by Hanna Rosin
Gone are the days when hard-driving women had to hide their pregnancies from their bosses. In the 1960s, Barbara Walters went back to work a day after her miscarriage. When she finally adopted a baby girl, she didn’t mention it, and she didn’t slow down. “There was no having it all,” Walters has said about her situation. If Walters were a news anchor today, she would do a series on adoption and live-tweet the moment she picked up her daughter from the orphanage. She would show her baby pictures on air, as Fox’s Megyn Kelly did, getting into vicious arguments with any viewers who complained. Kelly also got into one with a fellow conservative TV host who complained that her maternity leave was a “racket.” Earlier she had squeezed her milk-enhanced boobs into a tight black dress for a sexy photo shoot for GQ.
A space has opened up for women—and yes, we are talking mostly about professional women (and men) here—to get creative about how they conduct themselves in the workplace as parents. High-profile companies have begun to adopt radical flexibility programs. Best Buy recently instituted a Results-Only Work Environment for managers and executives, which goes by Silicon Valley rules. As long as you get your work done, you don’t have to show up; you can conduct meetings by cell phone from your fishing boat if you want. The top accounting firms—KPMG, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers—are in a PR race to see who can come up with more creative options for flexibility, and now financial firms are joining in, too. The key is not to place pressure on individual women to ask for special deals, but to make flexibility the default option, for everyone.
If a company doesn’t have a blanket flexibility policy, then the same strategy that works for women negotiating pay raises works for negotiating a flexible schedule: Present your solution as good for yourself and the company. When Sukhinder Singh Cassidy had her first child, she was working at Google. “I went into Eric’s office”—meaning then-CEO Eric Schmidt—“and I said I need to pay for my nanny and my daughter to travel business class around the world.” This was, on its face, an outrageous request, even for the permissive culture of Silicon Valley. “Why did I do it? Because I love my daughter and I love my job and I have the energy to manage them both. And at that point I had earned that flexibility,” she said. Cassidy made her case with a spreadsheet showing that the extra cost “is nothing compared to what it would cost to recruit another person who you know can perform in this job.” Her boss assented.
Sallie Krawcheck has referred to being a mother on Wall Street as an “extreme sport.” In the early years she managed it by choosing her firm, and what she calls her “microclimate”—meaning her specific boss and assignment—carefully. She became a research analyst, which was a job she could do largely on her own time. Although she is a Southern WASP, she sought out firms where the culture was renegade outsider, which in this case meant essentially Jews. One of the firms she worked for was most proud of having hired a former taxi driver as an analyst, “not the typical Joe from Harvard.” One weekend she and her husband were packed up to move when she got a call from her boss, who wanted to review an earnings model she’d drawn up. Krawcheck called a colleague, panicked—all her work clothes were boxed up and being shipped to her new place. “Don’t worry,” her colleague told her. “All he will see is your brain.” Krawcheck went to the office in sweatpants and a T-shirt and nobody cared. She got her first promotion when she was six months pregnant. “There was none of this 1970s thing of pretending I don’t have kids. Every Friday afternoon I went to the mommy and me sing-along. I never missed a single one.”
Many great working women reach the point where they stop and wonder whether the mad daily rush is worth it. Sometimes the moment is forced on them by some job frustration or layoff, but sometimes it starts to preoccupy them for no apparent reason at all. The typical male midlife crisis tends to hit out of the blue and take men by surprise, but for women it’s been lingering there all along. They might have felt it during maternity leave, or on the day they walked into the fourth meeting of the morning and desperately wanted to walk back out and find some quiet place to sit and read a magazine. What they need is not a room of their own—they probably have one at home, even if it’s called an office—but just more room, in the crammed minute-by-minute calendars that are their lives. Maybe they think, I could get away with slipping away—not for an hour, with a magazine, but for good. There are, after all, usually children to tend to and a household to manage; it could be justified.
In Tina Brown’s case, the moment arrived unbidden. Brown had been a celebrity editor since she was in her midtwenties and revived the British society magazine Tatler. She had always had a constant eye on the news, had always been in the news. Several stints later, she was put in charge of her own new magazine, Talk, but the magazine lasted barely four years and Brown, in her forties, found herself for the first time free of a workday calendar. She pottered around the house, had breakfast with her husband, Harry Evans, had ice cream and tea with her daughter, and helped her son with his homework. I have over the years read many profiles of Brown, but none had quite the wistful tone of this recent one in the British magazine The Lady, where she reflected on those years.
“I had,” she recalled, “become very happy. For the first time in my entire working life as a mother I wasn’t conflicted anymore. The conflict gets very tiring. Just suddenly to be free of that—to be able to come to the school—to be there when you’re supposed to be there—or if plans change that you weren’t immediately thinking how to do this or juggle that. All those conversations with yourself had stopped. I was able to pick up my children from school and gain proper insights into their day. It was really lovely. I was immensely rejuvenated. I looked about five years younger. People said I looked so relaxed—and I was!”
