Pausing for life

Author studied women who navigated motherhood and careers, found multiple paths.

Four years ago, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg published her book “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead.” It urged women to, well, “lean in,” to embrace their careers and become leaders of the business world.

Well, what if there are barriers to leaning in? Lisen Stromberg, who made a career in marketing in and around Silicon Valley, looked at how women were navigating their careers once they became mothers for her book, “Work Pause Thrive: How to Pause for Parenthood Without Killing Your Career” (BenBella, $24.95). She’s the chief operating officer of 3% Movement, a group that looks at the lack of women in leadership in advertising and marketing and tries to figure out how to change that. Stromberg was in town in March to give the South by Southwest “Elephant on Madison Avenue” keynote on that subject. For “Work Pause Thrive,” Stromberg, 54, interviewed highly skilled, educated women who are mothers about their career path. She also surveyed 1,476 Generation X women for her “Women on the Rise” survey. Eightyfour percent of these women had children younger than 18 living at home, and 61 percent had advanced degrees.

She wanted to figure out, if these women have everything going for them — education, careers — why aren’t they in the corner offices? Why aren’t they leading their companies?

The thing that separated them from their male counterparts was motherhood.

What she suspected and found out is that women often did not take direct routes in their careers. They “paused” (took time off from work to raise children) or they “pivoted” (took steps up and down and sideways on the career ladder) to make working and raising children doable for them.

In fact, she says, the career ladder for women is more like a lattice. Few women go up the ladder — instead they go in and out of the career world, they choose flexibility instead of job titles.

“Successful women are negotiating nonlinear paths,” she says. And they don’t talk about it. “They didn’t want to seem uncommitted to their careers,” she says, but when she talked to them about their career paths and different nonlinear variations that women sometimes take, even the most serious executives said, “I did that.” They had at times gone part-time or taken a break, though many hadn’t told their current coworkers that.

Throughout the book is example after example of women who are hiding the two-year career pause they took after having a baby. Or they are hiding that they work in the office three days a week and out of the office the other two, or even that they might only work three days a week. They also hide that they work nontraditional hours around children’s soccer games, field trips and appointments.

Stromberg did find women