Our Turn

by Stewart, Kirstine;

  One for All, and All for One

  WITH A MANDATE TO BUILD the brand and grow the business, I made it a priority at the new Twitter office I launched in Toronto to create a team of advisers from across departments. Together, we strategized and decided the calendar of topics we’d tackle. I’ve come to see such equality as not just being good for business, and for women, but for seeding good morale from the ground up. People want to have a seat at the table, and not just to “be heard.” They want to contribute and know that all the hours they spend at work are meaningful.

  Much has been written about how much people hate their jobs. Surveys and studies have produced evidence that too many of us, men and women, find their workplaces soulless and disappointing. A large national study by Carleton University researchers in 2012 found that only 23 percent of working Canadians are highly satisfied with life. That was half as many as in 1991. A 2013 Gallup report found just 30 percent of employees in the US feel engaged at work, and the big picture is even worse: around the world, based on data from 142 countries, only 13 percent of employees feel engaged. I believe much of the dissatisfaction and disconnection stems from people feeling that they have little ownership over what they do. Whereas if each individual man and woman feels like he or she is a valued part of a team, free to step up with ideas and be heard by the boss as well as peers, it would go a long way to boosting job satisfaction. It would also set that individual on a course toward leadership.

  After I discussed this idea in terms of women in the workplace at a recent talk I gave, a woman in her twenties approached me. She told me she’d found my talk intriguing but wondered how on earth it could be applied to her situation. “I’m not a boss,” she said. “I’m not going to be a boss any time soon.”

  I understood her perspective perfectly. Not everyone has a job at the top, but everybody wants to make a meaningful contribution. When I asked her what she did at her company she told me she was a researcher. I asked her to describe her job in a little more detail and she explained that an important part of it was a daily meeting in which the sales guys asked her questions: she provided the answers that helped them do their job.

  “When you are going through all that research you must see things that the salespeople don’t ask about? Trends or points that would be of collective interest to the group, right?”

  She agreed that she did.

  I suggested that if that was the case she didn’t need an invitation to share her insights. “Instead of waiting for the questions,” I said, “what about going to the person who organizes the meetings and saying that you’ve noticed this point in your research and offer to put a brief presentation together for the next meeting, a few slides of information that could be helpful to the group? Doing that would put you in a position of leading, because you have this wealth of data, and you have taken the initiative to share it so the group can benefit.” The woman said she hadn’t thought of it that way, and promised me she’d give it a shot.

  When I thought about it later, it struck me that, like that young woman, we all have opportunities to step up, to contribute and show initiative in the workplace. You don’t have to be the boss to be a leader. You can lead an industry, a company, a division, or even a project of just one—you. When you seize those opportunities, you are leading. The more you act like a leader, the more you learn to be one. And the more you will be seen as one.

  Like strengthening a muscle, it just takes practice.

  [ V ]

  So Long, Superwoman

  I REMEMBER A POPULAR perfume commercial from the ’80s that featured a seductive blonde singing about how she could bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan and never let you forget you’re a man—”’Cause,” as she belted out in the big finish, “I’m a woman.” As she sang, she danced through a rapid series of wardrobe changes, from business attire to casual clothes and then a slinky cocktail dress. The ad, for a fragrance called Enjoli, was such a hit the advertising agency created an extended version with the same woman crooning that she could also make it home at five o’clock and read the children Tickety Tock. (The ad still garners views on YouTube—more than 250,000 and counting.) It was less of a jingle than an absurd ode to the myth of the modern, multi-tasking female: able to leap corporate ladders in a single bound, cook faster than a speeding bullet, mother her children between meetings and still find the time (and energy) to remind her man, that yes, he was a man. The outfit that she should have been wearing was tights and a cape.

  Most of the female executives I knew at the time already realized that the idea of being a superwoman was nonsense. When it came to life’s great hat trick—love, kids and career—they felt that a woman could score two of these, but never three. If you wanted to bring home the bacon, and have a man, kids didn’t fit easily into the picture. If you wanted kids and a career, keeping your man happy, or keeping him at all, seemed impossible. In the late 1980s, Canadian Business magazine ran a cover story on a group of women who were as close to achieving those coveted corner offices as any woman in Canada at the time: the interviews revealed that none of them thought they could have it all, and despite their excellence at work, most of them had fantasies of escaping the corporate world and devoting themselves to their children and husbands.

  The divorce rate seemed to back them up. During the 1980s, it soared to historic highs in the western world. In Canada, it was projected that 50.6 percent of people who married in 1987 would divorce before they reached their thirtieth wedding anniversaries. The spike was due in part to the introduction of less onerous grounds for divorce, but the women’s movement was also thought to play a role, which to a certain extent encouraged women to look after number one. The professionally successful women I knew were variously divorced with children, or childless and still married, or living child-free with long-time partners.

