Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  These statistics are why I and so many women like me counsel the younger women in their lives not to wait until their late thirties to try to get pregnant if they can possibly help it. After making this point at a late night pizza and beer discussion with some of my graduate students, one young woman pushed back, telling me that I was effectively advising her, a woman in her early thirties, to “drop out of graduate school and get pregnant.” I said no, that actually being in school is a great time to get pregnant if your life circumstances allow, but of course I took her larger point, which was that I was advising her to make a choice I had not made, because my early thirties were a period when I needed to invest in my career.

  Which brings us back to the conundrum of sequencing. It is so often simply not within our control, for marital, career, or fertility reasons—not to mention the general folly of assuming that your life will go as planned. Moreover, even when everything does work out, as it did in my case, having children in your late thirties or early forties means that they hit their teens in your mid-fifties. Just as you hit the peak years of your career, when leadership opportunities are most likely to come your way, you discover that in many ways it is even more important to be available as a parent to your teenagers as it was when they were very little.

  That is why so 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.

  Up or Out

  EVEN IF YOU DO SUCCEED in having the family you want when you want, work is often unlikely to cooperate with your sequencing plan. The real world of current work practices still very much follows the tune of “up or out,” of “if you turn down a promotion, you get left behind.” I am reminded of a presentation I gave that was sponsored by a large oil company. At the reception afterward a number of women talked about the many great policies that management had put in place to make balancing work and family easier. One of the women who raised her hand said that she was working part-time after having her third child. She said that she had been grateful for the company’s willingness to allow her to continue working in a way that made sense for her family. After hearing my presentation, however, she said that her take-away was that she realized that she still wanted to be an executive and was going to recommit herself to that goal.

  What she was saying was that by taking advantage of these great policies, she had put herself on “the mommy track,” the path of fewer hours and lower expectations. In other words, not the executive track. When she made her decision to slow down, she’d known and accepted that consequence, but now she had some questions. The mommy (or daddy) track is the opposite of the leadership track, but why? Working part-time or flexibly or even taking some time out and coming back will understandably put you on a slower track for promotion, but why should it take you off the track entirely? Because the deep assumption in the American workplace is that the fast track is the only track. Up or out.

  In fact, thinking of careers as a single race in which everyone starts at the same point and competes over the same time period is a choice. It tilts the scales in favor of the workers who can compete that way, the ones who have no caregiving responsibilities or who have a full-time caregiver at home. It also means that as a society we lose massive amounts of talent. We lose the distance runners, the athletes with the endurance, patience, fortitude, and resilience to keep going over the long haul. We lose the runners who see a different path to the finish and are willing to take it, even if it is in uncharted territory. We lose the runners who have the temperament and perspective to allow them to see beyond the race.

  WHOLE TRUTHS

  NOW LET’S LOOK AT SOME whole truths.

  You can have it all if you are committed enough to your career…and you are lucky enough never to hit a point where your carefully constructed balance between work and family topples over.

  You can have it all if you marry the right person…who is willing to defer his or her career to yours; you stay married; and your own preferences regarding how much time you are willing to spend at work remain unchanged after you have children or find yourself caring for aging parents.

  You can have it all as long as you sequence it right…as long as you succeed in having children when you planned to; you have an employer who both permits you to work part-time or on a flexible work schedule and still sees you as leadership material; or you take time out and then find a good job on a leadership track once you decide to get back in, regardless of your age.

  As I said at the outset of this chapter, the last thing I want to do is to discourage younger women from pursuing high-powered careers that will catapult them into leadership positions and thereby improve society as a whole. Without a hefty dose of realism, however, we will continue to lose talent as women are pushed off the leadership track after they have children and/or when they spend more time caring for aging parents or other relatives. We will also end up ignoring the reality of the one in three of the nation’s women who live in poverty or on the brink of it and who are frequently pushed out of a job and into despair.

  On a personal level, the trick is to balance encouragement with expectation. To be clear—to ourselves, our families, and our employers—that putting yourself forward is important at the right moment, but so is pushing back against rules, structures, attitudes, and assumptions that still support a straight-on career path and stigmatize any worker who deviates from it, deferring promotions and bigger jobs to be able to spend time with loved ones. To see the whole picture, not just the shining role models at the top, but the employees, every bit as talented and motivated, who were pushed or shut out of leadership opportunities as their lives took unexpected detours.

  Telling whole truths and seeing the whole picture is the right place to start. But we can’t do this alone. The men in our lives have their own mantras, serving up their own preferred version of the truth or simply the truths they grew up with. They too need to ask some hard questions.

  2

  HALF-TRUTHS ABOUT MEN

  Over the past five decades, feminism has opened new doors of change through the process of questioning our assumptions about women, gender, and the language, categories, and stereotypes that we cling to. It is now time to start questioning our assumptions about men.

