Why Women Still Can’t Have It All
It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who
left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers
and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we
truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to
change.
By
Phillip ToledanoEighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.
She was horrified. “You can’t write that,” she said. “You, of all people.” What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet. I had always assumed that if I could get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January 2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could.
A rude epiphany hit me soon after I got there. When people asked why I had left government, I explained that I’d come home not only because of Princeton’s rules (after two years of leave, you lose your tenure), but also because of my desire to be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible. I have not exactly left the ranks of full-time career women: I teach a full course load; write regular print and online columns on foreign policy; give 40 to 50 speeches a year; appear regularly on TV and radio; and am working on a new academic book. But I routinely got reactions from other women my age or older that ranged from disappointed (“It’s such a pity that you had to leave Washington”) to condescending (“I wouldn’t generalize from your experience. I’ve never had to compromise, and my kids turned out great”).
The first set of reactions, with the underlying assumption that my choice was somehow sad or unfortunate, was irksome enough. But it was the second set of reactions—those implying that my parenting and/or my commitment to my profession were somehow substandard—that triggered a blind fury. Suddenly, finally, the penny dropped. All my life, I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the faintly superior smile while another woman told me she had decided to take some time out or pursue a less competitive career track so that she could spend more time with her family. I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist cause, chatting smugly with her dwindling number of college or law-school friends who had reached and maintained their place on the highest rungs of their profession. I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).
VIDEO: Anne-Marie Slaughter talks with Hanna Rosin about the struggles of working mothers.
Last spring, I flew to Oxford to give a public lecture. At the request of a young Rhodes Scholar I know, I’d agreed to talk to the Rhodes community about “work-family balance.” I ended up speaking to a group of about 40 men and women in their mid-20s. What poured out of me was a set of very frank reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children (even though my husband, an academic, was willing to take on the lion’s share of parenting for the two years I was in Washington). I concluded by saying that my time in office had convinced me that further government service would be very unlikely while my sons were still at home. The audience was rapt, and asked many thoughtful questions. One of the first was from a young woman who began by thanking me for “not giving just one more fatuous ‘You can have it all’ talk.” Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.
The striking gap between the responses I heard from those young women (and others like them) and the responses I heard from my peers and associates prompted me to write this article. Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.
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. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.
Before my service in government, I’d spent my career in academia: as a law professor and then as the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Both were demanding jobs, but I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done. I had to travel frequently, but I found I could make up for that with an extended period at home or a family vacation.
I knew that I
was lucky in my career choice, but I had no idea how lucky until I spent
two years in Washington within a rigid bureaucracy, even with bosses as
understanding as Hillary Clinton and her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.
My workweek started at 4:20 on Monday morning, when I got up to get the
5:30 train from Trenton to Washington. It ended late on Friday, with the
train home. In between, the days were crammed with meetings, and when
the meetings stopped, the writing work began—a never-ending stream of
memos, reports, and comments on other people’s drafts. For two years, I
never left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those
open 24 hours, which meant that everything from dry cleaning to hair
appointments to Christmas shopping had to be done on weekends, amid
children’s sporting events, music lessons, family meals, and conference
calls. I was entitled to four hours of vacation per pay period, which
came to one day of vacation a month. And I had it better than many of my
peers in D.C.; Secretary Clinton deliberately came in around 8 a.m. and
left around 7 p.m., to allow her close staff to have morning and
evening time with their families (although of course she worked earlier
and later, from home).
In short, the
minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of
working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I
could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to
be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I
realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least
for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip
side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types
of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.
I am hardly
alone in this realization. Michèle Flournoy stepped down after three
years as undersecretary of defense for policy, the third-highest job in
the department, to spend more time at home with her three children, two
of whom are teenagers. Karen Hughes left her position as the counselor
to President George W. Bush after a year and a half in Washington to go
home to Texas for the sake of her family. Mary Matalin, who spent two
years as an assistant to Bush and the counselor to Vice President Dick
Cheney before stepping down to spend more time with her daughters,
wrote: “Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who
want to have a career and a family can make it work.”
Yet the decision
to step down from a position of power—to value family over professional
advancement, even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing
social pressures on career professionals in the United States. One
phrase says it all about current attitudes toward work and family,
particularly among elites. In Washington, “leaving to spend time with
your family” is a euphemism for being fired. This understanding is so
ingrained that when Flournoy announced her resignation last December, TheNew York Times covered her decision as follows:
Ms. Flournoy’s announcement surprised friends and a number of Pentagon officials, but all said they took her reason for resignation at face value and not as a standard Washington excuse for an official who has in reality been forced out. “I can absolutely and unequivocally state that her decision to step down has nothing to do with anything other than her commitment to her family,” said Doug Wilson, a top Pentagon spokesman. “She has loved this job and people here love her.
Think about what this “standard Washington excuse” implies: it is so unthinkable that an official would actually
step down to spend time with his or her family that this must be a
cover for something else. How could anyone voluntarily leave the circles
of power for the responsibilities of parenthood? Depending on one’s
vantage point, it is either ironic or maddening that this view abides in
the nation’s capital, despite the ritual commitments to “family values”
that are part of every political campaign. Regardless, this sentiment
makes true work-life balance exceptionally difficult. But it cannot
change unless top women speak out.
Only recently
have I begun to appreciate the extent to which many young professional
women feel under assault by women my age and older. After I gave a
recent speech in New York, several women in their late 60s or early 70s
came up to tell me how glad and proud they were to see me speaking as a
foreign-policy expert. A couple of them went on, however, to contrast my
career with the path being traveled by “younger women today.” One
expressed dismay that many younger women “are just not willing to get
out there and do it.” Said another, unaware of the circumstances of my
recent job change: “They think they have to choose between having a
career and having a family.”
A
similar assumption underlies Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl
Sandberg’s widely publicized 2011 commencement speech at Barnard, and
her earlier TED talk, in
which she lamented the dismally small number of women at the top and
advised young women not to “leave before you leave.” When a woman starts
thinking about having children, Sandberg said, “she doesn’t raise her
hand anymore … She starts leaning back.” Although couched in terms of
encouragement, Sandberg’s exhortation contains more than a note of
reproach. We who have made it to the top, or are striving to get there,
are essentially saying to the women in the generation behind us: “What’s
the matter with you?”
