Per this site:
In September 20th, 2005, the New York Times ran a front-page article (“Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,”) alleging that undergraduate women at elite colleges such as Yale plan to choose motherhood over their careers. Dr. Victoria Brescoll and the Yale Women’s Center set out to test this claim with a comprehensive study. Nearly a tenth of the student body (469 male and female undergraduates) participated.
Overall, the results of the study indicate that both women and men at Yale value career and family to the same extent. However, women believe that they will encounter greater barriers to balancing career and family. In short, men and women at Yale share the same life goals, but women believe that society will make it more difficult to achieve those goals.
The study’s findings include the following:
* A higher percentage of men than women plan on becoming a parent, and Yale men and women want roughly the same number of children
* Yale women plan to take more time off than Yale men after having children. However, only 4.1% of Yale women plan to stop working entirely once they have children. The large majority (71.8%) plan to take less than one year off from work.
* Men and women are equally likely to continue to work full-time if their partner could financially support them.
* Men and women are equally likely to continue to work full-time if they were able to get high-quality daycare for their children.
* Women are more likely than men to believe that if they work full-time, they will looked down upon. In contrast, men are more likely women to believe that they stayed home full-time to care for their children, society will look down on them. Thus, we see that Yale men and women believe that society will look down on them if they perform”out of role”behavior.
* Both Yale men and women value career and family to the same extent.
* But, Yale women believe more strongly than Yale men that they will encounter barriers to work-family balance. Yale women are more likely to believe that it will be difficult for them to work full-time, that they will have a hard time finding daycare, and that it will be hard to support their family on one salary.
Click here and scroll down for the complete results. Click here to read about the NYT article that inspired this survey.
–Ann Bartow
