Faculty hiring committees at law schools look at hundreds of résumés every year, asking a small number of people to make presentations and give interviews. The committee then deliberates about whether to hire the candidate. Early on in my career, when I served on the committee at the University of Chicago Law School, I recall one of my colleagues telling me after a particularly intense round of deliberations, “Everyone tries to hire himself.”
What he meant was that each of us believes that we deserve to be on the faculty, so when we see candidates who have similar career paths to our own, we assume consciously or subconsciously that they deserve to be where we are. Faculty members who followed the traditional path of top grades, the presidency of the law review, and a Supreme Court clerkship not surprisingly look for those credentials as the minimum bar that a prospective candidate must meet. Faculty members who followed an unconventional path, as I did (mixed grades, no clerkship or law review, but a Ph.D. in another discipline and a demonstrated aptitude for scholarship), look for creative thinkers and unusual career profiles.
Hiring patterns like these are hardly restricted to law schools. Perhaps the best way to understand calcified work patterns is to recognize that the white men who got to the top by working around the clock and sacrificing their own time with their loved ones inevitably believe that the people below them who behave as they did must be the best candidates for advancement. They are thus highly suspicious, if not downright disbelieving, of data that show the benefits of working less, working differently, or even taking time out and not working at all for a while.
Joan Williams makes this point harshly but directly: “If you’ve lived a life where holidays are a nuisance, where you’ve missed your favorite uncle’s funeral and your children’s childhoods, in a culture that conflates manly heroism with long hours, it’s going to take more than a few regressions to convince you it wasn’t really necessary, after all, for your work to devour you.”
I’m not sure that it’s necessary to look at the many men and far fewer women who have made it to the top and rub their noses in what they have missed. Better to acknowledge the sacrifices they have made as prisoners of their time and cultural norms while asking them to envision a different world for their children. Better still to understand that for the majority of men, working hard was exercising their family responsibilities as they understood them and that they developed their own ideas of being a good man accordingly. As the women’s movement gained steam, we focused on being allowed to do that work ourselves, helping to make a fetish of income-generating work as a foundation of self-worth.
Now it’s up to all of us, women and men alike, to make the next big push toward equality between men and women. We’ll have to start by changing how we think.
Part II
Changing Lenses
My friends Sarah and Emily are both psychiatrists who married seven years ago and now have four-year-old twins. Although they love being mothers, they also both love their work and have flourishing careers. Twins are a handful, of course, and even though Sarah and Emily can afford to hire a caregiver to help out, one or both of them needs a more flexible work schedule or part-time work to be there for sick days, school holidays, snow days, and emergencies great and small with either the children or any paid caregiver.
How should they divide responsibilities between caregiving and breadwinning? Who should throttle back and work less to have more time at home? Should they both rearrange their practices or change jobs to work more flexible schedules? Or should one of them stop working to be a full-time caregiver while the other is the full-time breadwinner?
What criteria should they use to decide? Which one of them earns the most, or which enjoys her work the most? Which one has the best prospects for promotion? Which one is more comfortable with a flexible work schedule and a slower career trajectory, or which one’s workplace is the most flexible and accommodating of caregiving responsibilities?
Sarah and Emily decided that they will both keep working, but Sarah, who is older and earns more, has continued to work full-time while Emily cut back her practice so that she works three days a week. Their situation is not unique. My male friends in same-sex marriages tell me that they face exactly the same questions sorting out roles, all because of the absence of default rules. Gender stereotypes, no matter how much we may try to transcend them, provide those defaults. The woman starts from her “natural” position as caregiver and the man from his “natural” position as breadwinner; they negotiate, implicitly or explicitly, from those baselines. But in a relationship of two men or two women, what are the starting points? Both are breadwinners; both are equally potential caregivers.
That is the lens that same-sex couples offer the rest of us. It is no longer possible to assume, even at the subconscious level, that one member of the couple will be better at raising children and running a household and the other will excel at earning income and climbing a career ladder. There is only negotiation between two people who have different talents, desires, and obligations and who love each other, their children, their parents, and other family members.
Considering these choices invites heterosexual couples to think about the division of labor in the same gender-neutral way that same-sex couples do. It also lays bare another fact and fissure in our society: the person in a couple who stays home will be valued less than the person who goes to the office. Again, when gender is removed from the equation, it’s no longer possible to insist that discrimination against caregivers is just another way of describing discrimination against women. The truth is that we value people of either gender who invest in themselves more than we value people who invest in others.
I said in the last chapter that the women’s problem well-meaning executives want to solve is actually a care problem, a problem of not making it possible for workers with family responsibilities to work more flexibly and still stay on a leadership track. But the problem of care—or more precisely, of not valuing care—is much bigger and deeper than the challenges facing companies who want to promote women.
