The seeds of maternal guilt find fertile ground in traditional cultural mores in BRIC and the UAE. The majority of survey respondents say that it is socially acceptable for women with small children to pursue a career, but traditional voices in their family can be quick to criticize their choices. Many of the professional women we interviewed recall small sharp digs from family members. A principal with an international advisory firm recalls, “My mother-in-law visited when our daughter was one year old and said, ‘I can't believe you're feeding her from boxes you bought in the supermarket rather than freshly cooked food. I guess that's the price of being a career woman.’ That's the sort of comment you have to swallow.” Her daughter turned three soon after she was made a principal. “I know my in-laws are proud that I got promoted, but there's always the feeling that if anything goes wrong with my daughter, it's because of me.”

      Such traditional views are persistent, even if in muted form. About one in five of the women we surveyed reported feeling pressured “to drop out” of the workforce when they married. The exceptions are Brazil—at 16 percent, it was the lowest percentage in the group—and India, which topped the charts at 51 percent of women expected to give up their career prospects after marriage. The pressure further ratcheted up after the birth of their first child, nearly doubling in some cases.

      “My friends and I grew up in an era when you studied, did postgrad, worked for a year or two, and then got married,” says Jayashri Ramamurti, an Indian woman now in her mid-thirties. Of the twenty women who graduated with her from a prestigious two-year graduate program in management, Ramamurti calculates that only four are working, most of them part-time. “They are intelligent women, but they are pretty much at home.”

      Ramamurti herself left her fast-paced HR job in a telecommunications company after the birth of her second child in 2001. Despite a robust support network—her father lived nearly full-time with her family, and she also had a nanny and a live-in maid—something wasn't working. “I wasn't happy with the quality of time I was spending with my children,” especially her infant son, she says. In 2001 she quit, intending to take a couple of years off; instead, she stepped out of the workforce for more than five years. Ramamurti is now head of HR for Google India's engineering division and thrilled with her job, but she can't help taking an occasional backward glance: “Had I not had that break, would I have achieved a lot more?”

      So strong is cultural pressure that some of the women expressed the realization that their maternal guilt was, to some extent, self-inflicted, with little or no bearing on the actual well-being or happiness of their children. “I feel guilty at times, but no one else makes me feel guilty,” confessed an Indian working mother of two school-aged children. “My kids are actually proud of me.”

      When we probed deeper, we discovered a sophisticated awareness of the trade-offs of the costs of a high-powered career and an appreciation of its benefits. As one working mother in Brazil explained, “Sometimes I feel guilty, but I change my mind rapidly because without my job, I could not support education, health care, our house, vacations, et cetera.”

      Still, even without guilt and with multiple shoulders to lean on, it's not easy juggling career and children. Even as they are fulfilling the responsibilities of their demanding jobs, professional women still shoulder the lion's share of child care duties in Russia, the UAE, and, especially, Brazil, where, according to our research, the majority take on at least 75 percent of the load. “In [Brazil], women are the ones who concern themselves with the kids,” notes Samara Braga, a financial markets leader for Ernst & Young in Brazil. “That's the way we're brought up—and that isn't changing.”

      The same is true in India. “No matter what you do, family—taking care of children or elderly relatives—is a woman's primary responsibility,” says Anjali Hazarika. “She doesn't get exempted from family responsibilities just because she is a full-time working career person. There is an understanding with the family—sometimes explicit, sometimes unarticulated—that if you want to go outside the home to work, you will not neglect your family. Be ready for 24/7 and not only 9 to 5 five days a week. This can place additional demands on her, and that can lead to stress.”

      The close-knit nature of extended families in the BRIC countries and the UAE envelops its members in a circle of care. As daughters mature, its warm embrace provides support, and a source of strength. In interview after interview, high-achieving women affirmed that they couldn't have reached their level of professional success had it not been for their mother or father or an aunt or uncle pointing the way, encouraging their development and boosting them over the rough patches. In return, however, daughters are expected to shoulder their own share of family obligations, and that duty can undermine a career in surprising ways.

      ELDER CARE: A TICKING TIME BOMB

      When their mother fell seriously ill, Vasanti, an executive in the financial sector, and her sister, an equally highly qualified professional, were both working in the United States. “My sister quit her job and moved back to India with her family because one of us had to be there,” says Vasanti. “Before that, we took turns going back and forth because my parents refused to move to the U.S. to live with either my sister or me. And the mere mention of the words ‘nursing home’ threw things into chaos. It was like we were the meanest daughters on the planet” for even thinking it. Like her sister, Vasanti also left her job to help tend to her mother. When talking about trying to balance elder care duties with a demanding career, she says, “It's a huge struggle.”

      The pull that does loom large in the lives of many women in emerging markets is elder care. Although many BRIC and UAE women in our survey did not have children, the vast majority—81 percent—care for their parents or aging relatives. Their responsibilities consume anywhere from eight hours a week in the UAE to a draining fourteen hours a week—that's two hours every day—in India. In the United States, in contrast, professional women dedicate about five hours a week to elder care.¹ Our study found overall consensus among adult children in BRIC and UAE that they would change their lives to take care of their parents and that, in fact, the obligation toward parents loomed even more important than that toward one's children. As Leila Hoteit explains, “It's seen that parents take care of you all their adult life, so when it's your time to pay back, you do it wholeheartedly.”

      Daughterly guilt is pervasive among professional women throughout emerging economies. It's especially strong in India, China, and the UAE, where despite massive demographic shifts and economic development, the traditional concept of filial piety remains powerful. In India and China, in fact, daughterly guilt exceeds maternal guilt among our survey participants (see figure 2-2).

FIGURE 2-2

      Percentage of women who express daughterly guilt