Quality of a life.

Erin Callan, erstwhile CFO of the now-defunct Lehman Brothers investment bank, contributed a salvo to the "work-life balance" debate a few days ago in a New York Times op-ed. Apparently she worked on Sundays and ate her meals at her desk and ignored her husband and friends — her work was her only priority, as she tells it. And now she wishes she hadn't done all that work. Or something. A thousand-word op-ed is by nature limited, but I'm not really sure what her point is, or what she thinks she's contributing to the conversation about work-life balance. She's 47, once-divorced and now undergoing IVF to try and have a child with her second husband. She wishes this weren't the case. She writes:

Sometimes young women tell me they admire what I’ve done. As they see it, I worked hard for 20 years and can now spend the next 20 focused on other things. But that is not balance. I do not wish that for anyone. Even at the best times in my career, I was never deluded into thinking I had achieved any sort of rational allocation between my life at work and my life outside.

Callan may regret her decisions now; she may even regret them because it's now apparently fashionable for women to lament or to some extent disown their younger self who sacrificed for her career to the exclusion of everything else. But I think it's disingenuous of Callan to say that her decision to work so many hours wasn't "a rational allocation between my life at work and my life outside". It wasn't balance, sure, but that doesn't mean she didn't find it rational, or that other women or men who are not Erin Callan would be wrong in making the choices she did. She's an intelligent and ambitious woman, she could've found a less demanding job. It would've come with lower pay and less prestige, of course. But no one is entitled to unlimited prestige, millions of dollars in salary and bonuses, plus whatever "full" outside life he or she desires. 

What bothers me about these "can't-have-it-all" essays is that they seem to be coming predominantly from highly educated, upper-middle or upper-class, privileged, straight white women. These are not the women I'm worried about. I don't care that Erin Callan had to check her BlackBerry on Sunday or that she flew overnight to Europe for a meeting (oh, but on her birthday! How devestating). She got compensated handsomely for her time.

The women and men I'm worried about are the ones working eighty-hour weeks at jobs where working only one job wouldn't give them a living wage. I'm worried about the women and men who've been priced out of their last three neighborhoods to make room for luxury condos and who now must commute an hour or two each way into the city for work, costing them the cost of a car, gas, insurance, and time. These are the women and men who, although they've sacrificed everything else in their life for their jobs, don't get rewarded with prestige, several-million-dollar salary, and an op-ed in the New York Times. 

To Callan's credit, the op-ed doesn't solicit our pity (very much) for how hard her life must have been — she made her choices, it's just that now she regrets them or sees them to have been unnecessarily extreme. Fine. Callan has the right to her opinion and to express her regrets at her leisure. I'm not sure the New York Times op-ed page is the right venue for such a thing, but that's more a reflection of what people want to read (or what the NYT op-ed page editors think people want to read). I'd like to hear from the women who didn't get a choice, though.