They have an
answer that we don’t want to hear. After the speech I gave in New York, I
went to dinner with a group of 30-somethings. I sat across from two
vibrant women, one of whom worked at the UN and the other at a big New
York law firm. As nearly always happens in these situations, they soon
began asking me about work-life balance. When I told them I was writing
this article, the lawyer said, “I look for role models and can’t find
any.” She said the women in her firm who had become partners and taken
on management positions had made tremendous sacrifices, “many of which
they don’t even seem to realize … They take two years off when their
kids are young but then work like crazy to get back on track
professionally, which means that they see their kids when they are
toddlers but not teenagers, or really barely at all.” Her friend nodded,
mentioning the top professional women she knew, all of whom essentially
relied on round-the-clock nannies. Both were very clear that they did
not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional
success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family.
I realize that I
am blessed to have been born in the late 1950s instead of the early
1930s, as my mother was, or the beginning of the 20th century, as my
grandmothers were. My mother built a successful and rewarding career as a
professional artist largely in the years after my brothers and I left
home—and after being told in her 20s that she could not go to medical
school, as her father had done and her brother would go on to do,
because, of course, she was going to get married. I owe my own freedoms
and opportunities to the pioneering generation of women ahead of me—the
women now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who faced overt sexism of a kind I
see only when watching Mad Men, and who knew that the only way to
make it as a woman was to act exactly like a man. To admit to, much
less act on, maternal longings would have been fatal to their careers.
But precisely
thanks to their progress, a different kind of conversation is now
possible. It is time for women in leadership positions to recognize that
although we are still blazing trails and breaking ceilings, many of us
are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than
anything, a function of personal determination. As Kerry Rubin and Lia
Macko, the authors of Midlife Crisis at 30, their cri de coeur for Gen-X and Gen-Y women, put it:
What we discovered in our research is that while the empowerment part of the equation has been loudly celebrated, there has been very little honest discussion among women of our age about the real barriers and flaws that still exist in the system despite the opportunities we inherited.
I am well aware
that the majority of American women face problems far greater than any
discussed in this article. I am writing for my demographic—highly
educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in
the first place. We may not have choices about whether to do paid work,
as dual incomes have become indispensable. But we have choices about the
type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women who could be
leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.
Millions of
other working women face much more difficult life circumstances. Some
are single mothers; many struggle to find any job; others support
husbands who cannot find jobs. Many cope with a work life in which good
day care is either unavailable or very expensive; school schedules do
not match work schedules; and schools themselves are failing to educate
their children. Many of these women are worrying not about having it
all, but rather about holding on to what they do have. And although
women as a group have made substantial gains in wages, educational
attainment, and prestige over the past three decades, the economists
Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have shown that women are less happy
today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and
relative to men.
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.
The Half-Truths We Hold Dear
Let’s briefly
examine the stories we tell ourselves, the clichés that I and many other
women typically fall back on when younger women ask us how we have
managed to “have it all.” They are not necessarily lies, but at best
partial truths. We must clear them out of the way to make room for a
more honest and productive discussion about real solutions to the
problems faced by professional women.
It’s possible if you are just committed enough.
Our usual
starting point, whether we say it explicitly or not, is that having it
all depends primarily on the depth and intensity of a woman’s commitment
to her career. That is precisely the sentiment behind the dismay so
many older career women feel about the younger generation. They are not committed enough, we say, to make the trade-offs and sacrifices that the women ahead of them made.
Yet instead of
chiding, perhaps we should face some basic facts. Very few women reach
leadership positions. The pool of female candidates for any top job is
small, and will only grow smaller if the women who come after us decide
to take time out, or drop out of professional competition altogether, to
raise children. That is exactly what has Sheryl Sandberg so upset, and
rightly so. In her words, “Women are not making it to the top. A hundred
and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in
parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector,
[the share of] women at the top—C-level jobs, board seats—tops out at
15, 16 percent.”
Also see:
Ask Anne-Marie Slaughter a Question
The author will be online on Friday, June 29, at 11 a.m. Eastern time to
discuss her story. Click the link above to submit your questions in
advance.
Can
“insufficient commitment” even plausibly explain these numbers? To be
sure, the women who do make it to the top are highly committed to their
profession. On closer examination, however, it turns out that most of
them have something else in common: they are genuine superwomen.
Consider the number of women recently in the top ranks in
Washington—Susan Rice, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Michelle Gavin,
Nancy-Ann Min DeParle—who are Rhodes Scholars. Samantha Power, another
senior White House official, won a Pulitzer Prize at age 32. Or consider
Sandberg herself, who graduated with the prize given to Harvard’s top
student of economics. These women cannot possibly be the standard
against which even very talented professional women should measure
themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure.
What’s more,
among those who have made it to the top, a balanced life still is more
elusive for women than it is for men. A simple measure is how many women
in top positions have children compared with their male colleagues.
Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female
justices are single with no children. And the third, Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, began her career as a judge only when her younger child was
almost grown. The pattern is the same at the National Security Council:
Condoleezza Rice, the first and only woman national-security adviser, is
also the only national-security adviser since the 1950s not to have a
family.
The line of
high-level women appointees in the Obama administration is one woman
deep. Virtually all of us who have stepped down have been succeeded by
men; searches for women to succeed men in similar positions come up
empty. Just about every woman who could plausibly be tapped is already
in government. The rest of the foreign-policy world is not much better;
Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently
surveyed the best data he could find across the government, the
military, the academy, and think tanks, and found that women hold fewer
than 30 percent of the senior foreign-policy positions in each of these
institutions.
These numbers are
all the more striking when we look back to the 1980s, when women now in
their late 40s and 50s were coming out of graduate school, and remember
that our classes were nearly 50-50 men and women. We were sure then
that by now, we would be living in a 50-50 world. Something derailed
that dream.
