Sacrifices, gains, balances and choices
Introduction
This chapter looks at the sacrifices that the women made, the gains that resulted and the choices and balances that had to be considered in order to be successful professionally. It is complemented by the next chapter, which focuses on domestic considerations.
Sacrifices
One aspect of ‘getting to the top’ is the sacrifices that women (and men) have to make to achieve their career goals, and also what they gain from having ‘made it’. We asked the women involved in our study what they felt they had lost and gained from pursuing the career path that had led them to where they are now. Olivia was very clear that she ‘couldn’t think of anything that I have sacrificed actually, because if I want to do something then I do it. I don’t let things stand in my way if I want to do something’. Lillian made similar comments, saying: ‘I haven’t sacrificed much, or at least I’ve not sacrificed anything I didn’t choose to sacrifice’. Bella, on the other hand, felt very much that she had missed out on family and friends and even herself to the point where at times she questioned whether she wanted to continue:
I think there have been a lot of things I’ve lost. I don’t keep up with friends. I’ve got some really fantastic friends and there’s one who I was very close to at university … and I just don’t have time to see her – I feel terrible about that. I don’t spend very much time with the children; I would love to spend more time with them. I don’t spend any time on myself. I’d love to spend time sort of shopping and preening myself and going to the hairdressers and all of that is out the window. There are a lot of personal sacrifices and sometimes you stand back and just think ‘why do I actually do this?’
This sort of regret can be heard from other senior women, not part of our study. ‘I miss having a life. actually I don’t even have time to miss that’, said Alison Richards, retiring Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University (Stourton, 2010). For Bella, however, a change of job and new and interesting challenges had made her motivated to continue, even though the perceived sacrifices were considerable and the balance between work and the rest of her life difficult:
I was pretty much getting there with [my previous employer]. I had negotiated part-time, I’d had the meetings – it was quite tricky because they hadn’t had someone of my seniority, you know quite a senior partner, saying I want to work three days a week – I’d done it, when this job came up and I think what has slightly thrown me is that this is a really interesting job. I really enjoy it, but maybe that will slowly wear off and then I can start thinking about it again. But … what’s thrown me is the fact that this is a genuinely interesting job. But there are … all sorts of sacrifices. I mean I don’t get enough sleep either … I would love to get more sleep. I don’t manage to read many books.
Diane also felt that the attraction of the job meant that the sacrifices could be justified, though not at any cost, commenting that ‘if [the disadvantages had outweighed the advantages] I would’ve done the sensible thing and given it up. I’m not a martyr to this’.
Carrie reflected on the fact that she had worked almost continuously for nearly 40 years without any time out from the job:
I’m almost 60 years old, I’ve been working since 1970 – and it’s 2009 – with no breaks, except one term when I was doing my dissertation project and I was pregnant at the same time, so that was six months, but other than that I’ve always worked.
Kate was one of a number of women who was determined to ensure a reasonable balance in her life:
For me, it’s always been this balance between work, being valued at work, getting value out of work, but equally having a very strong sense that the other side of my life is just as important and there are some sacrifices that I’m not prepared to do.
In terms of my other life I keep them very separate. So I live in this small village and I’ve lived there for 26 years now and I have my friends in the village whose children have grown up with mine and I’m just any old other person in the village. They know what I do but that’s not the persona they relate to. So sometimes it comes up, but very rarely, it’s usually I’m just another person in the village.
However, there were times when perhaps Gill’s children did not see enough of her, even though they seemed unaffected by her absence and she had no regrets:
I work very hard at work/life balance so I play hard: harder than I ever have in the past actually, because I think that would be true of anybody at my level. You’ve got to work off the stress and get rid of it. My children are smashing human beings and so I’ve sacrificed a lot of time with them, but I don’t think they have suffered at all. In fact, I think they’ve gained by not having mummy at their beck and call. They tease me about it all the time: ‘oh, you’re never there, mother – do you remember when I did so and so? No, you weren’t there’. So, I wouldn’t change it if I had my time over again.
