Working women who seek a career worry about how to manage competing demands of a family and a career. Those ugly words - you can’t have it all - come to bear heavily upon us and have led many women throughout the world, not to seek management positions because they are aware that their family life will suffer. We continue to play the role as the nurturers, the ones who keep the home alive, the one who makes sacrifices for her children. Around the world, the cries of women working and having families are all the same. No society has been exempt from this and it is something that we as women must grapple with in our universe.

DESPITE the generations of female participation in the workforce and our successes, a constant message has been thrown at us, reminding us of our position in society. It causes us to constantly reassess our selves, our decisions, and our values.

This wholly female experience is brought about by our child-bearing ability. We have been told by many dissenting voices - you can’t have it all - either you have a career or you have a family. It appears as if the world does not want us to seek a balance in these two very important aspects of our lives.

This ugly reality leads to a question that we must seek deep within: is it the world, women or men who are keeping this ugly question alive? The answer is a mixture of traditions held by all parties that allows this question to survive despite the changes in the workplace and the world.

Women entered the workforce in the western world in large numbers after World War II; men held all the seats of power, and they never perceived that we would become successful. They probably thought our role would remain secondary, a supplement to the main male breadwinner, thus never having to worry about balancing career and family. They wrongly associated our impact on the workforce as they had wrongly associated brown peoples’ position in the colonised world.

However, in the western world, the female influence grew and women formed powerful lobby groups that championed their rights to achieve some form of balance in the work force and personal life. Some of these influential yet controversial laws that were achieved by the might of powerful organisations and the woman’s voice could be heard and felt in such controversial areas as equal employment opportunities, abortion, paid maternity leave, child support by an absentee father, and affordable, reliable daycare services.

The female experience is universal. When we meet women, no matter the race, there is a kinship based on our womanhood. In our universe, we instinctively understand each other’s pains and acknowledge the world has penalised us for childbearing even though it is the gel of all societies. This penalty is the load that we have had to bear and an important consideration for Caribbean women as we continue on the road to higher education because we must remember that the problems that have arisen on foreign shores is beating a path to our homeland.

Working women who seek a career worry about how to manage competing demands of a family and a career. Those ugly words - you can’t have it all - come to bear heavily upon us and have led many women throughout the world, not to seek management positions because they are aware that their family life will suffer. We continue to play the role as the nurturers, the ones who keep the home alive, the one who makes sacrifices for her children. Around the world, the cries of women working and having families are all the same. No society has been exempt from this and it is something that we as women must grapple with in our universe.

Working women in the developed world, the ones who live in the supposed cocoon as depicted in the romanticised Hollywood movies, complain they are still bearing the brunt of child rearing and housekeeping. Most men have not made changes to accommodate the female participation in the work force. Statistics, day to day lives and words of the female tell us this is reality. In the end, many women opt not to get involved in management jobs, because they know their home lives will suffer. Then, there is the other extreme of women having nannies rearing their children because that is the only way that they can have it all.

The result has been in the developed world, some younger women have chosen to either shun marriage and opt to have a career, or marry and not have children or as few children as possible because they realise that they too, can’t have it all. The result has been lower birth rates in the developed world as women realise they cannot sacrifice themselves.

These realities will come to our shores one day. We need to be aware of these issues so that we can prepare ourselves for the dilemma that many developed nations have had to grapple with.

Let us hope that as our society develops, we can find a way to learn from the lessons of these women and find a path that will enable us to have as much as possible of the pie.