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Surveys Say

More Than Their Mothers, Young Women Plan Career Pauses

Beginning in college, years before she planned to have children, Yi Gu began strategizing about how to have a career that was flexible enough to fit in family responsibilities.

She knew that arrangement wasn’t realistic in her first two jobs: banking, in which she worked very long hours, or consulting, in which she traveled often. Instead, she saw those as preparation for the more flexible job she took last year at age 31, in strategy at a major pharmacy company. She became pregnant soon after.

“The definition of work-life balance keeps on changing,” she said. “Out of business school, not being married and not having kids, anything less than 80 hours a week to me was balanced. Then in consulting, it was if I traveled or had time during the week to hang out with friends. Now with a kid, the definition has changed again.”

The youngest generation of women in the work force — the millennials, age 18 to early 30s — is defining career success differently and less linearly than previous generations of women. A variety of survey data shows that educated, working young women are more likely than those before them to expect their career and family priorities to shift over time.

The surveys highlighted that two generations after women entered the business world in large numbers, it can still be hard for women to work. Even those with the highest career ambitions are more likely than their predecessors to plan to scale back at work at certain times or to seek out flexible jobs.

You might call them the planning generation: Their approach is less all or nothing — climb the career ladder or stay home with children — and more give and take.

In surveys of millennials who are college-educated professionals by the Center for Talent Innovation, a research group, the young people said they saw their parents struggle while working full time or leave the work force altogether, and wanted a different option. “They felt as if they were learning from generations before them, and saw all of the downsides in both choices,” said Laura Sherbin, the center’s director of research. “Millennials are looking for more of a balance.”

A survey of Harvard Business School alumni, released as part of the school’s new gender initiative, found that 37 percent of millennial women and 42 percent of those already married planned to interrupt their career for family. That compared with 28 percent of Generation X women and 17 percent of baby boomers.

The surveys also revealed that some younger women believe today’s economy has made it harder to be a working parent. In the Harvard survey, fewer young women than older women said they expected to successfully combine work and family or have a career equal to that of their husband.

Half of women 30 and under said they thought their gender was a disadvantage at work — equal to the share of baby boomers who said the same. Women were less likely than men to say they were satisfied with their careers.

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Yi Gu playing with her 10-month-old son, Coby, at her Chicago home. She graduated from Harvard with a business degree and left a high-powered consulting job for a more flexible job in strategy at a pharmacy company.Credit...Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

A study of female students graduating from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found that while 78 percent of the business school graduates in 1992 said they planned to have children, that share had dropped to 42 percent by 2012. In some cases they did not want to, and in others they did not think they could make it work because of a lack of organizational support, according to Stewart Friedman, director of Wharton’s work/life integration project.

That belief extends beyond the narrow world of business school alumni. A broader Pew Research Center study found that 58 percent of working millennial mothers said being a working mother made it harder for them to get ahead in their careers, compared with 38 percent of older women.

“With the boomers, there was a real ascendance in this idea of having very egalitarian partnerships and the ability to have high-powered careers, and that has diminished with Generation X and even more so with this millennial generation,” said Colleen Ammerman, assistant director of the Harvard gender initiative.

Harvard Business School alumni are an elite group on an ambitious career path. And they are also likely to earn enough that both partners would not need to work. Young women do not seem to be lowering their ambitions — or “leaving before you leave,” as Sheryl Sandberg described it in “Lean In.” Their career goals, and their accomplishments in the years immediately after business school, were indistinguishable from those of men. Rather, they say, they are thinking ahead to some potentially tough decisions.

“Just as we look at strategies of companies, a lot of H.B.S. people are putting together strategies for their life,” said Cheryl Han, 33, an alumna and co-founder and chief executive of Keaton Row, a fashion start-up. “If I build that into my strategy, then I won’t feel like I failed, and maybe it makes you feel more certain about your future.”

Their approach is different from that of the women who paved the way for theirgeneration to enter the upper tiers of business. Baby boomer women were the first to work in professions in large numbers, and they were less likely to say they planned to interrupt their careers and more likely to say they expected to successfully combine their work and family lives.

Younger women say they learned from the experiences of older generations, and are determined to avoid their pitfalls. They are much more likely than women in older generations to say that women in senior leadership are critical to their success, both in navigating their careers and in figuring out how to incorporate family responsibilities.

“They’re anticipating that in some way they’re going to have to dial down or integrate their career and their life,” said Caroline Ghosn, chief executive of Levo, an online professional network focused on millennial women. “This reality is something that people are a lot more transparent and open about.”

By age 30, nearly half of the women in the Harvard study who were married said they had chosen a job with more flexibility, 26 percent had slowed down the pace of their career and 9 percent had declined a promotion because of family responsibilities. Many of those interviewed cited Ms. Sandberg, a fellow alumna.

Kwany Lui, 31, co-founder of Bundle Organics, a nutrition start-up, said: “The Sheryl Sandberg book says don’t lean out in advance. How I think about the message is currently I’m sitting here without children and I don’t have intentions to say, ‘O.K., next job I find, let me make sure it’s 40 hours a week.’ I think when I have kids I might change my mind, but until I get there I honestly don’t know.”

Women’s expectations have declined: 66 percent of millennial women said they expected their careers to be equal to those of their spouses, compared with 79 percent of baby boomers. Three-quarters of millennial women said they expected to succeed in combining their careers and family life, but that is a significant drop from the 86 percent of baby boomer women who said the same.

Men’s attitudes are also beginning to change. Eventually, that could lead to more shared responsibilities, though it is happening slowly. For example, 13 percent of millennial men said they expected to interrupt their careers for children. That is more than the 4 percent of Generation X men and 3 percent of baby boomer men who said the same — but significantly less than the 37 percent of women who said so.

The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Increasingly, Young Women Plan Career Pauses. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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