Includes bibliographical references (pages 309-334).

"Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the acclaimed author of When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children, tackles one of the most wrenching challenges for women today - creating rich multidimensional lives that contain both career and children." "Almost half of all professional women are childless at age forty. The more a woman succeeds in her career, the less likely it is that she will have a partner or a baby. For men the opposite is true: the more successful a man is professionally, the more likely it is that he will be married with children." "Hewlett brings to the book her substantial expertise as a policy analyst and her own difficult experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. Combining poignant and compelling portraits of women's lives with a groundbreaking survey commissioned specifically for this book, she gives voice to women's hopes and anguish and unearths stunning new information. For example, 42 percent of women in corporate America are childless at age forty (compared to 25 percent of men), but only 14 percent planned to be. Hewlett's research reveals a host of circumstances that have conspired to produce brutal trade-offs in the lives of professional women: America's long-hours corporate culture, a stubbornly traditional division of labor at home, and a fertility industry that lulls women into a false sense that they can get pregnant deep into middle age."--Jacket.

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