Our Turn

by Stewart, Kirstine;

  I remember reading the original article with a deep personal interest. I was heading up the specialty channels at Alliance Atlantis at the time; I had two daughters under the age of six and I was under a mountain of pressure. Any relationship can suffer when both parents work full-time. But in our marriage, my career became a source of bitterness. My daughters’ father had gone back to school to become a teacher after being laid off, and I had supported him as I worked my way up through television’s executive ranks and had a second baby. Yet the higher I rose, and the more money I made, the worse our relationship became. As he worked on reinventing his career, I had sped ahead, skewing the traditional lines of husband/wife, father/mother with my larger salary and big job.

  Yet despite the steady demands of my job, I was often expected to be the go-to parent. My job was seen as being “just meetings,” as opposed to the on-duty work life of a teacher. I was the one considered to have the more flexible schedule, so I often stayed home when the kids were sick, taking conference calls while I held back my daughter’s hair as she threw up. Eventually our relationship broke down, and we broke up, as sociologists might have predicted.

  A 2013 Pew study revealed that marriages in which a wife outearns her husband tend to be unhappy ones with higher rates of divorce. And that same year, researchers from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business found that marriages in which the wife made more than her husband were actually relatively rare, either because the marriages didn’t last or because women on course to outearn their spouses tended to reduce the number of hours they worked. Interestingly, when a wife’s income did rise beyond her husband’s, so did the amount of time she spent on household chores. Researchers suggested this may be guilt at work: high-earning women putting in extra time on the domestic front to please their partners or assuage that guilt is still prevalent among women who work.

  We had it much easier than most working parents because I could afford a nanny. But it wasn’t motherhood that made my work-life juggle miserable. Spending time with my girls was a gift. If it meant I had to catch the red-eye across the country to be back in time to join my daughter’s class trip to the pumpkin patch, I’d do it (although I did stand, jet-lagged, amid those chattering toddlers, at risk of doing a face plant in that muddy field). Having kids is not incompatible with having a career. But it is vital that both partners are committed to doing what it takes to survive as a family.

  In November 2014, the Harvard Business School released a persuasive study on that point. Based on interviews with 25,000 male and female HBS graduates, researchers concluded that children don’t hold women back, their husbands do. Many women in the study reported that they were not meeting the career goals they had set for themselves in their twenties. This wasn’t the result of choosing to opt out of the career track after they had children, but because they allowed their partners’ careers to take precedence over their own; if they had to leave their job, often they did so reluctantly. In part because respondents said their employers had put them on “the mommy track” in subtle or overt ways. But also because their partners had too. More than half of Boomer and Gen X men said they expected their careers would take precedence over their partners’; while only 3 percent of Boomer women, and 7 percent of Gen X women, said their careers would come first.

  Looking back, I don’t think I truly understood what my ex-husband expected. We never had an in-depth conversation about the future before we married when I was just months out of university. I made assumptions, likely unfairly, about his attitudes because of his parents: his mother had the more steady job and pay. We never talked specifically about my ambitions and how we would reconcile them with the home life he wanted; nor did we discuss his goals or my visions of the family home. I assumed it was enough to know that he generally supported my hopes to build a successful career and arrange for good child care. Which is just further proof that assumptions are dangerous. Having a marriage that goes bad teaches some very tough lessons, but for me, the upside was that my failed marriage helped me figure out how to forge a good one.

  In 2011, I married Zaib Shaikh. We’d met at the CBC when I was head of English language television and he was starring in Little Mosque on The Prairie. We weren’t the first couple to meet at work, and I knew the protocol; when we started dating, I recused myself from decisions involving his work at the CBC. Also, unlike my first time around, long before we exchanged vows, we talked at length about how we’d structure our home life as two busy professionals and, more importantly, we agreed on how we’d try to do it.

  It takes a brave man to take on everything I now brought to a relationship. I wasn’t a fresh university grad. I had a big job, with big demands that spill outside office hours, regular travel cross-country, and now out-of-country. And two kids, whose custody I shared with my ex (ironically, divorce had managed to create a more even split in our parenting duties). One time early in our relationship, Zaib was out with another actor friend who asked if he was truly ready to “take it on.” Not just the kids and the work, but the idea that when we walked into a room together, there would be certain times when he wasn’t going to be the centre of attention—that would be me. Zaib insisted he was ready. He is a brave man.

  And I knew that Zaib—an actor, director and producer with jobs that have taken him to the far corners of the globe; and, more recently, his role as Toronto’s first film and entertainment commissioner—has a schedule as erratic as my own. But we are a team. We make decisions together, whether it’s about what to order for dinner (and we order in a lot), or whether I should leave the CBC for Twitter, or whether he should become the city’s film commissioner. And when it comes to sharing parenting responsibilities, I may be the preferred PB&J-maker on Saturday after tennis lessons, but Zaib is king of the paratha lunch and a valued wardrobe consultant. When my eldest went shopping to buy a prom outfit for her boyfriend, she sent Zaib pictures so he could advise on the tie she picked out. They have their own relationship and I couldn’t describe what it is exactly, but it is exactly what it should be.