Fifty years ago middle-class women stayed home, cared for their families, and were manifestly unequal to their breadwinning husbands. To make them equal, we liberated women to be breadwinners too and fought for equality in the workplace. But along the way, we left caregiving behind, valuing it less and less as a meaningful and important human endeavor. Plenty of pathologies have resulted: mommy wars, distorted labor markets, shameful numbers of children in poverty, narrower options for men, and a continued advantage for all the male executives with a spouse at home.
The women’s movement challenged women and men alike and changed our thinking profoundly. But we are only halfway home. These next chapters reveal the work left undone, outlining the intellectual and emotional challenges we still have to meet and conquer.
4
COMPETITION AND CARE
Today, many feminists focus their attention on a single problem. It’s not quite the glass ceiling, or even the “sticky floor,” a term coined in the early 1990s by sociologist Catherine White Berheide to mean women who are trapped in low-wage jobs without much hope of professional advancement. Women have broken through the corporate ranks in most industries and professions; they have risen in politics, universities, foundations, and many other leadership roles. Instead, the problem is the Great Stall, the barely perceptible increase in the percentage of women leaders in all these institutions since the early 1990s. We seem to be stuck at 15 percent, rising to 20 percent in good industries and falling to 5 percent in bad ones.
This stall galvanizes many feminist scholars and public figures today. Fifty years after the second wave of the feminist movement roared into life, girls are raised to believe they can be anything they want to be. They pour out of top schools with great credentials and flood into the workforce. But the growing numbers of talented women who start out on professional career tracks just make it more frustrating to see how few actually make it to the top.
I too have been primarily focused on this problem for much of my adult life, and indeed I wrote my Atlantic article to address this specific issue. Since then, however, I began to realize the ways in which focusing primarily on women at the top, while understandable from the perspective of wanting women to have access to the levers of economic, political, and social power, creates a distorted lens. It is as if we were to diagnose a disease by examining the symptoms in only one part of the body.
If the ultimate goal is the real equality of men and women in American society, then it’s vital that we look at the situation of all women.
A COMMON PATTERN
WIDENING THE LENS BEYOND THE ranks of women with professional careers reveals an unlovely symmetry. We see far too few women at the top, yes, but we also see far too many women at the bottom. The statistics are equally jarring in both directions. Women hold less than 15 percent of executive officer positions in Fortune 500 companies and 62 percent of minimum-wage jobs. As a result, one in three adult women is living in poverty or just on the edge of poverty. For single mothers, the picture is particularly bleak. Almost two-thirds of them are working in dead-end, poorly compensated jobs without flexibility or benefits.
When we broaden our definition of the problem in this way, the solutions offered to help advance women in recent years (including some of my own) are radically incomplete. It just isn’t plausible that too many women are at the bottom of American society because they are not trying hard enough, are too perfectionist, or lack confidence. Those factors may well play an important role in holding back educated women with great initial career prospects, but they cannot explain why single mothers continue to fall through the cracks and end up in poverty.
It’s possible, of course, that women at the top and at the bottom simply inhabit different spheres, with different explanations for what’s holding them back or keeping them down. British economist Alison Wolf points out that for much of history women essentially shared the same fate. “Elite or poor, Irish or Indian, marriage and child-bearing were women’s necessary aspirations. You married well, or badly. You bore living children to support you, or did not. On those realities, as a female, your whole life hinged,” she writes in her book The XX Factor. Today, she argues, women’s life experiences have diverged dramatically, such that “womanhood” is no longer a category that defines a common experience.
I don’t challenge Wolf’s data, but in looking at the stark facts of women at the top and at the bottom, a common pattern in their seemingly disparate experiences begins to emerge. Once we see it, it’s like looking at an impressionist painting composed only of little dots of color that suddenly becomes comprehensible when we step back a bit. From the right vantage point, the dots fall into patterns that reveal a recognizable scene, a luncheon party or a field of flowers.
The key to that pattern lies in two complementary human drives: competition, the impulse to pursue our self-interest in a world in which others are pursuing theirs, and care, the impulse to put others first. These are the two great motivators of men and women alike. Anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and now neuroscientists study the ways in which different impulses in our brains and the resulting behaviors have allowed the human race to survive and progress. We fight with one another and strive to outdo one another in ways that push innovation and change, but we are also social animals who need relationships and human connection to thrive. Indeed, anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy observes that the capacity for caring about strangers is so unique to humans that “along with language and symbolic thought this capacity for compassion is quintessentially human.” Indeed, it is “what…defines us as human.”
Suppose then that what unites all women is the struggle to combine competition and care in a system that rewards one and penalizes the other? Yet if they are two equally valuable and necessary human drives, why should that be? It is no more justifiable to value the production of income over the provision of care than it is to value white over black, straight over gay, or men over women. Competition produces money. But care produces people.
