"It was my first summer associate job after my first year of law school, and I was at one of the first summer associate gatherings chatting with two of the male partners... [One] went on to say 'we create lots of opportunities to advance women and the fact is, if want to have children, you can still make partner and you can still get ahead--but you need to accept that it will take you longer because you will need to take time out'... He wasn't referring to maternity leave or a year off work, he was referring to the mere fact that [having] a child in your life would create a disturbance in your professional force and distract you from your career goals... It occurred to me, what made me so uncomfortable about that conversation is that the men didn't have to make that choice. They could have their cake and eat it too, and nobody was going to accuse them of derailing their career because they wanted to--shocker--have a family. In fact, it made them a more elligible candidate to be seen as a family man."
In this episode of the Mother Board, Taylor Poncz and Aarati Subramaniam discuss the weight of childbearing on women, the impacts of maternity leave (or lack thereof) has on working women, and the efforts to adapt, change, and update maternity leave policies across the corporate and legal fields.
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