I recently asked Brown about this period, and why she thinks women are so tempted to leave their jobs. “A lot of women have been battered around in traditional structures and they just don’t find it satisfying or edifying, and not particularly stimulating,” she told me. “They don’t want to go through the thing of being at the traditional top. They want to go off and be creative.” In Brown’s case, it worked out. During that hiatus she wrote her best-selling book, The Diana Chronicles. And now she is once again back in the news cycle, running Newsweek and The Daily Beast, e-mailing her editors at two in the morning.
Brown says she makes her peace with the “traditional structure” by sticking to what are essentially the same rules Marissa Mayer follows to ward off burnout. In her negotiations with new bosses, Brown always insists on a single thing: not more money, or a wardrobe, or a driver, but creative freedom. “I love working on magazines. I love writing. I love being in an office and seeing projects come to fruition. If I wasn’t able to do my work I’d get depressed. I think you either have that passion or you don’t—and those of us who do are very lucky, because in the end our children do grow up, so actually I’m glad I have it.”
Krawcheck has seen plenty of Wall Street women succumb to the temptation to jump ship. They make it through their first career plateau, where they don’t get promoted or don’t like a boss, and then a few years later they hit a second one. “The men continue to make it through, but I’ve seen numerous women who at that point say, ‘I’m out. It’s not worth it. I have two beautiful children at home, and it’s socially acceptable to be home. It’s more fun at home.’” But, she adds, “if we can get women past their second career plateau, you’ll find more making their way to the top—because it does get a lot easier when the kids are in school. It’s a lot easier for me, with kids who are twelve and fourteen, than when they were four and six.”
A recent McKinsey survey on women and the economy uncovered an admirable and also frustrating trait common to women. Much more than men, women tend to derive their satisfaction and moral identity from aspects of work—and life—that are unrelated to lockstep promotion. Women stay at jobs rather than move up to new ones because they might “derive a deep sense of meaning professionally,” the report con
cluded. They don’t necessarily want to “trade that joy for what they fear will be energy-draining meetings and corporate politics” that come along with a bigger title.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with a deep sense of meaning. The Netherlands, for example, is right now gripped by an epidemic of meaning. Despite various government incentives, Dutch women do not want to work full-time, because they would rather have their afternoons free for coffee with friends.
I asked Sheryl Sandberg about this once. What if it’s innate that women are allergic to a certain kind of ambition? What if women are somehow programmed to ease their way through life at a different pace? What if the resistance from the ruling patriarchy in the American workplace is still so overpowering that only a brave and exceptional few—only women like Sheryl, essentially—can keep up the will to fight it? “I think it might be innate and I still don’t care,” she said. “We need to get over it. We might be biologically programmed to get obese, but we don’t give in to that, too.” The external barriers are decreasing every day. Pretty soon women will take up 30 percent of spots at the top, which most people say is the tipping point, after which their presence there no longer seems unusual. But the internal barriers are likely to be the harder fight.
Often Sandberg is accused of blaming women for not advancing more quickly, of being blind to the realities of the average working woman (she stands to gain $1.6 billion in the Facebook IPO). But this again is a narrow reading of the situation. If Sandberg is watching over Facebook’s maternity leave policy, the receptionist has as much to gain from that as Sheryl does. If women want the future to contain fewer energy-draining meetings and a more family-friendly workplace, you need more women to make it to Sheryl Sandberg’s level. Not just for Sheryl Sandberg’s benefit, but for the millions of women who have a lot less power to make demands. You need women at the top to remake the workplace in their own image.
THE GOLD MISSES
ASIAN WOMEN TAKE OVER THE WORLD
One of the propositions considered by the Asian Debate Institute held in Seoul in the winter of 2012 is whether quotas are necessary for women to advance in Asian society. The college students assembled in this downtown university classroom provide strong evidence for the negative. These students have traveled from all over Asia to the South Korean capital for this weeklong debate camp, held over their winter break, and about three-quarters of them are women. Some have come just to practice speaking English but most are here to “get more aggressive,” as Hitomi Nakamura, a Japanese freshman who goes by the nickname Miki, told me. “This will help me get ahead in life.”
Yeeun Kim, a student-teacher and 2011 national debate champion, is teaching this class of beginners how to develop and deepen their arguments so they are more “powerful.” She calls on Miki for an example of utilitarian logic, and Miki gives her answer in a kitten whisper. Miki has never debated before, and her English is halting. It’s unclear whether she even understands what “utilitarian” means. She turns her head slightly away and covers her mouth with her hands when she talks. “Louder,” says Yeeun. Miki raises her voice half a notch. “I said louder,” Yeeun repeats. “I can barely hear you up here.” She rests her hands on her waist in the universal sign for growing impatience.
With her chunky sweater and short plaid skirt, Yeeun looks like a lot of the other college girls walking around Seoul, shyly holding hands with boys, leaning against each other, or talking on cell phones dangling with little dolls or stuffed bears. But Yeeun has none of the girlish giggle left in her. She started debating two years ago, after breaking up with a boyfriend who was turned off by her reluctance to lower her voice, to back down from an argument, or generally to behave like the “ideal, feminine Korean woman.” Yeeun was looking for a “challenge, a fresh feeling to life,” and a friend introduced her to a school debate club. There she found her role models, women and men who were “so confident and so intelligent!” At the time her English wasn’t that fluent, but within a year she was winning top speaking awards and placing in international competitions, beating back all-male teams with calm, methodical confidence.
