Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  In fact, anthropologists like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy point out that in early human groupings both men and women looked after the offspring collectively. In the book Sex at Dawn, a psychologist and a psychiatrist look deep into the evolutionary, anthropological, and sociological research and find that hunter-gatherers lived in entirely egalitarian societies, where childcare was generalized, food was shared, and sex was nonmonogamous, not because they were utopian romantics, but because “it works on the most practical levels.”

  Economist Paul Seabright looks at men’s and women’s differing sexual strategies back to the Pleistocene era, starting from the abundance of sperm and the scarcity of eggs. That basic asymmetry means that “women’s sexual psychology has been shaped by the need to be selective in their reactions to men, just as men’s has been shaped by the need to be persistent in their approaches to women.” But this biologically dictated dance of cooperation and conflict is consistent with a wide range of sexual behaviors that fly in the face of what we so often consider “natural.”

  In short, we have lots of primal urges, men and women alike. Which ones come out on top has just as much to do with economics and society as biology. And, as any of the world’s top biologists will tell you, we still have much to discover about the history of our species’ male-female relationships and interactions. Our body of knowledge, at this point, is far from complete, so anyone who claims to know what is “natural” is simply revealing his or her own biases.

  Who knows what we might find if we look a little harder and cast aside our preconceptions?

  MUST MONEY STILL MAKE THE MAN?

  A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, I had breakfast with a very successful banker and philanthropist, a woman ten to fifteen years older than I who is divorced. She was blunt about the ways in which men cannot handle their partner’s success but argued that they simply will not own up publicly to the way they feel about their wives outearning them because the truth is not politically correct.

  In the mid-1980s, journalist Bebe Moore Campbell conducted more than one hundred interviews with men and women in two-career couples in which the wife’s career had taken off, as well as with many therapists counseling couples in similar situations. The result was a book entitled Successful Women, Angry Men. She found plenty of husbands of successful career women who were outwardly very supportive of their wive’s careers but were inwardly anxious about the shifting power dynamics in their marriage. One vice president for a multinational energy company summed up the fears of many: “If my wife didn’t need me for my money, she didn’t need me.”

  Ah, but that was thirty years ago! Sadly, not much has changed. According to a 2011 study, “Men’s breadwinning is still so culturally mandated that when it is absent, both men and women are more likely to find that the marital partnership does not deserve to continue.” Andy and I know many professional couples, a number of whom we met in grad school when both the men and the women had equal career prospects. Today we know only a handful in which the wife outearns the husband. Moreover, Andy says that if he makes a comment about how I outearn him, many people—especially women—will shift uneasily and almost try to correct him, as if he had made a self-deprecating remark.

  Perhaps it is just the discomfort of talking about what any of us earn, a subject that, at least when I grew up in Virginia, was as taboo as religion or politics. But both Andy and I think it’s more than that. His acknowledgment of what should be an obvious fact, given that I was a dean when he was a professor and am now the president of an organization, makes his listeners uncomfortable in ways that simply would not happen if I made a comment about how my husband was the principal breadwinner in the family. He’s not shy about it; in his view he got lucky! But as a society we still have a long way to go.

  Sara Blakely, the billionaire founder of Spanx, took the stage at the Women in the World Summit in New York in 2013 and told the story of how several of her boyfriends ended up being scared off by her financial success. She went on to explain that it took her a long time to tell the man who is now her husband about her fortune, waiting until shortly before their wedding date, and concluded by saying how relieved she was when he took it in stride.

  Blakely’s story confirms the point I am making, which is that money and masculinity are still deeply intertwined. In the end, however, she obviously did find her man—a man secure enough to marry her. Marrying a billionaire may not seem like a particularly brave thing to do, but the men who are willing to break the barriers of traditional masculine roles have the same kind of courage that pioneering feminists did when they pushed their way into the all-male preserves of business and law.

  THE COURAGE TO CARE

  RYAN PARK WRITES, “DURING MY time as a stay-at-home dad, I was dismayed by the novelty of my choice.” He reports that as he took his daughter to libraries, parks, and playgrounds, he could “go weeks without seeing another man between the ages of 5 and 70 during the weekday working hours.” Worse, the mothers he encountered assumed that he must not actually be home with his daughter by choice; rather, it had to be the result of not being able to find a job. Over time, this assumption that he must “be a professional failure” got to him, no matter how hard he tried to resist it. It is in fact true that more than half of American stay-at-home dads either have a disability or couldn’t find a job, which means that the men who do choose this path voluntarily are all the more admirable.

  As in every other kind of behavior change, it turns out that the social network makes a huge difference here. Andy was strongly influenced by his dissertation supervisor, Robert Keohane, who is one of the leading political scientists of his generation and a close friend. Bob left Stanford to go to Brandeis when his wife, Nannerl Keohane, became president of Wellesley and later left Harvard to go to Duke when she became the first woman president of Duke. It is impossible to know Bob without seeing his enormous pride in Nan’s big jobs shine through. Bob has been a role model for Andy in the same way that Nan has been a role model for me.