  The three mantras that I examine here do not pop up nearly as often on the feminist radar as phrases like “You can have it all; you just can’t have it all at the same time.” But they are often pulled out as trump cards whenever discussions of women, work, and family arise. I have heard them often from men themselves, as well as from women who have absorbed these messages as the accepted order of things. The first one, “Men can’t have it all either,” immediately deflects attention away from what remains a genuine inequality between many men and many women. The second, “Children need their mother,” has taken on the sanctity of mom and apple pie, at least in the United States. How on earth could you challenge that? And the third, “A man’s job is to provide,” goes all the way back to the Bible.

  These statements are also half-truths. But determining what is true, or at least plausible, and what is a mass of sticky, biased belief—like the popcorn glued to the floor of the movie theater—starts the process of unpacking our certainties and convictions. We have to be able to see them clearly before we can begin to dislodge them.

  HALF-TRUTH: “MEN CAN’T HAVE IT ALL EITHER”

  IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, many people have criticized the entire idea of “having it all.” Some criticism came from feminists who argued that Madison Avenue had created the construct of women having it all as a way of selling stressed-out working mothers a bill of goods—literally. Rebecca Traister at
Salon proposed that we do away entirely with the phrase “having it all,” pointing out that it is a frame that inevitably makes women seem selfish and piggish, no matter how much we try to explain that all we are asking for is a career and a family too, just like men have. It is also a phrase that strikes an ugly, unfeeling note at a time when millions of people are struggling to have enough to make ends meet.

  To complicate matters further, many men are quick to claim that they don’t have it all either. The most common point made is that while women who have careers and families can’t pursue their careers as fully as they would like, men who have careers and families can’t spend as much time with their families as they would like. That is a trade-off that many men feel they have no choice but to accept.

  When I first started hearing men push back, my knee-jerk reaction was to be skeptical. Of course no one has it all, if by that we mean having everything you want and all at once. Still, the entire women’s movement was premised on the idea that men in our society have a lot more of “it” than women do; that they have far greater opportunities to flourish both as professionals and in their family roles as sons, brothers, husbands, uncles, and fathers. Indeed, in many societies around the world women still struggle for their basic human rights: to be free from violence, fear, and want; to control their bodies; and to have equal legal status to travel, learn, and pursue their dreams.

  Even in a developed, reasonably progressive country like the United States, most women still don’t have what most men have. Lilly Ledbetter began work in a Goodyear tire plant in Alabama in 1979 and discovered twenty years later that she had been paid substantially less than her fellow male managers. “I’d known from the get-go that I’d have to work longer and smarter than the men in order to prove myself. But how in the world could I have been paid less all these years?” Looking at a slip of paper that an anonymous co-worker left in her mailbox listing her salary next to those of her male colleagues, she reflected: “I’d wanted so badly to win approval, and I had done so in the eyes of most of my co-workers, who valued my hard work and loyalty—and who gave it back to me. But how dumb I’d been to think that this would counter the hostility surrounding me….Those numbers said loud and clear that it didn’t matter how hard I’d worked, how much I’d wanted to succeed and do the right thing: I’d been born the wrong sex, and that was that.” That was 1999; as of 2013, over a decade later, American women still earned only 82 percent of what men do for equal work.

  So is the claim that “men can’t have it all either” just a self-serving fiction? I continue to think that in many societies, including the United States, women are perfectly justified in wanting more of what many men do in fact have. Still, as I listened to men with an open mind, I began to understand the ways in which this view also expresses an important truth—but only a half-truth.

  Men Who Try to Have It All May Have a Harder Time than Women

  MANY MILLENNIAL MEN ARGUE THAT men and women increasingly want the same thing. A former State Department colleague whom I’ll call Steve put it this way: many men in the workplace are “struggling with the work-life balance issue and are reluctant to speak up/rebel against the conventions regarding sacrifice and long hours.” His experience has taught him that when men do speak up, they are penalized not only because of a perceived lack of commitment to their careers, but because “they are somehow not ‘macho’ enough and it works against them when it comes to promotions and career advancement.”

  This issue seems as stuck as the numbers of women at the top. Consider the experience of an employee at a public utility company who took three weeks off when his second child was born back in 1996. “Comments were made and my work wasn’t being covered….It made me feel like I wasn’t a ‘man’ if I choose to stay home and take care of the kids. This same attitude manifests when I ask to take time off so I can take the kids to the doctor.” Seventeen years later, in 2013, law professor Joan Williams wrote a piece entitled “The Daddy Dilemma” in which she summarized the conclusions of a host of academic studies: “Men face as many struggles when it comes to using flexible work policies—if not more—because child care, fairly or unfairly, is still seen as being a feminine role.”

