Educated, working, female millennials — age 18 to early 30s — see a winding path to the top, rather than the straight-to-the-top career ladder of their baby boomer predecessors, according to The New York Times.
The report pulls from a number of studies from the Harvard Business School, the Center for Talent Innovation, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and the Pew Research Center, that collectively show that millennial women are more likely to interrupt or slow down their careers for family life.
According to the Center for Talent Innovation study cited in the report, many millennials saw their parents either struggle to balance family life with a full-time job, or choose to become a full-time parent.
Rather than attempt to juggle a full-time job with a family, young women are more comfortable temporarily dialing back their career or choosing a more flexible path, according to the report. This female millennial career strategy seems to stem more from realism than optimism, though. Millennial women still see their gender as a disadvantage at work and believe being a working mother will be a significant career challenge, according to the report.
On the bright side, The New York Times noted a study that showed men are slowly beginning to expect shared responsibilities. Millennial men were more likely than Generation X men and baby boomer men to expect a career interruption for children, according to the report.
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