Too many conversations about why women aren’t able to become CEO with a babe on the hip focus on the wrong target: individual women, their choices, their failures. But the author, Ann-Marie Slaughter, has a different target in mind. She wants to focus on, well, everyone.
I still strongly believe that women can "have it all" (and that men can too). I believe that we can have it all at the same time. But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured.
I couldn't agree more. We both bristle at the Sheryl Sandberg-esque rallying cry to women to just try harder -- and promises that if they work hard and are smart enough, they can have a high-powered career and a happy family with absolutely no conflicts. As if.
Yet Slaughter and I differ on what creates this dilemma in women’s choices and how to create change so that they don’t feel torn in two opposing directions. Motherhood, in her mind, is something that women inherently crave, a yearning that doesn’t affect men in the same way. She therefore presents the choice to slow down a career for family as a women’s choice, one that must be accommodated by our society and economy. She leaves the idea that men don’t want or need to make similar choices intact. Yet it’s only by making a shift to a society in which men are also expected and encouraged to spend time raising children that women will begin to see real equality.
What are the culprits driving women’s strife? One of the causes that Slaughter points out is that while family life has been completely revolutionized by women’s entry into the workforce over the past half century, our economy hasn’t done the same. Worse, things are getting harder for those who have commitments outside the office. Mother Jones editors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery described this phenomenon as the “Great Speedup”: employees are being asked to work longer and longer hours without getting more pay in return. Nearly half of all workers in a recent survey said their jobs had expanded, and most didn’t see any extra money. And even in the midst of an unemployment crisis with millions out of a job, U.S. productivity increased twice as fast in 2009 as in 2008, and twice as fast again in 2010. Those workers who still have a job are being asked put in more time.
This phenomenon affects all workers no matter their gender. Yet when it comes to feeling a tug between our increasingly labor intensive jobs and the work of raising a family, the guilt invariably falls on women’s shoulders. Thus it becomes a problem of work/family balance and a “women’s issue.” Slaughter sides with this framing.
One of the storylines she takes issue with is that a woman can “have it all” if she marries a supportive husband willing to share equally in the work of parenting. But she doesn’t think that will cut it, because it “assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children… In my experience, that is simply not the case.” She smartly acknowledges she’s on “treacherous ground” in this assertion. And I do think it’s treacherous. She mentions the fact that “men are still socialized to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the breadwinner” and for women it’s “to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the caregiver.”
But she thinks it’s not just socialization – somehow it’s innate, that women experience “a maternal imperative felt so deeply that the ‘choice’ [to be home with children] is reflexive.” I don’t buy it. There are plenty of women who don’t want to have kids; there are, increasingly, dads who are clamoring to spend more time with their children. If we don’t work at undoing the differing societal expectations that say a woman is a mother and a man is a worker, we will never change the status quo.
While it’s become increasingly acceptable for women to work, it still hasn’t become acceptable for them to step back from motherhood. And that battle over what takes precedent plays out in women’s lives in harmful ways. Women are often putting in more hours than men: a recent survey of over 5,000 full-time professionals found that more than half of women work nine or more hours a day compared to just 41 percent of men, plus 11 percent of women work six to seven days a week while only seven percent of men do. One would hope that as women dial up the time they spend working, they could dial down the time they spend on parenting and home labor by offloading some of it to dad. Yet that’s not happening. Insure.com calculated that the value of what a father contributes to his household in labor, if paid at the going rate for outsourcing those tasks to someone else, would come to $20,248 this year – actually down since ten years ago, adjusted for inflation. When it did the same analysis for what a mother contributes, it founds she puts in 34 percent more, adding up to $60,182. While women are putting in more work hours, they’re still working harder at home than their partners.
Slaughter calls on women to redefine success and happiness. Their careers shouldn’t have to look like climbing up a ladder, but going up “irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips)” to change course in a way that better fits with family life. Clearly the current workplace it is not yet suited to this kind of behavior, but it’s imperative to push for this to be an acceptable choice. Yet this shouldn’t be a choice that only women make. She makes passing reference to the fact that “a more balanced life is not a women’s issue; balance would be better for us all,” but still insists on “respecting, enabling, and indeed celebrating the full range of women’s choices” without calling for them to be men’s choices, too. Real societal change can never happen if women and men are still expected to operate in two different worlds and have two separate slates of choices in front of them. All choices – work, family, time off – must be equally available to and expected of both genders.
Otherwise, we certainly won’t get the women in leadership that she believes are vital to creating societal change around women and work. Just take a look at her favorite role model, Michelle Obama. Slaughter lauds her for “repeatedly ma[king] decisions designed to let her do work she cared about and also be the kind of parent she wanted to be,” even though she had the same résumé as Barack. This is precisely, however, why she’s not in the White House and he is. Concerns over childcare are a major factor in why women choose not to run for office and why we have therefore never had more than a 17 percent female Congress. Those are not choices Barack was, or is, expected to make, and therein lies the rub.
The change in conversation represented by this article, from women’s failures to “have it all” to society’s failure to make more choices possible, is incredibly valuable. Slaughter also presents some interesting ideas about how to make this shift widespread, although stays clear of structural and/or policy change that might have the most significant impact. But there’s another conversation that also needs to shift, one that she doesn’t want to dismantle. We have to change the way we talk about parenting, work, and men and women’s choices to make sure both genders have equal opportunities. Women's advancement depends on it.
