Power Moms: How Executive Mothers Navigate Work and Life

A former Wall Street Journal career columnist who shared its 2003 Pulitzer Prize compares two generations of women—Boomers and Gen Xers—to examine how each navigates the emotional and professional challenges involved in juggling managerial careers and families.

For the first time in American history, a significant number of mothers are heading or recently led major corporations, including General Motors, Ulta Beauty, and Best Buy. Over the past several decades, women have made gains throughout executive suites. Yet these “Power Moms” still struggle with balancing their management responsibilities with raising children. Joann S. Lublin draws on the experiences of the nation’s two generations of these successful women to measure how far we’ve come—and how far we still need to go.

Lublin combines her own insights as a working mother with those of eighty-six executive mothers across industries, including experienced public-company chiefs such as Carol Bartz, the first woman to command Autodesk and Yahoo; Hershey’s Michele Buck; DuPont’s Ellen Kullman; ITT’s Denise Ramos; and WW International’s Mindy Grossman, plus twenty-seven of their grown daughters. Lublin's conversations with these women reveal how trailblazing Boomers often endured sweeping disapproval for their demanding management careers, even as their own daughters sometimes rejected their choices. While the second wave of executive mothers—all under forty-five when interviewed—handle parenthood with less angst, they still lead stressful lives.

Power Moms provides lessons and advice to help today’s professional women, their families, and their employers navigate this challenging terrain. Lublin looks at the trade-offs mothers are too often forced to make between work and family, as well as at the root causes of them, including the dearth of large-scale paid parental leave and other family-friendly policies. While it celebrates the gains women have made over the years, Power Moms makes clear how much more must be done to make working motherhood work.