The work-life balance was difficult, however, given that chief executive roles were so demanding of time because they could not be done on other than a very full-time basis, with so many other things being crowded out, as Fiona pointed out:
Time, time, sacrifices of time. It is not a job you could job share; this is not a job you could do part-time. You’ve got to throw every second of your life into it. I mean I know [chief executives] who are a bit calmer about it than me, but this is really my life. So there is a cost to that, about balance, I think on the wheel of life of balance, I’d be wobbling all over the place. In a sense, luckily, most of my friends are in similar circumstances either with jobs or kids or whatever, so we balance that out in seeing each other, but I don’t get enough time with friends, don’t get any holidays, or at least don’t go away, don’t get to the gym enough; just generally don’t have enough ordinary things in my life. But. you know the old cliché that if you studied English you never enjoy Jane Austen. In a way if you’re trying to lead, drive, support a community into a better place, if that doesn’t sound too arrogant, anything you read, think, do is kind of part of that. So it’s about not switching off.
Maggie felt that there had been times when she could have ‘lost it’ in terms of a balanced lifestyle, even though she determinedly had no regrets about the career path that she had adopted:
Let’s do sacrifices first of all. I don’t operate in a world of having regrets. Everything I’ve done has been done for the right reasons at the point in time when I made the decisions. Would I do anything differently from a. career perspective if I had my time again? I possibly would … Have I sacrificed anything? Yes possibly time as a [junior officer] I’ve got some of that back in terms of what I’ve done as a [senior officer]. Also, if I look back to my whole work-life balance learning, a few years ago, yes I nearly did, I nearly sacrificed my health and well-being. My work became all-consuming and became disproportionate in terms of my life. I was fortunate in that I recognised that and had people around me that could kind of get me back on track and I never kind of lost it in terms of the whole health and relationships or well-being issue. But I could’ve done.
Ruth suggested that women had to make greater sacrifices (though she did not use that word, because ‘that’s not what it feels like’), ‘but something has to give because women are still primary carers’ – a statement borne out by other research (Guillaume and Pochic, 2009). She continued by saying that she felt that ‘in some senses’ her professional success’ had ‘been at the cost of personal relationships’. There was a sense of regret, for example, about not having children, even though she had clearly gained from a number of close relationships – especially with other women – while not being a mother and not having been married had given her some advantages, as she saw it:
I suddenly realised I’ve forgotten to have children a few years ago, so that’s not going to happen … if I had my life again I would think more about relationships … if you’re talking about conventional marriage, cohabiting type relationships, that’s the one thing that if I had my time again I might well pay more attention to.
Caring was especially challenging when the women’s partners also had demanding jobs, as Bella pointed out:
I’ve been commuting … and really struggling – the old cliché – struggling to reconcile bringing up children and doing a job like this. [My partner] now has got a very senior and demanding job as well, so it’s just really, really tough.
Eliza also found the ‘juggling’ challenging, but had no regrets about marrying and having children alongside a career, most recently setting up and running her own business, which gave her a degree of flexibility in managing her roles at work and at home :
When I worked for the media I have to say I loved it. It was my life. I could eat, sleep, drink media, it was endless. But in one particular month I saw [my son] twice. And I looked at my peers who were either divorced for the first time or second time or single parents and I thought ‘I have a really special boy at home; I have a really wonderful husband at home who is not just my husband, he’s my best friend. Do I want to jeopardise that for promotion and for money and for title and a fast car or do I want to be happy in my home life, because these people here don’t have a home life?’ If you wanted to get on in media you didn’t have a home life; that was irrelevant. You lived your life with that group of people you worked with closely. And that was … a turning point that I felt I wanted; they were very important to me – my husband and my son … It is hard, very hard juggling.