  One of those studies found that men who requested a twelve-week leave to care for a child or elder were more likely to be demoted or downsized because they were seen as more feminine than other men. Another concluded that caregiving fathers had the highest rate of social mistreatment at work among men, chiefly because they suffered the highest rates of “masculinity harassment.” Yet a third found that, while men and women valued workplace flexibility equally, men were less likely to seek a flexible schedule if they believed (as many did) that doing so would make them appear less masculine. Overall, the share of companies that offer paternity leave actually dropped 5 percentage points from 2010 to 2014, and 20 percent of companies that are supposed to provide unpaid leave via the Family and Medical Leave Act don’t comply with the law when it comes to fathers who want time off. The annals of litigation tell similar stories. In one case, a management trainee was told straight out that he would be “cutting his own throat” if he took paternity leave.

  So it’s true that many men can reasonably say not only that they don’t have it all either, but also that at least some of them pay an even higher price than women do when they try. In the West, at least, a woman who downshifts her professional ambitions for a while may experience an identity crisis when she can no longer define herself primarily in terms of her work, but she is unlikely to face a crisis of femininity.

  The experience of many gay men underlines this point. Gauzy commercials featuring same-sex parents notwithstanding, gay men still face enormous social prejudice in their efforts to become parents and caregivers. This point was brought home to me in a blistering but justified letter in response to my Atlantic article from Scott Siegel, a former academic who now works for a start-up in San Francisco. He read me, as so many men did, as arguing that the pull of caregiving was felt only by women and indeed as saying that this pull is biological. That is much too strong a reading, but his response is still eye-opening. “You are probably not aware that your piece is being read by the gay community, especially those with children, as saying that ‘Oh, well, I don’t have those pressures because I’m not a woman—how DARE HER!’ EVERY type of caregiver, gay or straight, faces this difficulty….To say that PRIMARILY WOMEN face the pressure to ‘have it all’ is itself sexist.”

  The intensity of his response is driven by his fear that I was “giving ammunition to those groups who deny and wish to take away those rights gays and gay families have fought for and received in the last 20 years.” I would be deeply upset if my article contributed to anti-gay discrimination of any kind. But the passion with which Siegel makes his point reminds us of how hard it still is for gay men to be fully recognized as men—men who are attracted to other men, but no less men for that. And as men, they should have the same right to raise a family, to love and care for children and each other, as any woman does.

  Settling

  THE THIRD VARIATION ON THE “Men can’t have it all either” theme was articulated on the Atlantic website, in a response to my article by Andrew Cohen, a single father who describes himself as a “work-at-home dad.” He’s modest: others describe him as one of the nation’s leading legal journalists, who works for 60 Minutes and CBS Radio News. But he describes his life in a way that most working mothers I know would immediately recognize, the daily dance of “work and parenting, parenting and work.” He tries to mesh his obligations to his son, and indeed still to his parents, with the demands of his job: writing all day, overseeing homework and getting dinner on the table at night, while trying to cram in the rest of life, from laundry to love, in between.

  Cohen says that he doesn’t know any man who “has it all, or who says that he does, or who complains that he doesn’t.” When he goes out with the guys, they talk about lots of things—work, sports, women, and, yes, how they ca
n be better parents to their kids. But they don’t talk about “having it all.” Indeed, he thinks about his father, who never thought about having it all but rather about “having enough, simply being able to provide for his loved ones.”

  Does this mean that women really aim higher than men? Are they strivers rather than settlers? In the end, Andy Cohen is arguing just that. He is saying that women of my generation, at least, are simply asking for too much out of life, whereas men have learned to lower their expectations. Millennials too, in Cohen’s view, possess a wisdom about their own limits and the limits of life and luck that their elders—meaning my generation—lack.

  But hang on. Isn’t reaching for the seemingly impossible an all-American tradition? The boys I grew up with were pushed to aim as high as possible. Now that women are striving for what many men had and still have—a high-powered career and a family too—it seems disingenuous to say that they simply want too much.

  True and Not True

  THE CLAIM THAT “MEN CAN’T have it all either” is complicated. On the one hand, it is important for women to see that many men, today and for decades past, have accepted what they understand to be a role requiring them to trade time at work for time with loved ones. A man may have a family and a high-powered career, but many men wish they were able to spend much more time with that family.

  It is also true, of course, that individual men have made trade-offs at the expense of their careers. Perusing a biography of Colgate Darden, a former governor of Virginia and the namesake of the University of Virginia’s business school, I was struck by Darden’s explanation of his refusal to run for the Senate in 1946, notwithstanding strong public support for his candidacy, on the grounds that he would never see his family. Jim Steinberg, a deputy secretary of state, and Bill Lynn, a deputy secretary of defense, both stepped down from their jobs after two years in order to be available for their children too.