Women and Careers ... and Parenthood

With thanks to my colleague, Jessica Berg, for passing this along to me, I'm sure others found this NY Times article interesting, if depressing.  It compares the first women on the Supreme Court with the more recent appointments in terms of the generational differences re balancing careers and family.  Obviously, a number of people have noted that the current women on the court (including Kagan if her nomination goes through) are childless, while the original female judges had families.  The author of the article posits a number of generational differences, suggesting that it is actually harder for women to balance career and family in this new generation because the expectations for women are different than they were for women who graduated in previous generations.  As the author notes, the women on the Supreme Court are hardly a significant sample size from which to draw conclusions, but I wonder if there's some merit to the underlying argument, particularly as we noted during the law school hiring season that there seemed to be a lot less lateral hiring of women than of men, and that was largely attributed to reasons related to the woman's position in the family.