Andrea, like Eliza in many ways, ‘wanted to have everything’, with home and family making her balance life and work, though there was a sacrifice of only having one child because of the constraints of her professional role:
Too much of life is absorbed by work … and as time has gone on that’s got worse, maybe because of habit; you know because you do it you keep doing it. One of the other reasons for having a child, other than. biological, was to put a counterbalance in my life with something that would be so big and so strong it would force me to do things. because it would be asking for my attention. What was given up was my choice to have more than one child. I only have one, because it seemed to me that I only had X amount in the percentage of time – if I was spending 60 per cent on my work, then I only had 40 per cent for my home and family, and if I had two, then I would only have 20 per cent for the one that I’d just got, and I didn’t want to take it away from her simply to have the pleasure of giving it to somebody else. So reducing my family context is certainly something that was the negative side. But I think in many senses. I’m very. greedy: I want to have everything. It went through in my mind a while ago the different roles you know that I have – manager, mother, lover, partner, housewife, poet, writer, artist, singer you know and. I want to do all of those.
Lillian’s case was somewhat different, given the ‘role reversal’ which she and her husband agreed, a position perhaps made easier for both of them because of his not having ‘a bone of ambition’, though here again, as with Lillian, there was the sacrifice of not having more than one child:
I think it’s certainly damaged my husband’s career. It was something that we both consented to. He got a better degree than me, he was a very good scientist, but he hasn’t got a bone of ambition. He’s somebody who’s a very nurturing caring person. What he did was get heavily involved in the community, local charities, he still is. So at one level it suited us both but on another level his intellectual and scientific capacity, it would have been much more fulfilled … In some ways his freedom of action was limited. And my daughter, I don’t know, I certainly sacrificed time with her. We’re very close, we always have been. I think if I’d stayed at home she and I would’ve had a very close relationship and a relationship with my husband might have been more distant. We didn’t have a second child; we talked about it and he thought fundamentally that he couldn’t cope with a second one. So other people have made different decisions and made it work and we might have done, but that was a chosen sacrifice. I don’t know if I’d choose the same doing it again; you live with the choices you make.
Carrie stated that perhaps the most common sacrifice was in terms of personal – and even professional – relationships:
I’ve had a fabulous career and it’s because of the relationships that I’ve had with students and faculty and staff. I don’t have any regrets about anything but I do think the balance of personal and professional life is important. sometimes that suffers a lot. I’m a very social person but basically at the end of the day I go home and I don’t have a social life. Some of it’s the long hours. some of it is now being older. being tired and not wanting to be bothered with other people and other things. I think my personal life as a woman person, not as a mum or a sister or any of that, has suffered a bit … I’ve sacrificed time to develop hobbies for me … or the ability to create. a loving relationship with someone else because I’ve put all my energies into my people, I call it. I don’t have my own loving relationship with a man. That’s definitely a sacrifice.
Diane concentrated on the possible sacrifice of time with her daughter, though – as other women such as Gill noted – this does not seem to have been a particular issue, and the economic benefit of only having one child – as already noted by Andrea – did have its advantages:
Sacrificed? Well, probably that bit of attention to my daughter’s upbringing that although when I talk to her about it – she is an only child – and she says, ‘what I’ve never had I don’t miss; I’ve had the life I’ve lived, so there’s no point in saying, "would it have been different if I’d had sisters?" maybe not. "Would I have enjoyed my childhood more?" I don’t think I could. The good thing Mum was that two of you meant that there was more money about; I could do things that other kids maybe couldn’t do because we could afford to do things’. And actually she went to boarding school when she was 11, to a girls’ boarding school, so she found lots of sisters as it were, lots of family in a way in her boarding school. So I think it is about that sacrifice that you make.
Gains
All the women in our study felt that they had gained from taking the path that they had done in life, even if they had had to make the kinds of sacrifices described earlier. Ruth felt that being successful had made her ‘a more confident person’. ‘Paradoxically’, as she put it, she had developed a lot of very good friendships:
I’ve seen a lot more of the country than I might otherwise have done … I’ve built up some fantastic friendships from all the places I’ve worked in and I would say that my female friendships in particular are very, very strong, which may well be to do with the fact that [my profession] is predominantly female.
Carrie also referred to the gain of friendships in many countries as a result of the opportunities that she had had to travel:
My world is much larger because of what I do and my success. If I had remained a teacher. and hadn’t moved up to university. my world would’ve been my classroom. I wouldn’t have travelled as much … I’ve made friends all over the United States, some in other countries. my world has been broadened tremendously by the work that I do and that’s a definite asset.