  Of course, I took this all in, but I was sure, as each new generation tends to be, that things would be better for me. I couldn’t imagine life without a family. Nor could I imagine myself without a career, and I had chosen a partner I believed supported the ambitions of a modern woman.

  First, Do Not Judge Other Women

  AT A VERY YOUNG AGE I married a man who had grown up with a mother who was a nurse, which meant he’d had his share of babysitters and pouring his own bowls of cereal. Together, we had agreed to put off having kids for a few years until I was earning enough to afford good child care. I assumed a new age of equality had dawned.

  When I got pregnant with my first child, I was twenty-nine and president of Paragon International. Two weeks after my daughter was born, I was back on the job, though working from home. After six weeks, I was back in the office. By the time my baby was ten weeks old, I was on the other side of the Atlantic in Cannes, selling Paragon’s shows to an international roster of broadcasters.

  Many people were surprised at my approach to motherhood, perhaps even shocked, and they found ways to let me know it. My baby was home with her father, but also a full-time nanny. Still, people inquired after the well-being of my husband with awe, as though a father at home with a baby was a miracle. In interviews, journalists asked about the maternity leave I took or, rather, didn’t take. Only six weeks, when [at the time] Canadian women were entitled to six months? In media profiles, they cast it as evidence of my drive and ambition. The reactions and the coverage had a distinctly judgemental undercurrent: How could you leave your baby? How could you put your career before your child?

  Yet how it looked and how it was were two very different stories. We’d actually thought hard about how I could have enough time to be with my child in those early months. We had tried to time my pregnancy so I would deliver in the summer when things slowed down in the television industry and I could take the six months off. For a while, it looked like everything was going just as we had planned. Then my husband lost his job. Laid off from the museum where he worked as a carpenter, his severance pay ran out, ironically, the day I gave birth. Paragon didn’t offer any pai
d maternity leave and I wasn’t in a position that could influence changing such a policy. It was (and often still is) standard in the entertainment industry that additional support for leave is not a part of the employment package. Quite suddenly, I went from being our family’s main breadwinner to its only breadwinner. Taking time off was a luxury we couldn’t afford.

  So, as many women do, I fought back the longing to be with my newborn, spread myself across sleepless nights and busy days. I also took my breast pump to work. At the office, the sound of the pump became as familiar as a ringing phone: ahhwoogah … ahhwoogah … When I went to Cannes, the pump came with me because I was determined to resume nursing my daughter when I got home. But in France, the higher voltage at the hotel revved my pump into hyper-drive—ahhwoogah-ahhwoogah-ahhwoogah—then, suddenly, it quit altogether. With no release, my swollen breasts turned to concrete. By the time I reached home, my milk had dried up. I was a mess of hormones and guilt, letting down the “breast is best” campaign and feeling a strike against me as a mother. Yes, I didn’t miss tying myself into knots trying to pump on schedule while running a business. But I did feel desolate over losing the middle of the night and early morning feeds when my daughter and I felt like the only people in the universe, and I felt simply and completely essential to her. I realized that new dawn of equality was still a long way off.

  Sure, women’s horizons were broader than they had ever been, but we weren’t so much liberated as we were prisoners of expectation: our own for ourselves, and those of a society still wed to 1950s values about the moral obligations of women.

  Those early months of motherhood were among the most emotionally difficult periods in my life. They were made only more so by the judgements and assumptions of others. What right does anyone have to judge the most personal decisions in your life: If you have children, when to have your children, how much time you take away from work when they’re born, how long you breastfeed, or how you and your family decide to raise your baby? No one knows the forces at play in someone’s life. And no one has the right to judge. Whether we make personal decisions by necessity or by choice, they’re personal. We have to grant one another the freedom to make our best decisions.

  Yet we do judge, and women especially judge each other often, and often harshly. We are parked into camps of “stay-at-home” and “working” mothers when that’s a completely false divide. Having babies and raising children is work, period. The choice a family makes in how each parent contributes to raising that child is a choice for that family alone. We are all just trying to make it work; what works best for one family will not be the same as for another. Different women will make different decisions, yet we are all women in this together. Not appreciating that we are all in it together is what lies at the root of those ridiculous “mommy wars” that the media fuels, even manufactures (nothing like pouncing on a gurrl fight to sell papers and use as clickbait).

  In my opinion, these conflicts are a destructive attempt to divide and conquer women, and academia has played right into the battle. Researchers in many countries launched huge long-term studies to investigate the “effects” of working mothers on children, as if their offspring might be at high risk of growing up to be sociopaths; as if only a mother who works outside the home, not a father, might jeopardize a child’s future; and, worst of all, as if the many women who need to work to keep their families afloat are doing their children a disservice. We need to shed the misperceptions about the impact on children of working mothers, but there are signs that we are ready to do that work. In the run-up to announcing a new initiative on gender issues, the Harvard Business School released a study of 50,000 adults in 25 countries that showed that children of working mothers, far from being damaged, reaped some advantages. As the May 15, 2015, column in the New York Times, Claire Cain Miller, a reporter for The Upshot, the paper’s politics and policy venture, summed it up: “Daughters of working mothers completed more years of education, were more likely to be employed and in supervisory roles and earned higher incomes. Having a working mother didn’t influence the careers of sons, which researchers said was unsurprising because men were generally expected to work—but sons of working mothers did spend more time on child care and housework.”

