her family, and she also had a nanny and a live-in maid—something wasn't working. “I wasn't happy with the quality of time I was spending with my children,” especially her infant son, she says. In 2001 she quit, intending to take a couple of years off; instead, she stepped out of the workforce for more than five years. Ramamurti is now head of HR for Google India's engineering division and thrilled with her job, but she can't help taking an occasional backward glance: “Had I not had that break, would I have achieved a lot more?”
So strong is cultural pressure that some of the women expressed the realization that their maternal guilt was, to some extent, self-inflicted, with little or no bearing on the actual well-being or happiness of their children. “I feel guilty at times, but no one else makes me feel guilty,” confessed an Indian working mother of two school-aged children. “My kids are actually proud of me.”
When we probed deeper, we discovered a sophisticated awareness of the trade-offs of the costs of a high-powered career and an appreciation of its benefits. As one working mother in Brazil explained, “Sometimes I feel guilty, but I change my mind rapidly because without my job, I could not support education, health care, our house, vacations, et cetera.”
Still, even without guilt and with multiple shoulders to lean on, it's not easy juggling career and children. Even as they are fulfilling the responsibilities of their demanding jobs, professional women still shoulder the lion's share of child care duties in Russia, the UAE, and, especially, Brazil, where, according to our research, the majority take on at least 75 percent of the load. “In [Brazil], women are the ones who concern themselves with the kids,” notes Samara Braga, a financial markets leader for Ernst &
