JUDITH M. BARDWICK

Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D.,
MANAGEMENT CONSULTANTS

Some Effects of This Recession

This recession, like those in the early 1980s and 1990s, is disproportionately impacting a group of people who never expected to be vulnerable and seriously unemployed. Historically, white collar professionals and members of management did not suffer during recessions. That changed with the enormous restructurings that began in the 1980s and continued into the early 1990s. This recession is significantly impacting the 1995-2000 elite of the labor force: technology and finance experts. Worst hit are recent college graduates with MBAs and IT degrees whose optimism was never tempered by hard times.

Many of the young elite, including those from Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the like, from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley, are unemployed. For a while Pink Slip parties were heavily attended as the mechanism to network fastest. With no job growth and universities graduating far more trained people than were needed the unemployed are remaining unemployed longer and longer.

Many of the young elite are in denial or in despair, convinced that theirs is a lost generation. Some become waiters and waitresses…doing pick-up jobs that need little training or education…and some return to school and others go home to mom and dad. A generation with the highest expectations and belief in the value of their education are becoming cynical and depressed.

People who are 35 and older know that recessions come and go and so do opportunities…but our young people grew up without long and major recessions. As a result they haven't developed a more balanced perspective and significant levels of resilience.

For the last 35 years, under the leadership of feminism, work, and specifically careers were glorified and the prototypical tasks of women were denigrated. Despite the growing success of women in management and the professions in the last three decades, there has been a startling increase in the glorification of domesticity, notably that of child rearing, especially by boomer women in the last few years. Successful women in their 30s and 40s are leaving the labor force and staying home to raise their children if that's economically possible.

Leaving the labor force to remain home has several origins: for one thing, IT - the cell phone, pager and laptop - means everyone is essentially on a 24/7 work week. Untenable levels of stress and anxiety are the natural result of always being available and to anyone. Second, the boomers raised the bar on levels of every kind of performance: children are in after-school activities 5 days a week, with team practices and meets on the weekend. The competition to get children into the "right" schools starts with preschool and only ends with graduate school. Third, 95% of all careers normally plateau - promotions end - long before retirement. Work is fun as long as success and the good times roll. Even without this recession, a significant number of boomer men as well as women would have left even the elite labor force if they could afford it because their expectations couldn't be met and work was no longer "fun". The fourth reason to leave even a successful career is the economy has been down long enough so there's too little optimism to sustain people so a bump in the road has grown to feel as high as the Himalayas. And there's a sixth reason: when the world is filled with turmoil, the haven of home and family grows enormously important.

Thus, this recession, combined with the worst bear market since the 1960s, the debacle of the glamour industry of IT and telecommunications, combined with 9/11 and the unrelenting threat of terrorism has left many people with unusually high levels of chronic anxiety, fear and depression. The critical task for this and many other nations is to enable people to learn how to manage through anxiety and achieve a sustained sense of well-being in a world that is unlikely to again feel as safe as it did.