Sandberg thinks
that “something” is an “ambition gap”—that women do not dream big
enough. I am all for encouraging young women to reach for the stars. But
I fear that the obstacles that keep women from reaching the top are
rather more prosaic than the scope of their ambition. My longtime and
invaluable assistant, who has a doctorate and juggles many balls as the
mother of teenage twins, e-mailed me while I was working on this
article: “You know what would help the vast majority of women with
work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” The
present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer
exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms
were the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed.
Consider some of
the responses of women interviewed by Zenko about why “women are
significantly underrepresented in foreign policy and national security
positions in government, academia, and think tanks.” Juliette Kayyem,
who served as an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland
Security from 2009 to 2011 and now writes a foreign-policy and
national-security column for The Boston Globe, told Zenko that among other reasons,
the basic truth is also this: the travel sucks. As my youngest of three children is now 6, I can look back at the years when they were all young and realize just how disruptive all the travel was. There were also trips I couldn’t take because I was pregnant or on leave, the conferences I couldn’t attend because (note to conference organizers: weekends are a bad choice) kids would be home from school, and the various excursions that were offered but just couldn’t be managed.
Jolynn Shoemaker,
the director of Women in International Security, agreed: “Inflexible
schedules, unrelenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office
are common features of these jobs.”
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. I
would hope to see commencement speeches that finger America’s social
and business policies, rather than women’s level of ambition, in
explaining the dearth of women at the top. But changing these policies
requires much more than speeches. It means fighting the mundane
battles—every day, every year—in individual workplaces, in legislatures,
and in the media.
It’s possible if you marry the right person.
Sandberg’s
second message in her Barnard commencement address was: “The most
important career decision you’re going to make is whether or not you
have a life partner and who that partner is.” Lisa Jackson, the
administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, recently drove
that message home to an audience of Princeton students and alumni
gathered to hear her acceptance speech for the James Madison Medal.
During the Q&A session, an audience member asked her how she managed
her career and her family. She laughed and pointed to her husband in
the front row, saying: “There’s my work-life balance.” I could never
have had the career I have had without my husband, Andrew Moravcsik, who
is a tenured professor of politics and international affairs at
Princeton. Andy has spent more time with our sons than I have, not only
on homework, but also on baseball, music lessons, photography, card
games, and more. When each of them had to bring in a foreign dish for
his fourth-grade class dinner, Andy made his grandmother’s Hungarian palacsinta; when our older son needed to memorize his lines for a lead role in a school play, he turned to Andy for help.
Still, the
proposition that women can have high-powered careers as long as their
husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally (or
disproportionately) assumes that most women will feel as
comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as
their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not
the case.
Here I step onto
treacherous ground, mined with stereotypes. From years of conversations
and observations, however, I’ve come to believe that men and women
respond quite differently when problems at home force them to recognize
that their absence is hurting a child, or at least that their presence
would likely help. I do not believe fathers love their children any less
than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a
cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their
family at a cost to their job.
Many factors
determine this choice, of course. Men are still socialized to believe
that their primary family obligation is to be the breadwinner; women, to
believe that their primary family obligation is to be the caregiver.
But it may be more than that. When I described the choice between my
children and my job to Senator Jeanne Shaheen, she said exactly what I
felt: “There’s really no choice.” She wasn’t referring to social
expectations, but to a maternal imperative felt so deeply that the
“choice” is reflexive.
Men and women also seem to frame the choice differently. In Midlife Crisis at 30, Mary Matalin recalls her days working as President Bush’s assistant and Vice President Cheney’s counselor:
Even when the stress was overwhelming—those days when I’d cry in the car on the way to work, asking myself “Why am I doing this??”—I always knew the answer to that question: I believe in this president.
But Matalin goes
on to describe her choice to leave in words that are again uncannily
similar to the explanation I have given so many people since leaving the
State Department:
I finally asked myself, “Who needs me more?” And that’s when I realized, it’s somebody else’s turn to do this job. I’m indispensable to my kids, but I’m not close to indispensable to the White House.
To many men,
however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of
working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish. Male
leaders are routinely praised for having sacrificed their personal life
on the altar of public or corporate service. That sacrifice, of course,
typically involves their family. Yet their children, too, are trained
to value public service over private responsibility. At the diplomat
Richard Holbrooke’s memorial service, one of his sons told the audience
that when he was a child, his father was often gone, not around to teach
him to throw a ball or to watch his games. But as he grew older, he
said, he realized that Holbrooke’s absence was the price of saving
people around the world—a price worth paying.
It is not clear
to me that this ethical framework makes sense for society. Why should we
want leaders who fall short on personal responsibilities? Perhaps
leaders who invested time in their own families would be more keenly
aware of the toll their public choices—on issues from war to
welfare—take on private lives. (Kati Marton, Holbrooke’s widow and a
noted author, says that although Holbrooke adored his children, he came
to appreciate the full importance of family only in his 50s, at which
point he became a very present parent and grandparent, while continuing
to pursue an extraordinary public career.) Regardless, it is clear which
set of choices society values more today. Workers who put their careers
first are typically rewarded; workers who choose their families are
overlooked, disbelieved, or accused of unprofessionalism.
In sum, having a
supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have
it all, but it is not sufficient. If women feel deeply that turning down
a promotion that would involve more travel, for instance, is the right
thing to do, then they will continue to do that. Ultimately, it is
society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of
work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really
valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we
valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire
and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine
work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot
easier.
It’s possible if you sequence it right.
Young women
should be wary of the assertion “You can have it all; you just can’t
have it all at once.” This 21st-century addendum to the original line is
now proffered by many senior women to their younger mentees. To the
extent that it means, in the words of one working mother, “I’m going to
do my best and I’m going to keep the long term in mind and know that
it’s not always going to be this hard to balance,” it is sound advice.
But to the extent that it means that women can have it all if they just
find the right sequence of career and family, it’s cheerfully wrong.
The most
important sequencing issue is when to have children. Many of the top
women leaders of the generation just ahead of me—Madeleine Albright,
Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, Patricia
Wald, Nannerl Keohane—had their children in their 20s and early 30s, as
was the norm in the 1950s through the 1970s. A child born when his
mother is 25 will finish high school when his mother is 43, an age at
which, with full-time immersion in a career, she still has plenty of
time and energy for advancement.