  Today, I’d tell any woman considering marriage, my own daughters included, that they need to discuss how they want their future homes and families to operate, and that the discussion needs to be detailed and explicit. I’m convinced that the item that has been sorely missing from the have-it-all debate and the narratives of working mothers is men, and their expectations of their partners, career ambitions and visions for raising the next generation. For women, not spending enough time with their children is a source of guilt; for men, some are realizing that they miss out on something special, too, when they let themselves be chained to a desk and career. Last year, for example, when Mohamed El-Erian gave up his $100 million annual paycheque as CEO of the Pacific Investment Management Company, shocking the financial world, he said his decision was triggered by a note his ten-year-old daughter had written to him. It was a list of the significant events he had missed in her life because of work, including her first day of school, a parent-teacher meeting and her first soccer match.

  While it appears that a few more men are walking away from jobs at the top of their careers to build better relationships with their kids (and to be clear, these are men who can well afford to walk away), society has a lot of catching up to do. Unfortunately, too often men who do stay home to raise their children are either stigmatized or, perversely, held up as a unicorn (look, he actually stayed home with a sick child or baked cupcakes for the class party: amazing!). The idea that women should hold up the home front is still so entrenched that many male executives, according to another recent Harvard paper, still think of “work–life balance” as a “women’s issue.” And why wouldn’t they? Men are almost never asked how they “do it all,” how they made it to the corner office, or to the Supreme Court, or to outer space. We know the answer. What has to change is the question. It’s not “How do you do it all,” but “How will we do it all.”

  This was a point made beautifully by Max Schireson
. The CEO of MongoDB, a billion-dollar database company he’d helped to grow, resigned just seven months after El-Erian quit and for similar reasons: he said the travel demands of his job were robbing him of time he wanted to spend with his wife and three children. As Schireson described it in a blog post that went viral: “Earlier this summer, Matt Lauer [host of The Today Show] asked Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, whether she could balance the demands of being a mom and being a CEO. The Atlantic asked similar questions of PepsiCo’s female CEO, Indra Nooyi. As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO… . Friends and colleagues often ask my wife [a doctor and professor at Stanford University] how she balances her job and motherhood. Somehow, the same people don’t ask me.”

  The press celebrated Schireson’s resignation. “When a top CEO quits to be a better dad it’s a giant leap forward for women execs,” said the headline in Fortune magazine. And on Twitter, many comments were reminiscent of those “Ooh, you baked cookies” coos. People called it “brave … bold … honest.” As one woman summed it up: “Best. Statement. Ever.” I couldn’t help but contrast the public reaction when a woman with a top job steps down to spend more time with her family. For one thing, she rarely makes news. Women sacrifice professional advancement and potential earnings to take care of their families day in and day out, and always have. In 2000, I made the hard decision to turn down an exciting television job offer in Manhattan because it would have been too difficult for my former husband to find work there, and too difficult for me to spend time with my girls. (I took the Hallmark job in Denver instead.) When a woman’s decision to leave a high-profile job does become public, as it did when foreign policy expert Anne-Marie Slaughter left her director’s job in Hillary Clinton’s State Department to be closer to her two teenage sons, the fallout became rich fodder for the eternal can’t-have-it-all debate. (Slaughter’s 2012 article in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” quickly went viral, with over a million downloads in its first week.)

  I’ve always thought the phrase itself was terribly imprecise. Exactly what is “it”? I would argue that whether you succeed or not depends entirely on what “it” means to you. Maybe “it” is having satisfying work that rarely places demands on you outside of nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday hours, leaving your nights and weekends with your family undisturbed. Perhaps “it” is working part-time so you can pursue dreams of starting your own business while you raise your children. Or maybe “it” is becoming head of a multi-million-dollar corporation and having a family of five; in which case, you factor in the squadron of child care and domestic help you will need (and hopefully be able to afford) to keep your version of “it” from sabotaging your mental health.

  The upshot is that “it” is up to an individual to define. And, let’s face it, for the vast majority of working mothers, work is work: it’s to pay the bills, and quitting is not an option. The same goes for many working fathers: they don’t have the luxury of pondering the question. I’ve been there, counting subway tokens and statutory holidays to ensure I’d have enough to get me to the end of a month. I think the Rolling Stones essentially had it right: You can’t always get what you want, but if you try, you might find you get what you need.

  What’s giving me hope now is that the world is in transition, and we are not alone. The work-life juggle isn’t a woman’s issue, it’s a family issue—no matter the makeup of that family. No player scores a hat trick alone; it has to be a team effort. And this is the moment where if we move forward, we move forward together.

  [ VI ]

  He for She, and Vice Versa

  FINDING A HAPPY RHYTHM between work and home can no longer be called a woman’s issue because it simply isn’t one. Traditional gender identities are converging, with more women in the workplace (70 percent of women in North America) and men more involved in the home. As technology and demographic shifts remake the economy, and the culture, the workplace can no longer function as a rigid “man’s world” and home is no longer the place where men can play “Mr. Mom.”