Diane seemed to feel strongly that meeting people that you would otherwise never meet was a significant plus, as well as the overall mental stimulation that the role brought:
You get to meet people that … as [Diane] the housewife you would never ever get to meet. I think that’s fantastic. You get exposed to all kinds of ideas: political ideas, social ideas. The circles that you move in … are just hugely entertaining, lively, informative; every day is different; every day there’s something going on that challenges you, that keeps your brain going and motivated.
Fiona also stressed the gain from meeting people, both famous and not so famous:
Gained so much, very much, so fortunate. Met so many fabulous people and by that I don’t mean famous. I’ve met some famous people, but I mean the people around me. fantastic, talented, willing to open themselves to me, to take chances, to trust me and so on, that’s been amazing.
Travelling abroad had been a particular reward for her also:
So visiting a place as ‘an ambassador of’ and being let in to, you know I went to China in the very early days. I was the first western woman that anyone had seen … just amazing things I would never have done otherwise: just fabulous, fabulous opportunity.
Maggie felt strongly that she had gained significantly:
What have I gained? I’ve gained over many, many years a huge amount of life experiences. I work within a profession whereby the kind of things that I’ve been involved with, the kind of things I do, I’m incredibly privileged to do it. The career where you can on a day-to-day basis direct the pattern of people’s lives is a real privilege. It’s something that I say to people who work with me, we should never forget that we’re privileged to do what we do. It’s an incredibly demanding role, I love it because it’s challenging, it’s demanding, it’s so different every single day.
Olivia used the same phrase – ‘life experiences’ – to sum up what she felt she had gained, also commenting – like many other women – on the many friends that she had met:
I think I’ve had some really good life experiences; certainly met some really good friends in terms of working, and working for the business for such a long time, you can develop good friendships. So I think good life experiences definitely.
Andrea focused on moving out from her working-class background and ultimately into roles that she found very satisfying, particularly because of their intellectual stimulation. Security – perhaps given her origins – also seemed to be an important gain:
I think I’ve gained a huge amount of intellectual and personal pleasure from the work … for me the work is what I do and it does give me the money not to have to worry. Being the first to go from a family that was definitely … working-class … then having that sense of being able to buy what I wanted as against check and scrimp and save because we couldn’t afford it that was a real measure of success and so forth. I gained that sense of security perhaps from that point of view, but also being able to do a job that was really interesting and where you could see you were making a difference and you were achieving.
Maggie echoed this, commenting on the lifestyle that being in a senior position brought:
I have a very comfortable and privileged life. I have a career which is incredibly stable. I am incredibly fortunate in the current economic climate that. I will do this job for the rest of my working life. That’s a very fortunate position to be in, in terms of stability. In terms of gains, in terms of my life, I have a very comfortable lifestyle … You don’t go into public sector working to earn loads and loads of money but I am very, very fortunate that we are able to enjoy the things that we enjoy as a partnership and as a family.
Gill also spoke of the privilege and ‘honour’ of being in a senior role and – like almost all the other women – saw personal and professional growth as the greatest gain:
I’ve gained enormously – just amazing. A colleague, who’s now here actually, but in [my previous institution] about – it must be over ten years ago – said to me, I remember we were crossing the road from the organisation and he said ‘I think you ought to be a Chief Exec, Gill’ … One or two people from further back have said that, which is interesting. because they could see something that I couldn’t. I’ve grown in every role I’ve done … You go to senior manager and you think ‘hey, I’m doing this role – amazing’.
Being in a position of authority and influence was clearly an important gain for a number of our interviewees. Ruth felt that ‘one of the fantastic things about being in this role is that people take notice of your ideas and that’s seen as a good thing, not a bad thing’. Bella reinforced this view:
Yeah, I tell you one thing I really love is this feeling that when I read the newspaper in the mornings I feel I’ve really got quite a few fingers on quite a few pulses on what’s going on … Whereas what I would find hard I think if I weren’t working was reading the paper and feeling like a complete outsider in these sorts of discussions – I love that feeling of being so much part of it. I’m never ever bored. I don’t think I’ve ever been bored in this job, not once.