Yet this sequence
has fallen out of favor with many high-potential women, and
understandably so. People tend to marry later now, and anyway, if you
have children earlier, you may have difficulty getting a graduate
degree, a good first job, and opportunities for advancement in the
crucial early years of your career. Making matters worse, you will also
have less income while raising your children, and hence less ability to
hire the help that can be indispensable to your juggling act.
When I was the
dean, the Woodrow Wilson School created a program called Pathways to
Public Service, aimed at advising women whose children were almost grown
about how to go into public service, and many women still ask me about
the best “on-ramps” to careers in their mid-40s. Honestly, I’m not sure
what to tell most of them. Unlike the pioneering women who entered the
workforce after having children in the 1970s, these women are competing
with their younger selves. Government and NGO jobs are an option, but
many careers are effectively closed off. Personally, I have never seen a
woman in her 40s enter the academic market successfully, or enter a law
firm as a junior associate, Alicia Florrick of The Good Wife notwithstanding.
These
considerations are why so many career women of my generation chose to
establish themselves in their careers first and have children in their
mid-to-late 30s. But that raises the possibility of spending long,
stressful years and a small fortune trying to have a baby. I lived that
nightmare: for three years, beginning at age 35, I did everything
possible to conceive and was frantic at the thought that I had simply
left having a biological child until it was too late.
And when
everything does work out? I had my first child at 38 (and counted myself
blessed) and my second at 40. That means I will be 58 when both of my
children are out of the house. What’s more, it means that many peak
career opportunities are coinciding precisely with their teenage years,
when, experienced parents advise, being available as a parent is just as
important as in the first years of a child’s life.
Many women of my
generation have found themselves, in the prime of their careers, saying
no to opportunities they once would have jumped at and hoping those
chances come around again later. Many others who have decided to step
back for a while, taking on consultant positions or part-time work that
lets them spend more time with their children (or aging parents), are
worrying about how long they can “stay out” before they lose the
competitive edge they worked so hard to acquire.
Given the way our
work culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in
your career first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or
else freeze your eggs, whether you are married or not. You may well be a
more mature and less frustrated parent in your 30s or 40s; you are also
more likely to have found a lasting life partner. But the truth is,
neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not
have to make.
You should be
able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life
circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire. If more women
could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions.
And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it
easier for more women to stay in the workforce. The rest of this essay
details how.
Changing the Culture of Face Time
Back in the Reagan administration, a New York Times
story about the ferociously competitive budget director Dick Darman
reported, “Mr. Darman sometimes managed to convey the impression that he
was the last one working in the Reagan White House by leaving his suit
coat on his chair and his office light burning after he left for home.”
(Darman claimed that it was just easier to leave his suit jacket in the
office so he could put it on again in the morning, but his record of
psychological manipulation suggests otherwise.)
The culture of
“time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull
more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that
the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent
among professionals today. Nothing captures the belief that more time
equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting
large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong
incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family. Yet even
in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours
spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be
available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be
intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over
time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that
nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more
than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s.
But more time in
the office does not always mean more “value added”—and it does not
always add up to a more successful organization. In 2009, Sandra
Pocharski, a senior female partner at Monitor Group and the head of the
firm’s Leadership and Organization practice, commissioned a Harvard
Business School professor to assess the factors that helped or hindered
women’s effectiveness and advancement at Monitor. The study found that
the company’s culture was characterized by an “always on” mode of
working, often without due regard to the impact on employees. Pocharski
observed:
Clients come first, always, and sometimes burning the midnight oil really does make the difference between success and failure. But sometimes we were just defaulting to behavior that overloaded our people without improving results much, if at all. We decided we needed managers to get better at distinguishing between these categories, and to recognize the hidden costs of assuming that “time is cheap.” When that time doesn’t add a lot of value and comes at a high cost to talented employees, who will leave when the personal cost becomes unsustainable—well, that is clearly a bad outcome for everyone.
I have worked
very long hours and pulled plenty of all-nighters myself over the course
of my career, including a few nights on my office couch during my two
years in D.C. Being willing to put the time in when the job simply has
to get done is rightfully a hallmark of a successful professional. But
looking back, I have to admit that my assumption that I would stay late
made me much less efficient over the course of the day than I might have
been, and certainly less so than some of my colleagues, who managed to
get the same amount of work done and go home at a decent hour. If Dick
Darman had had a boss who clearly valued prioritization and time
management, he might have found reason to turn out the lights and take
his jacket home.
Long hours are
one thing, and realistically, they are often unavoidable. But do they
really need to be spent at the office? To be sure, being in the office some
of the time is beneficial. In-person meetings can be far more efficient
than phone or e-mail tag; trust and collegiality are much more easily
built up around the same physical table; and spontaneous conversations
often generate good ideas and lasting relationships. Still, armed with
e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we
should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of
operations more than the required locus of work.
Being able to
work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during
their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on
weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus
letting a team down at crucial moments. State-of-the-art
videoconferencing facilities can dramatically reduce the need for long
business trips. These technologies are making inroads, and allowing
easier integration of work and family life. According to the Women’s
Business Center, 61 percent of women business owners use technology to
“integrate the responsibilities of work and home”; 44 percent use
technology to allow employees “to work off-site or to have flexible work
schedules.” Yet our work culture still remains more office-centered
than it needs to be, especially in light of technological advances.
One way to
change that is by changing the “default rules” that govern office
work—the baseline expectations about when, where, and how work will be
done. As behavioral economists well know, these baselines can make an
enormous difference in the way people act. It is one thing, for
instance, for an organization to allow phone-ins to a meeting on an ad
hoc basis, when parenting and work schedules collide—a system that’s
better than nothing, but likely to engender guilt among those calling
in, and possibly resentment among those in the room. It is quite another
for that organization to declare that its policy will be to schedule
in-person meetings, whenever possible, during the hours of the school
day—a system that might normalize call-ins for those (rarer) meetings
still held in the late afternoon.