Around 2003, debate clubs began popping up at all the elite Korean universities in Seoul, as the activity became the nation’s latest marker of academic success and future achievement. Teams from all over Asia traveled to Korea for competitions, and pretty soon one school began to dominate those competitions: Ewha, the all-women’s university in Seoul. This surprised most people but not Peter Kipp, an American who teaches English at Ewha and runs the debate institute.
During his fifteen years of teaching, Kipp has seen a remarkable transformation in the women at Ewha. When he started, they were fairly shy and dutiful, coming to school in shirts with Peter Pan collars, never missing a class, always grateful. This kind of deference is not a quality Kipp especially admires. He is an American bohemian type who settled here after marrying a Korean woman. He was initially attracted to his wife because she was wearing combat boots (it turned out they were more fashion statement than punk). He liked Ewha because there was a sweet feminist sisterhood to the place, a group of women striving together to stay ahead of The Man. Now the aura of togetherness is gone, and the vibe is more cutthroat. Ewha women are known as the most competitive students in Korea, a country famous for killer academic competitors. In fact, the Ewha women these days are so “über-competitive” that they have started to seem almost “arrogant” and “entitled” to Kipp. The women in his English classes lobby him for higher grades and rarely help their fellow students. Their new attitude is “It’s my natural right to be a future global leader,” he says. “They fight to the end.” By this winter, Kipp admits, some of the other Korean debate teams were so weary of Ewha’s dominance that they were secretly rooting for the Japanese teams to win the regional competitions.
OVER SEVERAL CENTURIES, South Korea constructed one of the most rigid patriarchal societies in the world. A series of authoritarian leaders imposed their Confucian-inspired power structure on every aspect of society, including individual households. Men held all the property, and when women married, they were formally transferred to their husbands’ families. Eldest sons were responsible for taking care of all their relatives, and for seeing that the ancestors were properly respected. These rules were enshrined in the Korean Civil Code in 1958 as the Family Laws, which specified that eldest sons headed their families, and inheritance passed down male lines. When President Park Chung-hee began to rebuild Korea’s economy in the 1960s, he did it largely by promoting large conglomerates, called chaebol (Samsung Electronics, Hyundai Motor) and putting them in the hands of a small number of powerful patriarchs.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the government embraced an industrial revolution, and Korea became perhaps the most miraculous of the Asian miracle stories. A country that had ranked as poor as Ghana, where children chased after US army trucks to gather stray biscuits, transformed itself into the thirteenth-largest economy in the world. Because Korea is not especially resource-rich, it managed this feat by making its workers its main asset. (“Work hard,” was Park’s theme for the country one year. The next year it was “Work harder!”) The government set up extremely difficult national exams to determine which university students would go to and where they would eventually work—another Confucian legacy. The system tacitly encourages extreme academic competition, and most high school students attend private “cram” schools six days of the week that prepare them for the exams and can go until midnight or later. As a result, Korea climbed into the top five international rankings in math and reading scores and has remained there.
The government encouraged women to educate themselves, too, and they did. Women moved to the cities and went to college. They proved themselves to be perhaps the most plastic women in the world, advancing through the labor force with uncanny speed. They went through their Mad Men era in the early 1990s, when women were expected to serve tea and coffee to their male colleagues, and in many offices, to wear a uniform that made them lo
ok like stewardesses. But that phase passed quickly. Last year the percentage of women enrolling in college surpassed the percentage of men, and the newly educated women are trying their best to push into once exclusively male fields—medicine, law, technology, and finance. In jobs for which exam scores are the only criterion—primarily government jobs—women have sailed past men. In the last few years they have made up 55 percent of those who passed the extremely difficult foreign service exam, causing the Korean Foreign Ministry to establish a minimum quota for men.
Pretty soon, without anyone anticipating or planning for it, these changes started to erode the traditional patriarchal order. In 1991, the country’s laws were revised so that women could keep custody of their children after a divorce and inherit property. In 2005, the government abolished the law making men the automatic head of the family and allowed mothers to register children under their own family names. As recently as 1985, about half of all women in a national survey said they “must have a son.” That percentage fell slowly until 1991, and then plummeted to just over 15 percent by 2003. In the latest national study in 2010, about 40 percent of mothers and fathers said they would prefer a daughter, about 30 percent said a son, and the rest said they had no preference. Male preference in South Korea “is over,” says Monica Das Gupta, a demographer and Asia expert at the World Bank. “It happened so fast. It’s hard to believe it, but it is.”
Now South Korea is in economic and cultural crisis. The extremely modern, test-based meritocracy the government established was embedded in an old-fashioned patriarchy, and the two systems are at last at war. At the center of that war are Korea’s women, caught between society’s mixed messages that they should study hard and work like killers but somehow still remain dainty women and old-fashioned wives.