Jessica referred to the ‘huge sense of satisfaction that you’ve done something’ and especially in ‘being able to mentor and coach some of the younger people’:
This morning first thing I was [with] a young woman who used to work for me [and who] wanted some career advice and so I’m in touch with quite a deep strata of people and I actually get huge satisfaction out of helping the young ones come through with their careers.
Bella stressed similar fulfilment, notably through public service (as discussed in Chapter 3) rather than ‘this idea of staying at home’:
Going back to this feeling of fulfilment – it’s quite a sort of puritanical approach I suppose – I do believe very much in public service. making some sort of small contribution in whatever way one can and I think this idea of staying at home and reading and bringing up the kids; it’s not exactly a selfish idea but you lose that sense of public service if you do that. I’m not saying that bringing up children is not important.
Fiona stressed the way in which being a chief executive meant that she had to go on learning and keeping up to date:
I’ve learnt so much. because nobody takes on a job like this knowing how to do it. You don’t have any practice … I have just learnt so much and I go on learning. I’m learning literally by the minute now as the world changes. I think that the job has kept me young because you just have to keep moving. I don’t mean the simple thing about technology, but just coming up to something completely new out of my experience, facing it thinking ‘oh’.
Lillian summed up what she had gained as ‘personal development’ and fulfilled potential, which had led to her being ‘happy with the person I am’:
I’ve gained a huge amount. What I’ve gained is huge personal development. I think I’ve. grown, developed, understood myself and have had the opportunity to fulfil whatever potential I have as a person much more fully because of the work environment I’ve been in than I might have done in any other situation. The challenges of work, of a fairly intensive career, the way you have to build effective relationships with people, the way you have to learn to understand yourself. I’m happy with the person I am which has got a lot of things not very good about it, I’m reconciled to them, but also I’m fulfilled.
Choices
All the women in our study recognised that they had made often difficult choices in order to achieve their ambitions and that the sacrifices described in this chapter were often as a result of those choices. We asked the women about how much choice they felt they had been able to exercise.
Ruth pointed out that she had made her choices willingly, so the results could not – as far as she was concerned – be described as sacrifices, though, as she noted elsewhere in the interview, not having children had made it easier to progress in her career:
It’s all very well to say that I haven’t done this and I haven’t done that; it’s all about choice. It is that old cliché about the choice line; it’s about staying above that. I’m not a victim; I made choices whether consciously or unconsciously. I don’t think I’ve made sacrifices, although when I look at my peers on this management team for example. I am the youngest person there, and I think that if you are a woman it is harder to do probably with a family. Not having a family has probably helped in that sense.
Maggie – someone without children but with a partner – also felt that she had been in control of her choices and that job satisfaction was as important as career progression:
When I was on the accelerated promotions course I’d spend three months doing one role and then I’d get moved off onto something else and I’d do three months doing another role and I butterflied around all over the place because I was on this scheme and the [level] and the acceleration of promotion had become the be all and end all of everything. I consciously decided that actually I could do something about this; I didn’t have to constantly strive; the next time somebody rang the bell of Pavlov’s dog and said ‘there’s a promotion process’, I consciously decided that. I have choices here and I’m in control. I don’t have to do something because I think other people expect it of me, I do it when I know and I feel it is right for what I believe in and the contribution I can make. So as a result of that I consciously decided that I would remain in the role that I was doing at the time. I delivered on that because a key thing for me is being able to demonstrate before I move on some tangible impacts on [the profession], tangible impacts on communities. It becomes harder to do that the higher up the organisation you go, but actually I get a huge amount of satisfaction from seeing my colleagues, at whatever level, changing people’s lives.
