Stewart D. Friedman - Baby Bust: New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family

What a wonderful book. Stew Friedman stands out as one of the few male voices in the field. He understands better than anyone else how leadership, life, and business can fit together. Baby Bust offers a fascinating glimpse into how young people think about their work, their families, and their futures. Its a succinct and invaluable read for managers, politicians, and all men and women seeking to better understand how the world is changing and to support greater freedom of choice.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, President and CEO, New America Foundation

Provocative and practical, Stew Friedmans Baby Bust draws on his landmark study to document the metamorphosis in mens and womens views and expectations for work and family. As more women are leaning in to their careers, more men today want to be actively engaged in fatherhood. But both see conflicts between work and family life that are increasingly keeping them from choosing to be parents. Revelatory and rigorous, this urgent call to action is required reading for anyone who wants both men and women to be able to choose the world they want to live in.

John Gerzema, Author, The Athena Doctrine: How Women (and the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future

Stew Friedman has always been a trailblazer, and he has done it again! The provocative finding that 2012 graduates of Wharton are much less likely to plan to have children than those 20 years ago will receive a great deal of attention. More importantly, Friedman has probed the complex reasons why, and these are even more significant and telling. A must-read for everyoneemployees, employers, and familiesso that we can be much more intentional in creating the workplaces and family lives of the future.

Ellen Galinsky, President, Families and Work Institute, and Author, Mind in the Making

Stew Friedmans unique cross-generational study finds both a triumphant new freedom for men and women and, at the same time, an indication of the deep conflicts between what we value and the lives to which we aspire. Baby Bust is a game-changing addition to the literature on work and family. Stew clearly and compassionately tells the story from the perspective of both men and women, echoing the challenges we all face as we seek to do meaningful work and have a meaningful life in todays frenetic and tumultuous world.

Brad Harrington, Executive Director, Boston College Center for Work and Family

Important data and fascinating insights about the revolution we are experiencing in work and family. A must-read for anyone seeking to better understand how the world is changing and what new models will require.

Leslie A. Perlow, Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Harvard Business School, and Author, Sleeping with Your Smartphone

Stew Friedmans Baby Bust is a wake-up call for business. The lack of strong business and public support for the positive enactment of caregiving, breadwinning, and career advancement has redefined what employees see as possible in their lives. The future economic health and well-being of the U.S. may be at risk. This eye-opening study raises the critical questions and provides practical ideas for change.

Dr. Ellen Ernst Kossek, Basil S. Turner Professor of Management, Purdue University, Krannert School of Management and President, Work and Family Researchers Network

New Choices for Men and Women in Work and Family

STEWART D. FRIEDMAN

2013 by Stewart D. Friedman

Published by Wharton School Press

The Wharton School

University of Pennsylvania

3620 Locust Walk

2000 Steinberg Hall-Dietrich Hall

Philadelphia, PA 19104

Email:

Website: wsp.wharton.upenn.edu

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without written permission of the publisher. Company and product names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61363-033-4

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61363-034-1

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With love to my beautiful babies, Gabriel, Harry, and Lody

I n October 1987, I became a father. My mind flooded with questions. In the very next class I taught, I brought some of those questions to my Wharton MBA students in our organizational behavior course: What responsibility do you have as future business leaders to nurture the next generation of people in our society? If you choose to become parents, how will you manage to do so in a way that works for you, your family, your business, and your community?

Hungry for knowledge, they replied with a question of their own: Youre the professor. Can you just tell us? Thus began a conversation with students, colleagues, and thousands of people in public- and private-sector organizations around the world that I have been engaged in ever since.

For me, tracking these issues has been the work of a professional lifetime. In 1991, I founded the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In one of our initiatives, we surveyed 496 members of the 1992 undergraduate class as they were departing, and established a baseline for our longitudinal study. Twenty years later, we repeated the survey for 307 members of the 2012 graduating class.

With few exceptions, members of the Wharton Classes of 1992 and 2012 aspired to be in long-term relationships. Roughly one-third of both cohorts were already in committed unions, and most of the rest expected to be headed that way. All told, 88 percent of the Class of 1992, the Gen Xers, were in or planned to be in a permanent relationship. For the Class of 2012, the Millennials, the number was only slightly lower: 84 percent. Permanent relationship, however, does not necessarily lead to family, as we traditionally have understood this term. And here the differences between the two classes were staggering.

In our sample, the rate of college graduates who plan to have children has dropped by about half over the past 20 years. In 1992, 78 percent said that they planned to have children. In 2012, 42 percent did. And these percentages were nearly the same for men and women. Millennial men and women are opting out of parenthood in equal proportions.

Do you plan to have or adopt children?

We are certainly not the first to observe a decline in birth rates, and this change in plans for children is not unique to young business professionals. Its part of a larger trend: a nationwide baby bust. Across the United States, births have dropped precipitously. In 1992 the average U.S. woman gave birth to 2.05 children over the course of her life. By 2007, this number had crept up slightly, to 2.12. But according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average number of births per woman declined during each of the four years following 2007, dropping to 1.89 (preliminary estimate)below the replacement rate of 2.10in 2011.