Posted on 03/30/2002 7:51:48 AM PST by CoolH2OH
Many high-achieving women bowing out
Oprah Winfrey, Rosie O'Donnell, Gov. Jane Swift of Massachusetts.
They are all quitting.
Winfrey, after years of teasing about when she would abandon her daily talk show, announced March 14 that she would quit after the 2005-06 season, her 20th in TV.
O'Donnell, after six seasons on her talk show, which attracts 2.5 million viewers every day, will tape her last show in May.
And Swift, the acting governor of Massachusetts, surprised fellow Republicans by bowing out of the gubernatorial race. Her reasons: low numbers in the polls (and in her campaign bank account), the pressure of running a state in the economic doldrums and the inevitable pull of small children at home.
But children don't always play into the decision to step down. Gwyneth Paltrow told the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung last month that she wants to leave Hollywood and slow her moviemaking pace because she is fed up with the male-dominated movie industry.
Then there's Candice Olson, the former chief executive of iVillage (formerly Candice Carpenter), who quit corporate life last year, married, took her husband's name and became a stay-at-home mom. Cokie Roberts, the veteran ABC News anchor, recently announced that she is leaving "This Week" in the fall. "I want a life," she said.
All of these women gave up positions of fame and influence well before traditional retirement age. In many cases, they had struggled onto the porch of power, made it inside and were just about to ensconce themselves in an armchair when they suddenly did an about-face and headed back home. Would men? Even as Winfrey and O'Donnell were planning their exits, Ted Koppel and David Letterman were hanging on to their interview desks, refusing to budge from their network aeries. Men seem far more reluctant to give it all up.
Men don't leave
"Men never leave jobs," said Carol Wallace, who quit this year as managing editor of People to relocate to a remote Scottish village. "Men die or get forced out. They are addicted to the power and the status and the games." It is seldom, Wallace said, that a man voluntarily leaves a position of authority while at the peak of his game.
"But they're missing something," she said, adding that she was happy to be perceived as a quitter. "I don't want to drop d e a d in my job. I want to be ambulatory. But maybe their DNA says they'd drop d e a d if they didn't work, that it's their oxygen. But it's not for me."
Phyllis Moen, a sociologist at Cornell University who has studied gender in the workplace, said that it is easier for women in powerful jobs to quit all at once.
"You're seeing this now," she said, "because the way that careers are structured, women in high-status jobs can't reduce it, so they have to quit cold turkey. Imagine being a part-time governor. You can't do it."
Nicole Harburger, press secretary for Janet Reno's gubernatorial campaign in Florida and a veteran of many women's political campaigns, said that men form long-lasting identities with corporations or political posts.
But as long as women have been trudging into the workplace, they've been trickling out. Ostensibly, the reasons are children, lifestyle, exhaustion -- or a combination. Perhaps, also, women are different; some say they have less of a p s y c h i c investment in a career -- both the power and the money -- as a source of their identity than men.
O'Donnell has said she simply decided that she no longer enjoyed the artifice of fame and the rigors of a daily talk show, and that she preferred the quieter work of writing and editing her magazine. Winfrey, too, has the rest of an empire to run. Perhaps that explains part of it: If you can quit, why stay?
Geraldine Laybourne resigned as president of cable TV operations for the Walt Disney Co. and ABC in 1998, at the top of her game, to start Oxygen Media, an entrepreneurial experiment whose success has not yet been proved.
"I had all those cable networks reporting to me, I had a number of windows in my office and I had all the corporate perks you could have possibly imagined, but that wasn't what I was about, so I left," Laybourne said. "I don't know if it would have been as easy to do if I were a man."
Skewed picture
Sheila Wellington, president of Catalyst, a New York-based group that works to advance women in business, said the picture brought into focus by the recent spate of high-profile quitters is skewed.
"There are so few women in power, we pay more attention to it," Wellington said. Of the chief executives who run Fortune 500 companies, just six are women, she said.
"That's a whopping 1.2 percent," Wellington said. "If you start thinking about the fact that women made up about a third of the MBA students in the early 1980s, women have been in the work force and women have been educated for careers for two decades now. So where are they?"
For one, they are very much in the workplace. In 1975 there were 34 million women in the paid labor market, according to the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 1995, there were 57.5 million.
But those at the very top seem to be more prone to dropping out -- probably because they can. A Harvard study of 902 women who graduated from its professional schools from 1971 to 1981 found that 25 percent of the women who earned Harvard MBAs in the 1970s had left the workplace entirely by the early 1990s. Many of those women said they felt "forced out" by motherhood. Although not all.
But it is equally true that positions of serious authority continue to elude women. In the political arena, Congress added 19 women in 1992. Since then, only 16 more women have been elected to the House. There are 13 women in the Senate and 60 in the House, totaling only about 14 percent of Congress.
And though more and more women are now serving in the executive branch and there are two women on the Supreme Court, not one congressional committee is headed by a woman.
One who had a shot at any number of the top power positions in Congress was Patricia Schroeder, the former Colorado congresswoman, who was achieving true influence in the House, especially on women's and children's issues, when she quit and headed back West in 1997. Her children were grown, and her husband was still supportive of her, as he had been through her political career, when she left Washington. In an interview after she left office, Schroeder said she "felt like I had been in a huge fight, and I was tired."
Schroeder, now chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, a trade group, said she had particular sympathy for Swift.
"We're paying a lot of attention to Jane Swift because it shows us that we still have terrible work and family issues," Schroeder said. "I don't know how to say this nicely, but people have simply not supported women in the workplace."
Swift, however, had cited her family pressures as only one of the issues that drove her to drop out. The overarching reason seemed to be abandonment by her party -- and the threat of an outside force, Mitt Romney, the recent chairman of the U.S. Olympics Committee, who was getting not only widespread public support for his handling of the Salt Lake Games, but also the dollars needed to mount a hotly contested gubernatorial campaign against a full field of Democrats.
Schroeder, however, would not fully concede the point.
"She did not quit," Schroeder said. "You have the whole Republican Party of Massachusetts who, if she were male, would have been much more supportive than they have been."
Wallace, People's happy quitter, said there's little to be concluded from the current crop of dropout women.
"I don't have kids," she said. "Oprah doesn't have kids. So we have no real dependents, and that gives us some freedom. Rosie is wealthy. These are not regular women."
Unmentioned is that iVillage bombed as a dotcom.
Women different from men ? What an ugly truth ! It should be suppressed with equivocation, obfuscations, and bold-face denial unless you are not a "nut".
The supposed age of science is plauged with ideologically sanctioned superstitions. Physicist doing a mental pretzel reconciling political correctness and particle physics.
I see that in my work which is connected to disability evaluation and employment. If they can't retire due to financial ability or their spouse's consent, many look for a mental or physical reason. I see them exaggerate symptoms to be able to justify the early out.
The wealthy women in in the article have the $ and are on top, so can go at will.
GOOD FREAKIN RIDDANCE!!!
Also unmentioned is that IVillage and its associated site women.com pumped out a steady wave of feminist anti-man anti-family sludge. Interesting to learn from her actions that the CEO herself didn't believe any of it.
I saw a slogan back at the beginning of the women's Lib movement that capsulizes what you said: "No amount of success compensates for failure in the home."
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