Geoff,

The Wall St Journal had an article in yesterday's paper (In the Lead: Women Tell Women - Life in the Top Jobs is Worth the Effort - by Carol Hymowitz, Nov 20, 2006 p. B1) about a panel discussion with 5 top female CEOs and business leaders. I bring this up because the challenges facing women on the tenure track are probably not too dissimilar to those of women on the executive track. Probably a lot of the same factors (childbearling/rearing, famly support) apply in both worlds.

Several interesting comments came out of the panel discussion. First - these women suggested that the word "balance" should be banned from women's vocabularies. According to the panelists, balance = perfection which nobody can achieve, so rather than live with the stress and guilt, accept that sacrifices will be needed on both sides. The women on the panel expressed the concern that the fears some young women have about having an imbalanced work/life situation may cause them to "waive the white flag" before they've even gotten into the game. One of the panelists commented that people can be lonely, get divorced or have troubled kids without having a great career - "so why torpedo your chances of success before you've even tried?"

The reason I bring this panel discussion up because I think that the entire debate about women in academia tends to be somewhat myopic. Most PhDs (men AND women) don't end up in academia. There are lots of good reasons for this: the job is hard and, despite what most graduate students are brainwashed into believing, is probably genuinely rewarding for only a subset of the folks who enter graduate school. During my grad school experience the most common career concern among my fellow grad students was the fear that they'd have to live a life like their advisors!

Everyone on the panel noted that they were sustained in what they did by passion and love of the industry or the subject that was at the heart of their job. If we explored these deeper "satisfaction" issues while in graduate school, we PhDs would probably feel more satisfied with our careers , no matter what pathway we took.

My $0.02