Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  It is exactly that perception of the trade-offs between work and family that is widely shared by millennial women. They see that ambition and commitment are essential to climb to the top of their professions, but they do not see how to create room for family at the same time.

  But What About the Success Stories?

  AFTER ANOTHER TALK ON WOMEN and work I gave to a group of New Jersey women, a woman in her sixties came up and told me, in an oddly assertive tone, about her daughter, a lawyer with three children who managed to commute into New York every day, advance in her firm, and still be there for her kids when they needed her. I smiled and congratulated her on her daughter’s behalf, although I couldn’t quite understand the fervor or the edge in her tone. Later it hit me that she believed I thought women can’t ever actually manage to do it all, thereby denying the reality of her daughter’s life. She was essentially shaking her fist under my nose, pointing out to me that her daughter was in fact doing what I supposedly said she couldn’t do. From her perspective, every woman like her daughter who was managing to make a career and family work was somehow proving me wrong.

  So what about the women who are making it to the top in many professions and do have families? Let’s look at the facts: women make up 6 percent or so of Fortune 500 CEOs. Twenty percent of U.S. senators are now women. More broadly, roughly 15 percent of corporate “C-suite” (meaning top executive) positions are now held by women, alongside about 20 percent of law firm partners, 24 percent of full-time tenured professors, and 21 percent of surgeons. The numbers from other professions are rather more dismal: 8 percent of the most senior bankers on executive committees in investment banking firms (and half of those are heads of human resources or communications), 3 percent of hedge and private equity fund managers, 6 percent of mechanical engineers, and 8.5 percent of the world’s billionaires.

  These numbers may not be where we ultimately want them to be, but still, they show that it is possible for a significant number of women to make it to the top today. The strong desire to follow in their footsteps explains the success of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Sandberg herself has had an extraordinary career; she is genuinely motivated by the desire to see thousands more women make it to the top and millions rise higher than they are now. She had the courage to become an avatar for a revived feminism in an industry where blending in with the boys has been the key to survival. And she’s given us a new vocabulary: Are you leaning in or leaning back?

  I have seen some of the positive results of Lean In firsthand. A Princeton friend with whom I had worked in various capacities on campus ran into me at a summer barbecue and wondered aloud whether she should go for a top job, musing that perhaps it was her “lean-in moment.” I encouraged her to go for it; she did and got it. Would she have put herself forward without Lean In? Perhaps—but certainly thinking about her decision in the wake of the book made a big difference. Even closer to home, three of my female employees at New America, where I am currently president and CEO, asked me for raises after reading Lean In. As one said, she knew she had to “lean in and do it.” When I see examples like these, I smile and tip my hat to Sheryl.

  For young women, what is most attractive about the “lean in” message is that it tells them that the fate of their careers and families is within their control. That is the kind of message Americans, particularly, love to hear; it’s the kind of spirit that led our ancestors to believe they could come to this country, make their fortunes, and remake their lives. It’s the message any young person coming out of school and looking forward to her life wants to believe. It’s the reason that optimists do better in life than pessimists. It’s a source of both hope and resilience.

  The problem, though, is that it’s often just not true. We often cannot control the fate of our career and family; insisting that we can obscures the deeper structures and forces that shape our lives and deflects attention from the larger changes that must be made. Plenty of women have leaned in for all they’re worth but still run up against insuperable obstacles created by the combination of unpredictable life circumstances and the rigid inflexibilities of our workplaces, the lack of a public infrastructure of care, and cultural attitudes that devalue them the minute they step out, or even just lean back, from the workforce. Other women have decided that their life ambitions should include spending time with and caring for those they love while they can, even if it means deferring professional achievement for a while.

  Sheryl Sandberg and I agree on many things. We both encourage women to speak up and take their place at the table; we both want to see many structural changes in the workplace. To some extent the difference between us is largely a matter of which side of the equation to emphasize—a difference that, on my side, at least, is a function of relative age. I would have written a very similar book to Lean In at forty-three, Sandberg’s age when she published her book. My kids were very young and I had never met a work-life challenge that I could not surmount by working harder or hiring people to help out. By fifty-three, when I wrote my article, I found myself in a different place, one that gave me insight into the circumstances and choices facing the many women who have found that for whatever reason, leaning in simply isn’t an option.

  On another level, however, the differences between Sandberg and me are more fundamental. We have similar backgrounds in many ways, but our careers have led us on very different paths. Sandberg focuses on how young women can climb into the C-suite in a traditional male world of corporate hierarchies. I see that system itself as antiquated and broken. When law firms and corporations hemorrhage talented women who reject lockstep career paths and question promotion systems that elevate quantity of hours worked over the quality of the work itself, the problem is not with the women.