One real-world
example comes from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a place
most people are more likely to associate with distinguished gentlemen in
pinstripes than with progressive thinking about work-family balance.
Like so many other places, however, the FCO worries about losing
talented members of two-career couples around the world, particularly
women. So it recently changed its basic policy from a default rule that
jobs have to be done on-site to one that assumes that some jobs might be
done remotely, and invites workers to make the case for remote work.
Kara Owen, a career foreign-service officer who was the FCO’s diversity
director and will soon become the British deputy ambassador to France,
writes that she has now done two remote jobs. Before her current
maternity leave, she was working a London job from Dublin to be with her
partner, using teleconferencing technology and timing her trips to
London to coincide “with key meetings where I needed to be in the room
(or chatting at the pre-meeting coffee) to have an impact, or to do
intensive ‘network maintenance.’” In fact, she writes, “I have found the
distance and quiet to be a real advantage in a strategic role,
providing I have put in the investment up front to develop very strong
personal relationships with the game changers.” Owen recognizes that not
every job can be done this way. But she says that for her part, she has
been able to combine family requirements with her career.
Changes in
default office rules should not advantage parents over other workers;
indeed, done right, they can improve relations among co-workers by
raising their awareness of each other’s circumstances and instilling a
sense of fairness. Two years ago, the ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts
decided to replace its “parental leave” policy with a “family leave”
policy that provides for as much as 12 weeks of leave not only for new
parents, but also for employees who need to care for a spouse, child, or
parent with a serious health condition. According to Director Carol
Rose, “We wanted a policy that took into account the fact that even
employees who do not have children have family obligations.” The policy
was shaped by the belief that giving women “special treatment” can
“backfire if the broader norms shaping the behavior of all employees do
not change.” When I was the dean of the Wilson School, I managed with
the mantra “Family comes first”—any family—and found that my employees
were both productive and intensely loyal.
None of these
changes will happen by themselves, and reasons to avoid them will seldom
be hard to find. But obstacles and inertia are usually surmountable if
leaders are open to changing their assumptions about the workplace. The
use of technology in many high-level government jobs, for instance, is
complicated by the need to have access to classified information. But in
2009, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, who shares the
parenting of his two young daughters equally with his wife, made getting
such access at home an immediate priority so that he could leave the
office at a reasonable hour and participate in important meetings via
videoconferencing if necessary. I wonder how many women in similar
positions would be afraid to ask, lest they be seen as insufficiently
committed to their jobs.
Revaluing Family Values
While employers
shouldn’t privilege parents over other workers, too often they end up
doing the opposite, usually subtly, and usually in ways that make it
harder for a primary caregiver to get ahead. Many people in positions of
power seem to place a low value on child care in comparison with other
outside activities. Consider the following proposition: An employer has
two equally talented and productive employees. One trains for and runs
marathons when he is not working. The other takes care of two children.
What assumptions is the employer likely to make about the marathon
runner? That he gets up in the dark every day and logs an hour or two
running before even coming into the office, or drives himself to get out
there even after a long day. That he is ferociously disciplined and
willing to push himself through distraction, exhaustion, and days when
nothing seems to go right in the service of a goal far in the distance.
That he must manage his time exceptionally well to squeeze all of that
in.
Be honest: Do
you think the employer makes those same assumptions about the parent?
Even though she likely rises in the dark hours before she needs to be at
work, organizes her children’s day, makes breakfast, packs lunch, gets
them off to school, figures out shopping and other errands even if she
is lucky enough to have a housekeeper—and does much the same work at the
end of the day. Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s indefatigable chief of
staff, has twins in elementary school; even with a fully engaged
husband, she famously gets up at four every morning to check and send
e-mails before her kids wake up. Louise Richardson, now the vice
chancellor of the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, combined an
assistant professorship in government at Harvard with mothering three
young children. She organized her time so ruthlessly that she always
keyed in 1:11 or 2:22 or 3:33 on the microwave rather than 1:00, 2:00,
or 3:00, because hitting the same number three times took less time.
Elizabeth Warren,
who is now running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, has a similar
story. When she had two young children and a part-time law practice, she
struggled to find enough time to write the papers and articles that
would help get her an academic position. In her words:
I needed a plan. I figured out that writing time was when Alex was asleep. So the minute I put him down for a nap or he fell asleep in the baby swing, I went to my desk and started working on something—footnotes, reading, outlining, writing … I learned to do everything else with a baby on my hip.
The discipline,
organization, and sheer endurance it takes to succeed at top levels with
young children at home is easily comparable to running 20 to 40 miles a
week. But that’s rarely how employers see things, not only when making
allowances, but when making promotions. Perhaps because people choose to have children? People also choose to run marathons.
One final
example: I have worked with many Orthodox Jewish men who observed the
Sabbath from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. Jack Lew, the
two-time director of the Office of Management and Budget, former deputy
secretary of state for management and resources, and now White House
chief of staff, is a case in point. Jack’s wife lived in New York when
he worked in the State Department, so he would leave the office early
enough on Friday afternoon to take the shuttle to New York and a taxi to
his apartment before sundown. He would not work on Friday after sundown
or all day Saturday. Everyone who knew him, including me, admired his
commitment to his faith and his ability to carve out the time for it,
even with an enormously demanding job.
It is hard to
imagine, however, that we would have the same response if a mother told
us she was blocking out mid-Friday afternoon through the end of the day
on Saturday, every week, to spend time with her children. I suspect this
would be seen as unprofessional, an imposition of unnecessary costs on
co-workers. In fact, of course, one of the great values of the
Sabbath—whether Jewish or Christian—is precisely that it carves out a
family oasis, with rituals and a mandatory setting-aside of work.
Our assumptions
are just that: things we believe that are not necessarily so. Yet what
we assume has an enormous impact on our perceptions and responses.
Fortunately, changing our assumptions is up to us.
Redefining the Arc of a Successful Career
The American
definition of a successful professional is someone who can climb the
ladder the furthest in the shortest time, generally peaking between ages
45 and 55. It is a definition well suited to the mid-20th century, an
era when people had kids in their 20s, stayed in one job, retired at 67,
and were dead, on average, by age 71.
