Finally warned to consider family costs before deciding on a career, will Gen Y listen?

College: the calm before the storm (image via Wikipedia)

There was an excellent article in the New York Times that publicly outed finance as an especially bad career choice for anyone who would like to combine work and family.

As Adam of Washington, D.C. noted in the comments section, this isn’t really news: “It’s not exactly a secret that hours are long on Wall Street. What do you expect for that kind of bonus, afternoons off to coach your kids’ sports teams?”

Point taken, Adam. Certainly, anyone who enters finance must quickly realize that working 70-hour-plus weeks, frequenting the office on weekends, and living out of a suitcase to accommodate habitual travel will not a happy family life make. Personally, I’ve stopped feeling sorry for my friends who work in finance. The war stories never seem to end (“I haven’t been home in days; I haven’t had a weekend off in months…”), but no one put a gun to their heads and forced them to work for Goldman Sachs.

On the other hand, David Leonhardt, author of The Times piece and an economics columnist, makes an important point—more of a plea, really:

“The question of how to balance work and family is almost inevitably a thorny one. Easy answers, free of compromise and sacrifice, are rare…But if you’re a teenager or college student trying to decide what to do with your life, you at least may want to start thinking about the question. I promise: Most of you will spend a lot of time thinking about it later.”

Leonhardt hits the nail on the head. The fact of the matter is that young adults give little explicit thought to how we will combine family life with our future careers. We spend an enormous amount of time thinking about and preparing for our futures, yes. But by “future” we inevitably mean our career.

If it isn’t the practical details of daily life, what do we starry-eyed youngsters consider when thinking about our future careers? For the most part, career choices seem to depend on personal, family, and social expectations. Consider some questions I pondered with regards to my “future” while at college:

1) I’d like to save the world. If I choose to work in the non-profit sector, will I be able to find a spouse willing to work some corporate job so that we can still live the bling-bling lifestyle any self-respecting girl raised in Los Angeles has always wanted?

2) If I don’t become a doctor or lawyer, will my Russian-Jewish immigrant family disown me?

3) Are my fellow classmates who are landing jobs at Lehman Brothers better than me? (Lehman was still alive and well when I graduated from Middlebury College a few years ago, where Dick Fuld served on the Board of Trustees.)

In four years, I never once stopped to consider how, in my quest to save the world via my challenging, fascinating job, I would make it home for dinner every night. Or what I would do when I had kids, which, having already disappointed my Russian-Jewish parents by steering clear of medicine and law, is the least I can do.

Now a few years out of college, I think about how I will balance work and family life all the time. I’ve realized that I will have to make compromises, that I probably can’t “have it all” all the time. My future spouse will have to make compromises, too, because I know all about the Second Shift, and I’m making it my life’s mission to avoid the bitter, sex-less marriage that materializes when women bear the brunt of household work on top of paid work. No double duty for me, thanks.

In any case, it’s about time that young adults paid more attention to the work-family implications of a given career. It’s a shame that it took a financial crisis of quasi-apocalyptic proportions to finally jumpstart a public dialogue about the flexibility and the family-life failures of careers in fields like finance and consulting. But I thank Mr. Leonhardt nonetheless for his candor. He certainly got me thinking. The question is: what about my peers?

- Liz