  There’s been a tendency to analyze the evolution of the women’s movement as a phenomenon unto itself: blossoming like an exuberant kid in the 1960s and ’70s, shooting up with the growing pains of a moody teen through the ’80s and ’90s, and now maturing, becoming part of the wider social revolution under way, which includes a fledgling movement among men.

  After all, the very nature of what constitutes family is shifting profoundly, not just the gender roles within it. We’re experiencing the rise of single-parent homes; the recreation of the extended family as grandparents age or as children need longer to launch; gay and lesbian couples having children, people choosing not to have children, to name just a few. People are marrying later in their lives and having children later, if they are having them at all. You can’t have a true social revolution with only half the population participating any more than you can exclude half the population from the professional talent pool. Women’s roles and aspirations have been changing for a century, and, at last, albeit slowly, so are those of men.

  Early signs of that change were evident to me about eighteen months after I opened the offices of Twitter Canada, during which time our staff grew from zero to thirty. It was September 2014, just after Labour Day weekend, and kids were heading back to school. Several employees called to let me know they’d be late, or away that whole morning, as they took their children in for the first day. At some point, it struck me that I’d heard from as many men as women. It was a nice revelation: a small sign of equality on the home front. Not only did employees have the freedom to take the morning to deliver their kids to school, but the duty had apparently been taken up by fathers as well as mothers. There have been other signs. During the time I was in charge at Twitter Canada the only employee to take a parental leave was a man, our head of research, who took paid leave to be off with his newborn daughter.

  I was recently part of a panel of women in finance where we discovered we were living examples of the gender roles in transition. The eldest of us was married and chose to be childless: “There was just no way for us back then if we wanted a career.” The second eldest had children, but was the breadwinner whose husband was able to move where her jobs took her. The youngest was a newly married woman confident that when it came time to start a family, she and her husband would work out raising the baby together, confident that technology, the nature of her job and her partner’s commitment, would make the work-life juggle much easier for her than it had been for any of us who had gone before. And I don’t doubt it.

  There’s a raft of evidence about the expanding domestic roles of men to bolster my front-line anecdotes. A 2014 Pew Center study found the number of stay-at-home dads has more than doubled in the last twenty-five years. Men are still firmly in the minority of parents who stay home, and many are home because of a disability or unemployment. But the segment of fathers who said they were choosing to be at home specifically to look after their children has expanded dramatically: it’s jumped to 21 percent from 5 percent in 1989.

  In part, the trend reflects new economic realities that have been especially tough on men. With the rapid shift from brawn to brain, from a manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy, many of the jobs traditionally held by males have disappeared. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, during the recent recession, women lost just one job for every 2.6 jobs lost by men. Statistics Canada figures show that between 2008 to 2009, employment among men 25 and under declined nearly 10.8 percent, while for women in the same age group it fell by only 6.5 percent.

  Women, meanwhile, now account for about 60 percent of university graduates, they’re far more likely than men to graduate from the programs they start and in many fields they’re earning more advanced degrees than men are. These achievements in learning are, bit by bit, translating into earnings. A woman is now the primary breadwinner in 40 percent of A
merican households with children under 18, according to Pew Center research. That’s compared to 11 percent in 1960. In Canada, the story is similar: households with women at the economic helm have nearly quadrupled, from 8 percent in 1976 to more than 31 percent in 2010. And interestingly, this StatsCan data shows the rise of female breadwinners is happening equally across the country, and across age groups. (Though education makes a significant difference: the higher the level, the more likely a woman is to be a female breadwinner.)

  The increase is due, in part, to the rise of single mothers. But simple economics helps to explain it too; more couples are opting to have the higher-earning parent keep earning while the other parent becomes the main caregiver and manager of the household. And more and more, that higher earner is the woman, the wife, the mother. StatsCan data shows that between 1976 and 2010, the median annual income of men with full-time jobs hardly budged, while it jumped by more than 25 percent for women, who are more likely to hold jobs requiring cognitive versus manual skills. Women still earn a whole lot less than men overall, but this is an area where the gap is closing and having a real impact on the home front. In 2013, for instance, the New York Times reported that the number of women in finance with stay-at-home husbands has increased tenfold since 1980. The National At-Home Dad Network, started in 2003 by three fathers in the Washington, DC, area, has grown into a national, even international, organization with seventy chapters across the US and Canada. And demographic changes are contributing to the trend big time.

  Many studies have found that Millennials believe that professional goals should take a backseat to family responsibilities and personal aspirations. And the young men among them are more likely than any males who have come before them to have grown up with a working mother, or a single mother, which may have given them a fresh perspective on modern fatherhood. The Boston College Center for Work and Family, for example, found Millennial and Gen X dads took more time off to care for children than Baby Boomers did. Its 2014 report, entitled The New Dad, based on surveys and interviews with nearly three thousand fathers, found more than three out of four dads expressed the desire to spend more time with their kids. More than two out of three said they and their partners should evenly split caring for their children, and slightly more than half said they would seriously consider staying home to be full-time dads.