Career Women at Midlife: Sadder and Sicker

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Like many women in midlife, Caprino realized the role that fit her so well in the first part of her career—ruthless negotiator, hard-charging boss, office "buzz saw"—now felt like a farce. Because she was the family breadwinner, she was afraid to admit to herself that she wanted a career change.

Needing a Road Map

For Caprino, the answer was in a fearless and searching reevaluation of her life. She watched. She listened. She slowed down. Eventually, she went back to school to score a therapist's degree while her musician husband expanded his job portfolio. Today, Caprino runs an executive coaching consultancy. Her recent book, Breakdown Breakthough, is a road map for women who crash into middle-age, dizzy with confusion.

Caprino believes part of the reason for the "sicker, sadde"" syndrome is that women often take on the over-functioner role, being the person who cleans up for her cleaning lady, who is not familiar with the word no, and who triple checks in a corporate culture where most don't even deign to double-check—and besides, minions are hired to do that anyway.

There's also this: "Women could simply ask their husbands for more help," says Caprino. Indeed, the rise in women's labor force participation and earnings has not come with a concomitant rise in husbands doing more around the house. This holds true even for breadwinner wives, the 36%-and-growing cohort of women whose paychecks are fatter than their husbands, according to economist Heather Boushey. On the home front, the breadwinners still wind up doing 75% of the "domestic engineering." With more men losing their jobs than women in this recession, it will be interesting to see if this imbalance starts to even out.

The doing-it-all, all-at-the-same-time ethos so dominant in careerland has cast women as the new Sisyphus, forever pushing the rock up the hill. Of late, there has been some enlightenment around the fact that one human being cannot possibly maintain this charade without getting sick or going crazy. That's why accounting firms like Deloitte & Touche have implemented lattice structures whereby women and men can ramp up and down their work-life according to life stage. That's why companies such as Best Buy (BBY) and IBM (IBM) promote cultures where anybody can work anytime, anywhere.

Mostly, though, work remains modeled on the male body clock, an analog-era relic. As for the answers, and the way through all this black ice, experts are just starting to find solutions, or at least some suggestions. One thing Buckingham advocates is the positive inquiry approach: What would a happy, fulfilling life look like for a woman at 20, 30, 40, 50, and beyond? For one who is newly married and one who is recently divorced? For one with a brood and another who is child-free? What would these different pictures need to include? What would they need to leave out?

Here's the bright spot: In every measure, from educational test scores to graduate degrees, girls are trouncing boys. It's only a matter of time before their new Fempire begins to grapple with redoing the carapace that surrounds life and work.

In the meantime, there's the quiet and oft-ignored fact: Under the current industrial-age career framework, you can't have it all. At least not all at once.

Conlin is the editor of the Working Life Dept. at BusinessWeek.

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