In addition, Maggie decided that because she acted as a model for others, some of the choices that she made – indeed had to make – were not just for her own good, but for those of her colleagues and subordinates:
They were choices that I made because I knew I wanted to do something about it. Years before, I knew I worked long hours but I was the classic person that would say to colleagues I worked with ‘it’s my choice to work these hours; I don’t expect you to do the same’. But my behaviour was really unhelpful and unhealthy to everyone around me and I took the view that actually it’s not about what I say, it’s about what I do and by me working more manageable hours it gives colleagues the permission to say, ‘I don’t have to be here for long hours’. That again comes down to my influence in a good way; or if I get it wrong my influence in a bad way on other people around me, because of the role and also because of the [position] I have in the organisation.
Not all the women felt that they had had many choices, however, as in the case of Lillian, for whom the sector in which she worked was a constraint:
I think you pick up your models, and certainly in the utilities it’s very engineering based, very male and part of the challenge was how you succeeded in that environment. When the environment is perhaps not so constraining you have choices.
For Diane, there was a similar lack of choice if she was to progress in her career, even though she may have wanted to take time out to care for her daughter:
I was 30 by the time I had my daughter … I could see there were opportunities [where I worked] and there were lots of [opportunities] because it was a young organisation growing very rapidly. It was a good place to be and if you wanted to make. a career for yourself it would not be a good idea to leave for about five years while you brought up kids and go back again. It would all have moved away from you after that, so when I was 30 that was a choice that certainly had to be made.
Andrea felt that her background – coupled, perhaps, with the aspirations for her daughter – had directed her towards particular choices. This led to an economic dependence that could have serious consequences in other ways:
Well the economic dependence then reflecting in the psychological dependence and the capacity to then make your own choices. you can’t choose because, actually, you don’t have any control over that. And the consequence of that later if that emotional integration unpicks itself.
Having children (or not) was arguably the single biggest constraining factor in making choices, as for example Kate:
I think having children and feeling that that made a series of choices closed to me has been more influential than being a woman, which sounds a bit contradictory.
For Andrea, though, organisational issues could also be a constraining factor, especially when restructuring led to a situation where she had to make choices that were not those she would have preferred. Bella was concerned about making career choices for her and her husband that affected the children adversely, even though, at another point in the interview, she had said that ‘as far as I can see the boys haven’t suffered from my working. It’s not that there’s a real compulsion to be there so I would probably find it rather self-indulgent’. There was a feeling in a number of the interviews that, given an opportunity to go back and choose again, not all the women would have made the same choices as before, especially in the present-day environment. For Lillian, the important thing was that she had been able to choose, even if in retrospect she might have taken a different decision:
I had a choice, even if I might have chosen differently, that sort of doesn’t matter. I had that ability.
Conclusion
This chapter has looked at the sacrifices that the women in our study made, the gains that making sacrifices brought them and the choices and balancing that they had to make and achieve in order to be as successful as they had been. We observed that the women varied considerably in the extent to which they felt they had made sacrifices. However, it was clear that a majority had made significant sacrifices in areas such as their family and home life; very few had been able to enjoy much time for themselves, though a number remained determined to have a reasonable balance and a life outside work. Some of the participants in our study felt that there had been times when there had been too much of an imbalance, but coping strategies had been put in place, and while life at the top was stressful, few had any regrets, apart from, perhaps, personal relationships in some cases. Certainly, the most frequently cited set of ‘sacrifices’ related to partner and children.
We then considered the concomitant gains, which all of the women felt that they had enjoyed. Many stressed the benefit of meeting a wide range of people, through travel in some instances. ‘Life experiences’ was a phrase often used as one particular gain. Lifestyle – in terms of comfort, security and intellectual stimulation – was also cited regularly, as was the privilege, personal development and fulfilment of being in – and more especially growing into – a senior role, helping others and being able to have significant influence.
Following on from this, we considered the kinds of choices that the women had made. Almost all had been in control of their choices: they had made them willingly. Conscious of their position as role models – notably for other women – some of the participants in our study had taken account of this aspect when making some of their choices, as for example regarding the ways in which they worked. Others felt that their choices had been limited because of their surrounding environment, their background or their personal circumstances, including the extent to which they felt economically dependent. We observed that, if the women were to have their time again, not all would make the same choices. In this context, there were particular issues with regard to having children and/or being with a partner – or not. This is considered further in the next chapter.