Think about it. Countless women have described the ways that they became invisible the minute they left paid work to take care of their children or other family members. Sociologist Pamela Stone quotes Maeve, a 52-year-old former lawyer, on this point: “It was like all of a sudden I didn’t exist….You know, six months ago I was working in the U.S. Attorney’s office doing all this hot stuff. My name was in The New York Times….Now I’m nobody.”
“Nobody.” In other words, if all you do is care for other people, an activity just as if not more essential to the survival of the human race as earning an income, you lose your very identity as a person of value.
It is this devaluing of and discrimination against caregiving that provides the common thread linking the experiences of women at the top and at the bottom. If a young female lawyer or banker on a promising career track decides to leave early every day to be home with her kids for dinner, work part-time, or take time out for a while to be a full-time caregiver, she is quickly knocked out of the game—meaning the competition for the top. And if she takes time out completely, her time spent caregiving is a black mark on her résumé going forward, a hole that she will vainly try to cover over or explain away when and if she tries to re-enter the job market.
Now consider the woman at the bottom. She is likely to be a single mother who has no choice but to be the sole breadwinner and caregiver for her family. Half of single moms in the United States make less than $25,000 a year. Compared to single parents in other high-income countries, American single parents have the highest poverty rate and the weakest income-support system.
Statistics like these provide an abstract summary of the lives of large numbers of people. But let’s bring it home. Ranie Sherr is a single mom of two in South Scranton, Pennsylvania, who makes minimum wage. Because of childcare issues and a fall on the ice during the long winter of 2013, Sherr missed four days of work in a single week. “My next check is only going to be for 7.5 hours,” Sherr told The Times-Tribune of Scranton. “I don’t know how I’m going to make ends meet.”
María, a single mom in Providence, Rhode Island, worked in a factory and earned $7.40 an hour. If she missed a shift because her son was sick, they would take her off work for two weeks, and then they’d give her fewer hours when they finally did let her return. She told researchers at the Urban Institute, “There was no flexibility even to go to the bathroom. You can’t go to the bathroom more than twice a day, and they yell at you, ‘Where were you?!’ ‘Move it!’—it’s incredible. And they watch you when you go to the bathroom and they follow you to the bathroom. ‘Move it! Move it!’ ‘Are you tired? You can’t be tired here!’ ” She lost that job and, subsequently, her childcare arrangement for nine months. She found a new job, with better bosses, though she still had low pay and limited flexibility to care for her son.
As a society, we value Ranie’s and María’s breadwinning. Indeed, the entire reform of U.S. welfare programs under President Bill Clinton was designed to insist that the beneficiaries of what had been called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which was overwhelmingly aid to single mothers, go to work in return for their benefits. Fair enough, if you believe, as I do, in the dignity and value of work. But why don’t we believe in the equal dignity and value of caring for others? Particularly when those “others” are our own future citizens? President Clinton intended the new welfare work requirements to be coupled with investments in child care that would allow women to work. Yet today we don’t provide affordable daycare, early-education, and after-school programs that take up the caregiving slack. We don’t provide paid leave that any worker can use when a child is sick. The result is that a mother with dependent children must patch together an unstable and unreliable network of caregivers in ways that sharply hamper her ability to succeed at her job and climb out of poverty.
For middle-class families, the struggle to balance caregiving and breadwinning is a dai
ly grind and often the tipping point that drives them into poverty and bankruptcy court. In The Two Income-Trap, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi describe how a divorce sent Gayle Pritchard, a college-educated HR professional, into bankruptcy. She couldn’t afford to make mortgage payments on the family’s modest home on her $46,000-a-year salary alone, and her ex-husband was not required to pay much in the way of child support. Pritchard’s story is all too common; indeed, “Motherhood is now the single best indicator that an unmarried middle-class woman will end up bankrupt.” (emphasis added) Those mothers continue to pay the price long after their children are grown. Ann Crittenden notes that because unpaid caregivers do not earn Social Security credits or have access to other parts of the social safety net, motherhood is “the single biggest risk factor for poverty in old age.”
Privileged women who can afford to take time out or choose more flexible schedules to fit in caregiving may give up promotions and the shining aspirations that led them through college and professional school and into the workforce. Poor women who are both breadwinners and caregivers find themselves in far more serious straits, wondering how they are going to feed their families. They are often giving up on any hope of escaping the poverty they grew up in and creating better lives for their children. Without minimizing the differences in these women’s lives, they all pay a price for having loved ones who need care.
Not valuing caregiving is the taproot, the deeper problem that gives rise to distortion and discrimination in multiple areas of American society. When we open our eyes and change our lenses to focus on competition and care rather than women and work, we can see new solutions and new coalitions that can open the door to progress and change. Care can provide a new political banner under which all women can unite.
Unfinished Business Page 9