  Sandberg argues that “women will tear down the external barriers [to women’s advancement] once we achieve leadership roles. We will march into our bosses’ offices and demand what we need….Or better yet, we’ll become bosses and make sure all women have what they need.” I agree that having more women at the top will make a difference and have been fortunate enough to work for two great female bosses—Princeton president Shirley Tilghman and Secretary Clinton—who did indeed do everything they could to create conditions conducive to the advancement of women. On the other hand, almost every time I give a talk someone raises her hand and tells me she has a female boss who’s much tougher and less accommodating of work-family conflicts than many male bosses in the office. It’s human nature to absorb the values and practices of the system that we survived and succeeded in and to demand that others make it the same way. So it’s not surprising that some of the women who made it to the top in a system that demanded they compete on exactly the same terms as the men who had full-time spouses at home may see less need for change than many of their male peers.

  Lean In tells you how to survive and win in what is still fundamentally a man’s world, while making what changes you can when you reach the top. That is important, but much broader social, political, and cultural change is also necessary. It cannot be achieved within the system, corporation by corporation, one progressive female CEO at a time.

  We must rework our society so the expense and headache of childcare and eldercare don’t sink women and their families, and we need to remodel our workplaces so that our employers no longer assume that a lawyer or businessperson can be available 24/7 to answer email or that a restaurant worker or clerk can be available 24/7 to staff a shift. This kind of change goes far beyond feminism. If we can adopt policies and practices that support and advance women at every level of our society, we will make things better for everybody.

  Fear or Fate?

  MY HUSBAND TAUGHT ME TO act like a man. Early on in our relationship, we were both young professors who frequently attended the same seminars and conferences. Andy, a powerful speaker and assertive debater, would listen to me make my arguments. Afterward, he’d point out all the ways in which I’d undercut myself: the typically feminine trope
s of speech and posture that signal lack of confidence and thus diminish others’ confidence in you.

  The most common mistake I made was to start a comment on a speaker’s presentation by saying something like “I’m not an expert, but I think…” In Andy’s memorable phrase, “If you start out by telling everyone you don’t know what you are talking about, why on earth should you expect them to listen to you?”

  I have since spent years monitoring my own female students and mentees and passing on the lessons I learned: teaching them to be the first to raise their hand after a speech or lecture, because that way they are bound to be called on; to speak confidently and assertively; to look for the weak points in arguments and ask questions probing the basis for a particular assertion rather than immediately responding with a counterassertion that can be brushed off. But fear can always creep back in. Even after a decade of making my living as a professor, dean, and paid public speaker, when I found myself, at the age of fifty, sitting around the table at the State Department at Secretary Clinton’s early morning meeting, surrounded by people who had served in government before or worked for her before, I felt that old self-doubt stirring once again. It took months before I could speak up as confidently and clearly as I normally do.

  I can attest firsthand, then, that fear can be a major obstacle holding women back. Banishing those doubts, however, can promote a virtuous circle: you assume you can juggle work and family, you step forward, you succeed professionally, and then you’re in a better position to ask for what you need and to make changes that could benefit others. As someone who was able to control my own time, as a tenured professor, by the age of thirty-five, and who made it to a leadership position as dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School by the age of forty-two, I know that the faster you can become the boss, the easier it is to fit work and family together. And believing that you can be the boss is an important part of getting there.

  What happens, though, when life intervenes? As much as we try to make our own luck, a concept that I suspect is uniquely American, how often have you heard that getting a particular job is a matter of “being in the right place at the right time”? When I came out of college, I had planned my entire career around the idea that I would work for a big New York law firm doing international practice, make myself indispensable to a partner who had served in government and was likely to go in again, and then follow him to Washington as a special assistant of some kind—a path that was well trodden in those days. Little did I imagine that I would discover that I really did not like big-firm law practice or that I would marry a man who at that point was firmly rooted in Boston.

  These are relatively benign examples of the unexpected circumstance that the ancients called fate. Though you can’t plan for them in advance, they can have very big and very real consequences later on. Suppose the twists and turns of your life include late marriage, no marriage, divorce, or infertility. A miserable economy, a boss who just doesn’t recognize your merits no matter how confidently you assert them, a job and a spouse that are not in the same place, a child who needs you more than you expected or whom you want to be with more than you expected, parents who need care. Illness, unemployment, debt, disasters both natural and man-made.

  A resilient system is one that can handle the unexpected and bounce back, that anticipates the possibility of many different paths to the same destination. Confidence and conviction are important elements of personal resilience. But even for those of us who are optimists, assuming that life will go your way is not a recipe for success. Build in the expectation of setbacks and unpredictable events; prepare and plan for them. That includes a realistic assessment of your own capabilities; if you need eight hours of sleep, surviving on five hours a night is not a sustainable life proposition. If you are not the world’s most organized human being, then trying to run an office and a household at the same time is likely to be a prescription for great stress, not to mention dropped balls. If you are a creative person, cramming every minute of every day with activity, either family or professional, will burn you out quickly.