It makes far
less sense today. Average life expectancy for people in their 20s has
increased to 80; men and women in good health can easily work until they
are 75. They can expect to have multiple jobs and even multiple careers
throughout their working life. Couples marry later, have kids later,
and can expect to live on two incomes. They may well retire earlier—the
average retirement age has gone down from 67 to 63—but that is commonly
“retirement” only in the sense of collecting retirement benefits. Many
people go on to “encore” careers.
Assuming the
priceless gifts of good health and good fortune, a professional woman
can thus expect her working life to stretch some 50 years, from her
early or mid-20s to her mid-70s. It is reasonable to assume that she
will build her credentials and establish herself, at least in her first
career, between 22 and 35; she will have children, if she wants them,
sometime between 25 and 45; she’ll want maximum flexibility and control
over her time in the 10 years that her children are 8 to 18; and she
should plan to take positions of maximum authority and demands on her
time after her children are out of the house. Women who have children in
their late 20s can expect to immerse themselves completely in their
careers in their late 40s, with plenty of time still to rise to the top
in their late 50s and early 60s. Women who make partner, managing
director, or senior vice president; get tenure; or establish a medical
practice before having children in their late 30s should be coming back
on line for the most demanding jobs at almost exactly the same age.
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 think of these
plateaus as “investment intervals.” My husband and I took a sabbatical
in Shanghai, from August 2007 to May 2008, right in the thick of an
election year when many of my friends were advising various candidates
on foreign-policy issues. We thought of the move in part as “putting
money in the family bank,” taking advantage of the opportunity to spend a
close year together in a foreign culture. But we were also investing in
our children’s ability to learn Mandarin and in our own knowledge of
Asia.
Peaking in your
late 50s and early 60s rather than your late 40s and early 50s makes
particular sense for women, who live longer than men. And many of the
stereotypes about older workers simply do not hold. A 2006 survey of
human-resources professionals shows that only 23 percent think older
workers are less flexible than younger workers; only 11 percent think
older workers require more training than younger workers; and only 7
percent think older workers have less drive than younger workers.
Whether women
will really have the confidence to stair-step their careers, however,
will again depend in part on perceptions. Slowing down the rate of
promotions, taking time out periodically, pursuing an alternative path
during crucial parenting or parent-care years—all have to become more
visible and more noticeably accepted as a pause rather than an opt-out.
(In an encouraging sign, Mass Career Customization, a 2007 book
by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg arguing that “today’s career is no
longer a straight climb up the corporate ladder, but rather a
combination of climbs, lateral moves, and planned descents,” was a Wall Street Journal best seller.)
Institutions can
also take concrete steps to promote this acceptance. For instance, in
1970, Princeton established a tenure-extension policy that allowed
female assistant professors expecting a child to request a one-year
extension on their tenure clocks. This policy was later extended to men,
and broadened to include adoptions. In the early 2000s, two reports on
the status of female faculty discovered that only about 3 percent of
assistant professors requested tenure extensions in a given year. And in
response to a survey question, women were much more likely than men to
think that a tenure extension would be detrimental to an assistant
professor’s career.
So in 2005, under
President Shirley Tilghman, Princeton changed the default rule. The
administration announced that all assistant professors, female and male,
who had a new child would automatically receive a one-year
extension on the tenure clock, with no opt-outs allowed. Instead,
assistant professors could request early consideration for tenure if
they wished. The number of assistant professors who receive a tenure
extension has tripled since the change.
One of the best
ways to move social norms in this direction is to choose and celebrate
different role models. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and I are
poles apart politically, but he went way up in my estimation when he
announced that one reason he decided against running for president in
2012 was the impact his campaign would have had on his children. He
reportedly made clear at a fund-raiser in Louisiana that he didn’t want
to be away from his children for long periods of time; according to a
Republican official at the event, he said that “his son [missed] him
after being gone for the three days on the road, and that he needed to
get back.” He may not get my vote if and when he does run for president,
but he definitely gets my admiration (providing he doesn’t turn around
and join the GOP ticket this fall).
If we are
looking for high-profile female role models, we might begin with
Michelle Obama. She started out with the same résumé as her husband, but
has repeatedly made career decisions designed to let her do work she
cared about and also be the kind of parent she wanted to be. She moved
from a high-powered law firm first to Chicago city government and then
to the University of Chicago shortly before her daughters were born, a
move that let her work only 10 minutes away from home. She has spoken
publicly and often about her initial concerns that her husband’s entry
into politics would be bad for their family life, and about her
determination to limit her participation in the presidential election
campaign to have more time at home. Even as first lady, she has been
adamant that she be able to balance her official duties with family
time. We should see her as a full-time career woman, but one who is
taking a very visible investment interval. We should celebrate her not
only as a wife, mother, and champion of healthy eating, but also as a
woman who has had the courage and judgment to invest in her daughters
when they need her most. And we should expect a glittering career from
her after she leaves the White House and her daughters leave for
college.
Rediscovering the Pursuit of Happiness
One of the most
complicated and surprising parts of my journey out of Washington was
coming to grips with what I really wanted. I had opportunities to stay
on, and I could have tried to work out an arrangement allowing me to
spend more time at home. I might have been able to get my family to join
me in Washington for a year; I might have been able to get classified
technology installed at my house the way Jim Steinberg did; I might have
been able to commute only four days a week instead of five. (While this
last change would have still left me very little time at home, given
the intensity of my job, it might have made the job doable for another
year or two.) But I realized that I didn’t just need to go home. Deep down, I wanted
to go home. I wanted to be able to spend time with my children in the
last few years that they are likely to live at home, crucial years for
their development into responsible, productive, happy, and caring
adults. But also irreplaceable years for me to enjoy the simple
pleasures of parenting—baseball games, piano recitals, waffle
breakfasts, family trips, and goofy rituals. My older son is doing very
well these days, but even when he gives us a hard time, as all teenagers
do, being home to shape his choices and help him make good decisions is
deeply satisfying.
