The Corporate Balancing Act No One Can Win

For Harvard students, there’s nothing more on brand than disapproving of careers in finance or consulting. Unless you count going into a career in finance or consulting, that is.

According to The Crimson’s 2023 senior survey, over 22 percent of respondents reported that they would be working in the financial services sector, closely followed by 19.6 percent, who said they would pursue consulting. No other industry comes close to matching these post-grad recruitment numbers.

There are plenty of arguments critiquing how so many brilliant young minds disappear into New York high-rises. Some emphasize the potential harms brought along by powerful, profiteering firms: They point to the role private equity companies play in the affordable housing crisis, or the fact that investment banks continue to fund fossil fuel expansion. Another school of thought simply mourns the lost talent being pumped into careers focused on making the rich richer.

There is another reason, however, why the glorification of these careers is troubling. This trend receives less attention, perhaps because it has less moral kapow than lampooning Goldman Sachs’ ties to Big Oil. The reality is that these jobs, particularly those in finance, fail to retain women. Or at least, women with children.

While it is not uncommon for the wages in the corporate sector to be roughly evenly balanced between men and women in the early stages of workers’ careers, women’s relative pay and representation declines with age and rank. For women of color, the underrepresentation, especially in top positions, is even more pronounced. Hundreds of Harvard men and women flood to these jobs every summer, but give it two decades and the ratio becomes dramatically male-skewed.

The pattern is easy to explain, yet rarely brought up in conversations about recruiting, success, and salary. And it is a pattern that has less to do with overt discrimination, and more to do with the subtle assumptions we make about who ought to sacrifice work for family or family for work.

In societies where gendered norms regarding childcare and domestic responsibilities persist, mothers are much more likely than fathers to leave male-dominated industries requiring long working hours than fathers after the birth of their first child. Nobel Prize-winning Harvard economist Claudia D. Goldin has demonstrated this striking asymmetry may be one of the remaining contributors to the lingering gender wage gap. On average, the incomes of working women across industries are cut in half once children enter the picture.

Women working in classic post-Harvard industries are no exception. On the contrary, it is the sectors that reward work at irregular hours and over the arc of a long career that are perhaps the most likely to trigger this so-called “motherhood penalty.”

Why? Because 50 hour work-weeks make dual career households almost impossible. Instead, one parent typically assumes most of the domestic burden, dialing down professional commitments. It need not be women — but it almost always is.

To combat cultural trends that contribute to skewed representation in the workplace, there are two obvious societal solutions. We can either empower women to work more like men — more time on the job and less at home — or we can empower men to work more like women and spend more time at home and less on the job. A new happy equilibrium might form in such a world.

Beyond the discussion of how to get fathers to take paternity leave — which they do at much lower rates than women, even when it’s available to them — and beyond the discussion of how to encourage women to stay in the labor force, it is also time to stop glorifying the careers that force us to choose between our personal and professional ambitions.

We should resist linking the time intensity of a profession too tightly with its respectability. This need not entail dismissing the endurance of those who work Wall Street hours. Nor discouraging women from pursuing corporate jobs.

But if we desire to create an economy where everyone — irrespective of gender — can balance commitments to both family and career, we must think critically about which industries set our standards for success, prestige, and worthiness.

Maibritt Henkel ’25 is a double concentrator in Social Studies and Economics in Pforzheimer House. Mie L. Holm ’25 is a double concentrator in Social Studies and Economics in Pforzheimer House. Their column, "Rethinking Economics," runs bi-weekly on Fridays.

By Sami E. Turner