When ambition and family collide: how Gail Kelly, Sheryl Sandberg, Anne-Marie Slaughter and others forged a path for young women

Young women these days want more kids, education and employment than ever. But what happens if they don’t get it?

A girlfriend in her late 50s recounts with a shiver a life-changing epiphany — the moment a nun at her school complimented her steady hand during a game of pick-up sticks. “Mary-Lyn, you could be a surgeon,” the nun suggested.

Mary-Lyn became a barrister instead but the notion she could become something so grand was a nugget of gold difficult to sluice from the dirt of those days.

Now dreams of starting a business, running a company, leading the country or curing cancer nod cheerfully in fields where girls grow. They learn fearlessness from the cradle. Female CEOs, scientists, judges, filmmakers and entrepreneurs smile at them from screens and billboards promoting courses, schools, universities and the blue sky of limitless possibilities. Young women are significantly more driven than their older sisters, according to a September poll by the US-based Time magazine, which found 48 per cent of girls in their 20s described themselves as “very” or “extremely” ambitious compared with only 26 per cent of women over 60. The same steely resolve flowers here, according to the Australian Longitudinal Survey of Women’s Health, which is tracking three age cohorts of women over 20 years. Those born between 1989 and 1995 are far more likely to want further qualifications and fulltime work, compared with those born between 1973 and 1978, while older women born in the 1950s were the least likely to aim this high.

Ambition rocks in a society that worships individual stamina and personal success, with women better placed than ever to embrace significant career goals, given the structural shifts opening doors for them. My local grocer, Mary, who’s 70, wanted to be a mathematician but her father insisted she leave school early to work in his shop. Dads today cheer their daughters on. Ballarat horse trainer Paddy Payne always knew his youngest, Michelle, had the spunk to win a Melbourne Cup.

What hasn’t budged from one generation to the next is the almost universal desire of women for marriage and children. Indeed, a growing number of 20-somethings are now articulating a desire for bigger families of three or more children. Thirty-three per cent of the youngest group in Australia’s longitudinal survey want a larger brood, compared with 23 per cent of women born between 1973 and 1978.

“They want everything,” explains Queensland academic Professor Gita Mishra, who analyses the data. “They want to have more kids, to upgrade their skills, more education and fulltime employment.”

She laughs wryly as she envisages a crunch point. “If they don’t succeed … then that will be where the problems come.” Already more younger women in the survey are exhibiting higher levels of stress and mental-health disorders.

Here lies the inevitable collision as women’s ambition meets their demands for a family. Although this generation is blessed with mushrooming childcare, convenience foods catering for busy households, stay-at-home dads, paternity leave, technology that encourages flexibility and many other reforms that alleviate the pressure on women in the workforce, it seems our maternal imperative to care for children is hardwired.

This was the “treacherous” phrase US foreign-policy high-flyer Anne-Marie Slaughter used in her 2011 account of why women can’t have it all. She resigned as the first female director of policy planning at the US State Department when her teenage son hit a rocky adolescence and she realised, “I didn’t just need to go home. Deep down, I wanted to go home.” Her husband was not the problem. “He’s spent more time with our sons than I have,” she conceded.

Former Westpac CEO Gail Kelly advises young women that who they marry is critical. Her paediatrician husband, Allan, arrived home earlier each night, fielding homework questions and supervising school pick-ups. But she readily concedes her career would never have soared if she had given birth to a child with special needs or troublesome behaviour.

Life has a habit of interfering with the best-laid plans. Even Sheryl Sandberg has reportedly modified her schedule and suspended travel after the sudden death of her husband, Dave Goldberg, in May. After 30 days of mourning, as prescribed by Jewish faith, she wrote that she still believed in her “lean in” mantra for women. But she noted how many men had told her they were honouring Dave’s life by spending more time with their families, just as she set about curbing her own commitments.

My contemporaries delayed children for as long as possible to protect hard-won gains at work. As a result some women missed out altogether. Generations learn from each other. We wanted to achieve differently from mothers who’d settled for second-rate jobs, or who’d stayed at home reluctantly, so we tested fertility’s limits. There was almost a macho bravura about filing copy or counselling clients between contractions.

Once we began the juggling of children and jobs we faced a difficult reckoning, for the supports that exist today were not in place then. Our partners were fixed on breadwinning roles and we experienced deep anxiety over whether our absence might scar the little people we were rearing. Just as the world young women inherit is unrecognisable from the one their predecessors inhabited, parenting has become a psychological minefield.

My daughter-in-law’s desire to start a family soon after snaffling a plum corporate job makes me nervous. Partly, I worry it’ll hamper her upward climb; partly this grandma isn’t ready for babysitting; partly (and this is so politically incorrect, please forgive me) I fear my son’s academic work will suffer since he has more flexibility to drop everything in a domestic emergency. Still, I know from experience that ambition rarely muffles a child’s cry for help.

But since women are better educated, living longer, working in an economy where jobs come and go, there’s scope to redefine their career arcs. Slaughter advocates “irregular steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips)” as the surest way for her younger sisters to secure personal and professional satisfaction.