My Two Cents

My sister just sent me Anne-Marie Slaughter's incredibly smart article about "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."  Slaughter asks why, despite the message the older generation of feminists strove to impart, does this generation have a much more resigned attitude towards choosing between work and family?  She notes that older women are often offended by the choices their younger counterparts are making to sacrifice high positions or otherwise compromise their careers, but ultimately concludes that what looks like resignation or giving up might actually be a realistic reaction to a society that does not make it possible for women to both have a satisfying, demanding career and be the kind of mother that they want to be. 


 My friends and peers seem to struggle with this reality continuously, but I think the struggle and the willingness to discuss it is hopefully part of the progress towards a new model of working mother (and father, for that matter.  I definitely think that many of the issues Slaughter brings up are just as relevant for men).  I don't know anyone who wants to "just stay at home" (a problematic phrasing, in itself), but all of the mothers, or friends planning to be mothers, that I know have some elaborate plan of how to balance work and family.  Some plan on doing part time, some working from home, some taking a few years off and then resuming when their kids go to school.  Still, I can say firsthand that our culture doesn't make it very easy to reconcile these contortions with a satisfying work and family life.  


One issue Slaughter raises that is often hush-hushed for fear of emphasizing biological realities over women's ambition and potential, is that in attempts to juggle children and work, women are waiting longer to have babies, then often frantically trying to conceive before it's too late.  In addition to causing much angst over conception, Slaughter notes, this puts many women in the position of reaching the height of their careers right as their children enter the teen years--a time when parents often find it just as crucial to be present as they did when their children were infants. Many women I worked with in academia were also facing the challenge of raising young children and dealing with aging parents at the same time: a stressful combination occurring more frequently when women wait to have babies.  


Slaughter's solution (if one can call it that) is an overhaul of how our society thinks about work.  Instead of negatively judging women who ask for more flexibility in order to accommodate and embrace their family lives, this flexibility should become a given.  She quotes Mary Matalin as  saying, “having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.”  She observes that men like Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg have made efforts to accommodate work from home, but also wonders "how many women in similar positions would be afraid to ask, lest they be seen as insufficiently committed to their jobs."  She concludes that


The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.


Slaughter takes issue with Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg's claims that women need to be more aggressive and ambitious in order to make their way to the top, stressing, "these “mundane” issues—the need to travel constantly to succeed, the conflicts between school schedules and work schedules, the insistence that work be done in the office—cannot be solved by exhortations to close the ambition gap."  She makes the point that mundane issues require fighting mundane battles--even though it is so much more sexy to make sweeping claims about women's lack of ambition or men's misogyny.  


Along the way, women should think about the climb to leadership not in terms of a straight upward slope, but as irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips) when they turn down promotions to remain in a job that works for their family situation; when they leave high-powered jobs and spend a year or two at home on a reduced schedule; or when they step off a conventional professional track to take a consulting position or project-based work for a number of years.


I am currently reading Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent by Meredith Small, an interesting anthropological view of parenting, which makes it evident that we try to parent the kids we think our society needs.  (The documentary Babies made this point very clearly as well--American parents are horrified to see a baby in a field accompanied only by cows, but as that baby needs to grow up to live on the Mongolian steppe with little company, we might soften our judgment of that parenting technique.)  But as society changes, so do parenting and parenting goals.  Perhaps one realization women had following the gains feminists made in past decades was that a society where mothers sacrifice all for their careers doesn't actually lead to a place where any of us would like to live.  How do we create a society that both teaches our children that women are intelligent, strong, and capable of working in any profession at any level, but also that mothering and fathering are enormously worthwhile pursuits?  


I do agree with much of what Slaughter says about the difficulty of balancing work and family, and also about what would need to change in our society in order to make that balancing a realistic achievement.  But one thing I think she misses, from her perspective at the very top of her profession and our society, is that we also need to do a better job of respecting the women who either can't or do not want to go down that path.  She offers solutions for how to reach the peak of your career later in life and devote your life to your career after the kids have left for college, but at some level this still seems to be making a judgment about women who decide to opt out more fully.  We will have made real progress when women can be respected for all of the different choices they make: when we give stay-at-home moms the credit they deserve for all of the incredibly hard work they do, and also give the full-time working mothers the support they need.