The flip side of
my realization is captured in Macko and Rubin’s ruminations on the
importance of bringing the different parts of their lives together as
30-year-old women:
If we didn’t start to learn how to integrate our personal, social, and professional lives, we were about five years away from morphing into the angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.
Women have
contributed to the fetish of the one-dimensional life, albeit by
necessity. The pioneer generation of feminists walled off their personal
lives from their professional personas to ensure that they could never
be discriminated against for a lack of commitment to their work. When I
was a law student in the 1980s, many women who were then climbing the
legal hierarchy in New York firms told me that they never admitted to
taking time out for a child’s doctor appointment or school performance,
but instead invented a much more neutral excuse.
Today, however,
women in power can and should change that environment, although change
is not easy. When I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I
decided that one of the advantages of being a woman in power was that I
could help change the norms by deliberately talking about my children
and my desire to have a balanced life. Thus, I would end faculty
meetings at 6 p.m. by saying that I had to go home for dinner; I would
also make clear to all student organizations that I would not come to
dinner with them, because I needed to be home from six to eight, but
that I would often be willing to come back after eight for a meeting. I
also once told the Dean’s Advisory Committee that the associate dean
would chair the next session so I could go to a parent-teacher
conference.
After a few months of this, several female assistant professors showed up in my office quite agitated. “You have
to stop talking about your kids,” one said. “You are not showing the
gravitas that people expect from a dean, which is particularly damaging
precisely because you are the first woman dean of the school.” I told
them that I was doing it deliberately and continued my practice, but it
is interesting that gravitas and parenthood don’t seem to go together.
Ten years later,
whenever I am introduced at a lecture or other speaking engagement, I
insist that the person introducing me mention that I have two sons. It
seems odd to me to list degrees, awards, positions, and interests and not
include the dimension of my life that is most important to me—and takes
an enormous amount of my time. As Secretary Clinton once said in a
television interview in Beijing when the interviewer asked her about
Chelsea’s upcoming wedding: “That’s my real life.” But I notice that my
male introducers are typically uncomfortable when I make the request.
They frequently say things like “And she particularly wanted me to
mention that she has two sons”—thereby drawing attention to the unusual
nature of my request, when my entire purpose is to make family
references routine and normal in professional life.
This does not
mean that you should insist that your colleagues spend time cooing over
pictures of your baby or listening to the prodigious accomplishments of
your kindergartner. It does mean that if you are late coming in one
week, because it is your turn to drive the kids to school, that you be
honest about what you are doing. Indeed, Sheryl Sandberg recently
acknowledged not only that she leaves work at 5:30 to have dinner with
her family, but also that for many years she did not dare make this
admission, even though she would of course make up the work time later
in the evening. Her willingness to speak out now is a strong step in the
right direction.
Seeking out a
more balanced life is not a women’s issue; balance would be better for
us all. Bronnie Ware, an Australian blogger who worked for years in
palliative care and is the author of the 2011 book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying,
writes that the regret she heard most often was “I wish I’d had the
courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of
me.” The second-most-common regret was “I wish I didn’t work so hard.”
She writes: “This came from every male patient that I nursed. They
missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship.”
Juliette Kayyem,
who several years ago left the Department of Homeland Security soon
after her husband, David Barron, left a high position in the Justice
Department, says their joint decision to leave Washington and return to
Boston sprang from their desire to work on the “happiness project,”
meaning quality time with their three children. (She borrowed the term
from her friend Gretchen Rubin, who wrote a best-selling book and now
runs a blog with that name.)
It’s time to
embrace a national happiness project. As a daughter of Charlottesville,
Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson and the university he founded, I
grew up with the Declaration of Independence in my blood. Last I
checked, he did not declare American independence in the name of life,
liberty, and professional success. Let us rediscover the pursuit of
happiness, and let us start at home.
Innovation Nation
As I write this,
I can hear the reaction of some readers to many of the proposals in
this essay: It’s all fine and well for a tenured professor to write
about flexible working hours, investment intervals, and
family-comes-first management. But what about the real world? Most
American women cannot demand these things, particularly in a bad
economy, and their employers have little incentive to grant them
voluntarily. Indeed, the most frequent reaction I get in putting forth
these ideas is that when the choice is whether to hire a man who will
work whenever and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more
flexibility, choosing the man will add more value to the company.
In fact, while
many of these issues are hard to quantify and measure precisely, the
statistics seem to tell a different story. A seminal study of 527 U.S.
companies, published in the Academy of Management Journal in
2000, suggests that “organizations with more extensive work-family
policies have higher perceived firm-level performance” among their
industry peers. These findings accorded with a 2003 study conducted by
Michelle Arthur at the University of Mexico. Examining 130 announcements
of family-friendly policies in The Wall Street Journal, Arthur
found that the announcements alone significantly improved share prices.
In 2011, a study on flexibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky,
Kelly Sakai, and Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed
that increased flexibility correlates positively with job engagement,
job satisfaction, employee retention, and employee health.
This is only a
small sampling from a large and growing literature trying to pin down
the relationship between family-friendly policies and economic
performance. Other scholars have concluded that good family policies
attract better talent, which in turn raises productivity, but that the
policies themselves have no impact on productivity. Still others argue
that results attributed to these policies are actually a function of
good management overall. What is evident, however, is that many firms
that recruit and train well-educated professional women are aware that
when a woman leaves because of bad work-family balance, they are losing
the money and time they invested in her.
Even the legal
industry, built around the billable hour, is taking notice. Deborah
Epstein Henry, a former big-firm litigator, is now the president of
Flex-Time Lawyers, a national consulting firm focused partly on
strategies for the retention of female attorneys. In her book Law and Reorder,
published by the American Bar Association in 2010, she describes a
legal profession “where the billable hour no longer works”; where
attorneys, judges, recruiters, and academics all agree that this system
of compensation has perverted the industry, leading to brutal work
hours, massive inefficiency, and highly inflated costs. The
answer—already being deployed in different corners of the industry—is a
combination of alternative fee structures, virtual firms, women-owned
firms, and the outsourcing of discrete legal jobs to other
jurisdictions. Women, and Generation X and Y lawyers more generally, are
pushing for these changes on the supply side; clients determined to
reduce legal fees and increase flexible service are pulling on the
demand side. Slowly, change is happening.