  A key thing to anticipate is the possibility of a tipping point, a situation in which what was once a manageable and enjoyable work-family balance can no longer be sustained—regardless of ambition, confidence, or even an equal partner. In my own life, and in scores of conversations and letters with other women who started out with all the ambition in the world but suddenly found themselves in a place they never expected to be, the tipping point was always a highly individual matter, but it is a frequent enough occurrence to form a clear pattern.

  Tipping Over

  MANY WOMEN AND MEN MANAGE to juggle two careers and caregiving responsibilities for children and/or aging parents through remarkable organization and time management, often coupled with chronic sleep deprivation. Making it all fit, from baking school cupcakes at midnight to rising at five to get writing or reading done to prep for a meeting or a class, can be exhilarating even if exhausting. When I was a dean, I would often walk down the street to my office (one of the many conveniences that made my life possible) feeling like the luckiest woman in the world, with work I loved and a family I loved even more. My schedule was often so finely calibrated that a kid’s ear infection could send a week’s worth of appointments toppling into one another like dominoes, and I certainly faced days where I felt like I was letting both my family and my work down. But overall, the satisfactions outweighed the stress, and still do.

  Even the most organized and most competent multitasker, however, can reach her limit. Something happens, and the carefully constructed balance suddenly tips. For many women that something is the birth of a second child. Law firms and businesses are well acquainted with the “second-child syndrome,” where suddenly a talented woman who was making it work with one child can no longer work full-time or at the same job with two children. Other women manage two children and their careers until a child gets sick or starts having real trouble in or out of school; an aging parent needs care; a partner gets a promotion requiring him or her to travel extensively; a marriage comes apart; or a move requires leaving a vital family support system behind. Alternatively, the woman herself moves steadily up the career ladder until the next job on that ladder requires her to travel extensively, at which point her husband is unable or unwilling to fill the breach.

  The tipping point for me was fairly extreme and probably predictable: working in a high-pressure job in another city with two teenagers back at home. Still, I didn’t see it coming. As in the cliché about the straw that breaks the camel’s back, it’s never clear which straw it will be until it happens. Every family’s situation is different; some women may be able to handle with ease situations that are too much for others; some women will never encounter a tipping point at all. What matters is that on the precarious seesaw between work and family it is always possible to put enough weight on one side to create a tipping point, most often leaving the woman as the caregiver and the man as the breadwinner.

  Listen to a young woman I met while giving a speech to a group of employees at a highly respected bank. Linda, as I’ll call her, wrote afterward to tell me she’d reached her tipping point a few days after my speech:

  I resigned yesterday from my job, a job which I love, for the betterment of my family unit. The short of it is that I had a “crisis” child care situation which forced my hand into making a really tough choice. My wonderful nanny made a not so wonderful decision resulting in her losing her license for 7 months. Although I struggled greatly with the challenge of trying to figure it all out on such a tight time frame—the reality was that I could not in good conscience put my 3 young boys (ages 6, 3 and 1) through their fourth nanny change in less than a year. Perhaps they could have been resilient…but I wasn’t sure if I would be.

  Despite having as close to an ideal flexible work arrangement as possible, this temporary derailment caused me to panic, pause, write about 794 pros and cons lists, annoy the hell out of my husband as we had the endle
ss conversation 12 times a day about “am I doing the right thing?,” reach out to every woman I know in hopes of finding “the right answer”…and then ultimately coming to the realization that being the most stable force in my kids’ life is more important than my professional advancement for today. I can’t lie and say that I’m not terrified that I made a totally irrational/short-sighted decision. I am giving up a good thing—and something that I worked hard to get. But I’m doing my best to embrace this leap of faith!

  Linda had many different flexible options at work but still hit a tipping point. For many other women, the tipping point is triggered by workplace rigidity. They do not opt out of their jobs; they are shut out by the refusal of their bosses to make it possible for them to fit their family life and their work life together. In her book Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home, sociologist Pamela Stone calls this a “forced choice.” “Denial of requests to work part-time, layoffs, or relocations,” she writes, will push even the most ambitious woman out of the workforce.

  Carey Goldberg, a talented journalist and author who had a promising career at The New York Times, describes her effort to convince the Times to allow her to give up her staff position and work on a contract three days a week. Nothing doing; it was either stay on staff or be a pure freelancer paid piece by piece at a very modest rate. So she quit, opting for a three-day-a-week job at The Boston Globe. “It hurt to leave the lofty Times, but I have not a single regret about that decision. I only regret that I had to make it, that I faced such a stark either-or,” Goldberg wrote. Now she works half-time in a job-share arrangement at WBUR’s CommonHealth blog.