MBA Moms Most Likely to Opt Out

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The varying degrees of family-friendly options available in fields like medicine, law, and business is what prompted Wolfram, an associate professor of economics and member of the Haas Economic Analysis and Policy group, to look into the issue. Back in 2004, Wolfram—herself a Harvard alum from the class of 1989—was flipping through the notes her classmates had entered about their lives in the 15th anniversary reunion report. She noticed that a surprisingly high number of her classmates who had gone on to get advanced degrees were stay-at-home moms. "I was really pretty surprised by the number of women I had seen drop out," said Wolfram, a mother of two children. "I had gone through my own debate about whether working was the right thing for me."

Most Work Environments Not Family-Friendly

Intrigued by her classmates' decisions, she decided to track the career patterns of a larger group of Harvard women, trying to pinpoint the root of the divergent career paths these women embarked on once they started families. She was most curious to see whether the type of advanced degree the woman obtained later played a role in her decision to continue working or stay at home with her children, she said.

Her findings confirmed her suspicions that there was some aspect of the work environment driving these women out of the business world. Wolfram speculates that a surprisingly high number of women with MBAs had to leave their workplaces because the business work environment is not structured to be as family-friendly as the fields of medicine and law. For examples, doctors tend to have flexible schedules and might be able to work part-time hours more easily, a feat harder to accomplish in the business or nonprofit world, Wolfram said.

This was what Icke, the mother of four from Weston, ran up against when she initially tried to balance a career and a family. After graduating from Harvard Business School, she took on another high-powered job, this time as a management consultant at Bain. She worked full time until she had her first child and then went part-time, running the recruiting and training division, a position the company had created for her.

MBAs Not as Loyal as Doctors or Lawyers

The job was "manageable," but ultimately a dead end, with little hope of promotion, she said. By the time she had her second child, she was ready to become a stay-at-home mom. She has been out of the workforce for nearly a decade and is only just now thinking about reentering the workforce, she said.

"I think the big shift for me was I went from saying, 'Bring it on and give me the hardest thing you can find,' to 'Oh, no. I actually need to compartmentalize my work into a certain number of hours per day," she said. I didn't know how to do that, and there weren't too many role models."

Another factor in the disparity: Women who enter the business field may not have as strong a tie to their profession as women in other careers. Women with MBAs typically spend only two years in business school, a shorter amount of training time than doctors or lawyers. They also put less money into their schooling, spending $146,000 on average for an MBA, as opposed to $308,000 for an MD and $225,000 for a JD, Wolfram's study showed.

High-Earning Men Want Stay-at-Home Wives

And unlike the fields of medicine and law, each of which have very defined career trajectories, a career in the business world can sometimes feel more nebulous, the Forte Foundation's Sangster said. "When you get out of business school with a business degree, you're not a business person. You're a manager. Not everybody knows what a manager means, but everyone knows what a doctor and lawyer means," Sangster said. "The passion and connection you feel in your pursuit of a career may be very different for doctors and lawyers than people in business."

Another consideration is that many of these women are married to men who are just as ambitious as they are, said Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California and an expert on work and family life issues.

Williams said she believes that what has been termed the "opt-out revolution," the notion that working women choose parenting over building their careers, is more complicated than meets the eye. Men who are in the upper ranks of their profession with stay-at-home-wives earn 30% more than men who are married to women who work, she said. Those men who want to reach the highest rungs of their career and earn the most money often need a stay-at-home wife to take care of all other aspects of their life, including raising a family, Williams said. "And since many women in business school marry those men, they end up being stay-at-home wives, regardless of their own vision of what they wanted from their careers," Williams said.

Finding the Right Balance

Of course, that's not the case for everyone. Cindi Frame, a member of the Harvard class of 1988 who received her MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management in 1995, holds the same graduate degree as her husband, David Frame, who also graduated from Kellogg in 1995. A former brand manager at Clorox (CLX), she has managed to work part time while raising her three children. She worked 15 to 20 hours a week managing a small company called Market Metrics, a market research firm for the hospitality industry. Her company now needs a full-time person for her job, but Frame said she is not certain she is ready to commit just yet to such a demanding schedule. It's a decision she will be wrestling with over the next few months, she said. "I still have a little one at home, so you don't want to all of a sudden feel like their whole childhood went by and you weren't there," she said. "It's hard to work even part time and find that balance. There are always tradeoffs."

Business Exchange related topics:
Women in Business School
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Glass Ceiling
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Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.