At the core of
all this is self-interest. Losing smart and motivated women not only
diminishes a company’s talent pool; it also reduces the return on its
investment in training and mentoring. In trying to address these issues,
some firms are finding out that women’s ways of working may just be
better ways of working, for employees and clients alike.
Experts on
creativity and innovation emphasize the value of encouraging nonlinear
thinking and cultivating randomness by taking long walks or looking at
your environment from unusual angles. In their new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change,
the innovation gurus John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas write, “We
believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most
important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.”
Space for play
and imagination is exactly what emerges when rigid work schedules and
hierarchies loosen up. Skeptics should consider the “California effect.”
California is the cradle of American innovation—in technology,
entertainment, sports, food, and lifestyles. It is also a place where
people take leisure as seriously as they take work; where companies like
Google deliberately encourage play, with Ping-Pong tables, light
sabers, and policies that require employees to spend one day a week
working on whatever they wish. Charles Baudelaire wrote: “Genius is
nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google
apparently has taken note.
No parent would
mistake child care for childhood. Still, seeing the world anew through a
child’s eyes can be a powerful source of stimulation. When the Nobel
laureate Thomas Schelling wrote The Strategy of Conflict, a
classic text applying game theory to conflicts among nations, he
frequently drew on child-rearing for examples of when deterrence might
succeed or fail. “It may be easier to articulate the peculiar difficulty
of constraining [a ruler] by the use of threats,” he wrote, “when one
is fresh from a vain attempt at using threats to keep a small child from
hurting a dog or a small dog from hurting a child.”
The books I’ve
read with my children, the silly movies I’ve watched, the games I’ve
played, questions I’ve answered, and people I’ve met while parenting
have broadened my world. Another axiom of the literature on innovation
is that the more often people with different perspectives come together,
the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers the
ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—whether they
spend that time mothering or marathoning—will open the door to a much
wider range of influences and ideas.
Enlisting Men
Perhaps the most
encouraging news of all for achieving the sorts of changes that I have
proposed is that men are joining the cause. In commenting on a draft of
this article, Martha Minow, the dean of the Harvard Law School, wrote me
that one change she has observed during 30 years of teaching law at
Harvard is that today many young men are asking questions about how they
can manage a work-life balance. And more systematic research on
Generation Y confirms that many more men than in the past are asking
questions about how they are going to integrate active parenthood with
their professional lives.
Abstract
aspirations are easier than concrete trade-offs, of course. These young
men have not yet faced the question of whether they are prepared to give
up that more prestigious clerkship or fellowship, decline a promotion,
or delay their professional goals to spend more time with their children
and to support their partner’s career.
Yet once work
practices and work culture begin to evolve, those changes are likely to
carry their own momentum. Kara Owen, the British foreign-service officer
who worked a London job from Dublin, wrote me in an e-mail:
I think the culture on flexible working started to change the minute the Board of Management (who were all men at the time) started to work flexibly—quite a few of them started working one day a week from home.
Men have, of
course, become much more involved parents over the past couple of
decades, and that, too, suggests broad support for big changes in the
way we balance work and family. It is noteworthy that both James
Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, and William Lynn, deputy secretary
of defense, stepped down two years into the Obama administration so
that they could spend more time with their children (for real).
Going forward,
women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader
social and economic issues that affect both women and men. After all,
we have a new generation of young men who have been raised by full-time
working mothers. Let us presume, as I do with my sons, that they will
understand “supporting their families” to mean more than earning money.
I have been blessed to
work with and be mentored by some extraordinary women. Watching Hillary
Clinton in action makes me incredibly proud—of her intelligence,
expertise, professionalism, charisma, and command of any audience. I get
a similar rush when I see a front-page picture of Christine Lagarde,
the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Angela
Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, deep in conversation about some of
the most important issues on the world stage; or of Susan Rice, the U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, standing up forcefully for the Syrian
people in the Security Council.
These women are
extraordinary role models. If I had a daughter, I would encourage her to
look to them, and I want a world in which they are extraordinary but
not unusual. Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words,
“to be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that
define you as a woman.” That means respecting, enabling, and indeed
celebrating the full range of women’s choices. “Empowering yourself,”
Jackson said in her speech at Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting
motherhood, or eliminating the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you
are.”
I gave a speech
at Vassar last November and arrived in time to wander the campus on a
lovely fall afternoon. It is a place infused with a spirit of community
and generosity, filled with benches, walkways, public art, and quiet
places donated by alumnae seeking to encourage contemplation and
connection. Turning the pages of the alumni magazine (Vassar is now
coed), I was struck by the entries of older alumnae, who greeted their
classmates with Salve (Latin for “hello”) and wrote witty
remembrances sprinkled with literary allusions. Theirs was a world in
which women wore their learning lightly; their news is mostly of their
children’s accomplishments. Many of us look back on that earlier era as a
time when it was fine to joke that women went to college to get an
“M.R.S.” And many women of my generation abandoned the Seven Sisters as
soon as the formerly all-male Ivy League universities became coed. I
would never return to the world of segregated sexes and rampant
discrimination. But now is the time to revisit the assumption that women
must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our mothers and mentors
warned us about.
I continually
push the young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the
confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present
them readily. My husband agrees, but he actually tries to get the young
men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen
more. If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we
have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and
the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending
career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us.
We’ll create a better society in the process, for all
women. We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able
to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart. But when we
do, we will stop talking about whether women can have it all. We will
properly focus on how we can help all Americans have healthy, happy,
productive lives, valuing the people they love as much as the success
they seek.
The Secret Shame of the Working Mother
A woman who wants to make it home for dinner shouldn't have to sneak out of the office.
Reuters
'Supermoms' Should Tell the Truth About Their Perfect Lives
They make it look easy. But the women who seem to "have it all" are navigating mazes of complex logistics every day.
Jerry Bunkers/Flickr
Why There's No Such Thing as 'Having It All'—and There Never Will Be
When smart women lament the challenges of having everything at once all of the time, they sound awfully childish
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