  Despite such research, when it comes to explaining the dearth of women in leadership roles, having children is still cast as the mother of all issues.

  Blame the Cape

  WHEN BERKELEY SOCIOLOGIST Arlie Hochschild explored the lives of mothers who work outside the home in her landmark book, The Second Shift, published in 1989, she estimated the amount of daily housework and child care women were doing outside of their paying jobs totalled an extra month of work per year compared to their spouses’ workload. What’s remarkable is that despite all the judging I just mentioned, and the double duty women assumed when they started also working outside the home, our progress in the workplace has been as impressive as it has been. But we all know it’s hard, and that’s why, of all the questions I’m asked about my career trajectory, at the top of the list is “How do you do it?” as not only a woman, but a woman with children. Women with demanding jobs who also have children tend to be seen as fiercely driven (if not slightly demented) females who want to “have it all.”

  I blame the cape. The media portrayal of the modern female as superwoman has stuck. It’s the standard to which women are still held, and that’s been superdestructive.

  History has a lot to do with why it is such a sticky idea. Once upon a time, girls were groomed to be perfect daughters, wives and mothers. Now, of course, female territory has expanded outside these roles, but so has that quest for perfection. We want to be straight-A students, professionally successful, excellent and attentive mothers caring for our families in beautiful homes, as we exercise our taut bodies, foster our happy marriages and always have something organic baking in the oven. Women tend to view anything less than perfect as a failure, usually their own.

  I have twisted myself into a pretzel trying to prove (to whom, might be the question) that I am both a consummate professional and a devoted parent. On another trip to Cannes, in between closing million-dollar distribution deals, I spent the flight hours there and back furiously knitting a full-body bear costume so my daughter would have it in time to wear for her first Halloween. She was four months old. The only person demanding that she have the best handmade costume ever was me!

  Fuelled by media portrayals that perpetuate society’s expectations of what the successful modern female is supposed to be, we set ludicrous standards for ourselves in all areas of our lives. The quest for perfection starts early. A 2007 article in The Nation dubbed it “The Supergirl Syndrome”: “At the top of her class, kicks ass on the soccer field and the debate team, plays a mean violin and is the life of every party. Everyone loves her: mom, dad, the coach, teachers, the boys at school and, of course, the media. The supergirl is the embodiment of the ‘go-girl’ feminism that has become the staple of mainstream coverage, the focus of feel-good stories about female empowerment. Everything a boy can do, this gal can do and more … and maybe even better.” It’s no wonder women enter the workforce with lower levels of self-confidence, lower expectations of what they might achieve professionally and why that insidious Imposter Syndrome—the self-destructive sense that you are a fraud unworthy of your position, just a breath away from being “found out”—is likened to an epidemic among high-achieving women.

  By the late ’90s, many women gave up on trying to make their way in the workplace at the same time as leading the way on the home front. They were fed up trying to have, be, or do it all. Kids came along and suddenly life’s vaunted hat trick seemed as elusive as it had to the women execs I’d known in the 1980s. A study from the Pew Research Center found that the proportion of mothers not working outside the home rose in the US to 29 percent in 2012, up from 23 percent in 1999—a reversal of the long-term decline of “stay-at-home” mothers in the last three decades of the twentieth century.

/>   In 2003, The New York Times Magazine documented the trend of well-educated, professional women cutting back in order to work part-time or quitting altogether as proof that the feminist movement had stalled. It described these women as being part of “the opt-out revolution” and included Harvard Business School stats that revealed that only 38 percent of its female graduates in the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 were working full-time. Meanwhile, the US Census showed that the number of new mothers going back to work was falling and the number of women staying home to care for their children had increased by 13 percent in less than a decade. (Interestingly, the same trend did not surface in Canada, where the number of women who stay home to raise children has steadily declined. This may have something to do with the fact that Canadian maternity leave jumped from seventeen weeks to a full year during this time period. Even so, 2009 data from Statistics Canada shows women without children are much more likely to be employed than those who have kids.)

  The women in the Times article were generally affluent. They had high-earning partners whose incomes allowed them the luxury of choosing whether they wanted to work outside the home. But they were also the very well-educated, ambitious women who were expected to blaze the equality trail into the future, something they had once expected of themselves. Instead, they gave up trail-blazing to be with their children and find greater domestic harmony, maybe sure that their change in direction was temporary. (A follow-up feature a decade later found that while these women had no regrets about dropping out to raise their kids, opting out of the career track had been no guarantee of a happy marriage, and in some cases had put their financial independence and self-confidence in jeopardy. And opting back in was no simple matter.)