Last month, there was a front page story in The New York Times that caused something of a furore. Written by Louise Story, it told the tale of a bright student at Yale who, though studying law, plans to stay at home and be a mother. Story further cited a survey of 138 Yale women students, 60 per cent of whom planned to stop working and have children.

So, is this wrong or right? Is it a waste of an education? Is it self-indulgence on the part of these women? And does the fact that women, irrespective of their talent, skill and education, rarely reach the top levels of high powered professions, influence their decision to opt out in favour of bringing up their families?

This is not the first time that highly qualified women have been accused of frittering away their education. I remember, somewhere in the late eighties, an article that appeared in the Harvard Business Review that prompted the same sort of reaction as the present one in The New York Times and for the same reasons. Dubbed as The Briefcase and the Baby, the report had professional women frothing at the mouth.

The sheer physical difficulties that career woman face are enormous. And nowhere is this more so than in India, where by decree the business of rearing a child lies strictly in the mother’s domain. A combination of emancipation and economics has led to husbands encouraging their wives to work. But let any woman suggest that the responsibility for hearth, home and offspring be equally shared and the chores divided and she will discover that her husband’s liberalism is less than skin deep.

This perhaps is understandable: biological and social reasons ensure that it is the mother who rears the child. But this being so, how does a women set her sights on climbing the professional ladder? How does she tear herself away from her newborn baby to go back to full-time work? How does she concentrate on the agenda of an important meeting when all she can think of is her infant’s raging fever? How does she cope with having to go on tour on the eve of her daughter’s final exam? Or when, just as she is leaving for work, the maid servant hands in her notice? Fathers faced with the same problems can leave for work happy in the knowledge that their wives will cope. But is the reverse true? While stay-at-home moms are common enough, stay-at-home-dads are a rarity.

However, none of this confronts the main question raised by Story’s article. Are women wasting an expensive and superior education by not using it professionally? Clich?d though it is, the answer to this is that education is never wasted. How it is used is up to the individual concerned. Would you agree?