Jack Welch: Child-Raising Is for Chicks

According to former General Electric (GE) CEO Jack Welch, "women" must choose between advancing their careers and raising their children. "There's no such thing as work-life balance," he said, specifically referring to Patricia Woertz, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), as well as Ellen Kullman, CEO of DuPont (DD) as women who chose to concentrate on their careers.

Now, I don't know anything about the family lives of Woertz, Kullman, or any of the many women who head up food companies. I wonder if Welch does. He hints at it: Woertz and Kullman have "had pretty straight careers," he said, meaning, apparently, that they never took off any time from work to care for their kids.

Whether or not that's true, achieving a work-life balance doesn't necessarily mean taking off time for kid-raising. Parents at all income levels manage to successfully raise their kids and work at the same time.

I do agree with Welch that there "are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences."

Welch made his comments during the annual conference of the Society for Human Resource Management on June 28, as reported today by the Wall Street Journal. What irked me most was his directing his comments specifically at women. Of course there are work-life choices, and of course they have consequences. For women and for men.

The Journal's coverage downplayed the woman-centric aspect of Welch's comments, focusing instead on whether a "work-life balance" is realistic or not, with the unspoken assumption that it's a women's issue. The reporters—Cari Tuna and Joann S. Lublin—asked for responses from women, one of whom (a CEO who had taken a long maternity leave) said in passing that men have to make such choices, too. (Update: they also talked to a couple of men, as Tuna just pointed out to me.) But Welch's glaring cluelessness on that front otherwise went unremarked upon.