  The chain continues. One of Andy’s cousins is an actor, musician, and artist in Los Angeles who took on the primary caregiver role for his two children while his wife brought in most of the income. When I asked him whether he felt comfortable with that decision, he acknowledged that the social pressures could be tough, but he noted that he had always looked up to Andy and so figured that if Andy was cool in that role, he could be too.

  In short, men need role models to be comfortable making the choice to put their families first, particularly role models who are willing to use their alpha male status to change the definition of an alpha male. Mohamed El-Erian resigned as CEO of PIMCO, an investment management firm, in large part because he felt as if he was missing his daughter’s many milestones. He took on several advisory positions instead to give him the flexibility “to experience with my daughter more of those big and little moments that make up each day.” Similarly, Max Schireson, the former CEO of MongoDB, a database company, announced he was quitting his job because he wanted to be more present for his three kids. His resignation was accompanied by a blog post, in which he wrote:

  I recognize that by writing this I may be disqualifying myself from some future CEO role. Will that cost me tens of millions of dollars someday? Maybe. Life is about choices. Right now, I choose to spend more time with my family and am confident that I can continue to have a meaningful and rewarding work life while doing so.

  These men are in rarefied positions, but, like Hollywood fathers, they can have a wide impact. Men somewhat further down the economic ladder are looking at their options and making similar decisions—decisions that women have been making for decades. Rob Boland, who was a senior VP at Fidelity Investments, and his wife, Beth, who was a partner at the law firm Mintz Levin, realized something had to give with two big careers and three small kids. So Rob took a less demanding job, and then two years later became a stay-at-home dad. According to The Boston Globe, Boland’s son told his pediatrician, “The happiest day of my life…wa
s when my dad came home from work and told me that he was going to stay home and take care of us from then on.”

  If men whom other men respect can handle a high-powered wife who brings in a larger salary or can step back from their own big jobs to spend more time with their families, those other men will follow suit. Men who are strong enough to take risks, break the mold, and prove themselves in new roles can define a new frontier. After all, the “man’s world” that American women still experience is actually a world shaped by and for a relatively small number of privileged, educated, heterosexual, white alpha males, a group less and less reflective of American men as a whole. It’s up to other men to make that world their own.

  LIFE LESSONS

  BRONNIE WARE, AN AUSTRALIAN BLOGGER who has worked in palliative care for years and written a book entitled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, writes that the regret she heard most often, from men and women, was “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” The second was: “I wish I didn’t work so hard,” which she said “came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship.”

  Old age reveals important truths. But why is this so hard? Why is it that so many men only realize what they have missed at the end of their lives?

  Ryan Park gets it as a young man. Writing about his choice to spend as much time as possible with his daughter while he could, he says, “My deepest fear is that, decades from now, I will look back at the heart of my life and realize I made the wrong choices in favor of work.” One of his friends, a surgeon, sees the fragility of life every day. As he told Park, “I’ve seen too many 30- or 40-something fathers rushed into the O.R. after a car crash and never get the chance to say goodbye to their young children….You have to focus on what is important while you can.”

  President Obama, for one, agrees. In his words,

  Everything else is unfulfilled if we fail at family, if we fail at that responsibility. I know that when I am on my deathbed someday, I will not be thinking about any particular legislation I passed; I will not be thinking about a policy I promoted; I will not be thinking about the speech I gave, I will not be thinking about the Nobel Prize I received. I will be thinking about that walk I took with my daughters. I’ll be thinking about a lazy afternoon with my wife. I’ll be thinking about sitting around the dinner table and seeing them happy and healthy and knowing that they were loved. And I’ll be thinking about whether I did right by all of them.

  That’s man enough for me.

  7

  LET IT GO

  Like many people, I loved the movie Frozen. My boys are a little old for it, however, so I have to admit that during one of my many long plane flights I watched it happily on my own. When I got to the theme song “Let It Go,” sung by one of the movie’s two heroines, who has decided to let go of all the suffocating expectations about how a princess should behave and finally use her long-suppressed magic powers, I wanted to cheer.

  This chapter embraces that song’s message of liberation—with a twist. Women not only have to let go of society’s traditional expectations about who a woman should be and what she should do. We also have to let go of our own expectations about who a man should be and what he is and is not good at.

  TURNING THE SPOTLIGHT ON OURSELVES

  VIRTUALLY ALL THE WOMEN I know and most of the women in my audiences have deeply embedded stereotypes about men in the home. I certainly indulge them myself. I often laugh with other women about “male looking”: that phenomenon when a man opens a cabinet in the kitchen, stares blankly straight ahead, and then yells, “Where’s the peanut butter?” Typically it’s right in front of him. I’ve also often said that “my husband believes in Santa Claus,” because as far as he’s concerned Christmas just magically appears, stockings and all. With an audience of women, this line never fails to get a knowing chuckle.

  A certain amount of gender teasing is completely fine and funny. Given that our household is three men and me, we all indulge in plenty of eye rolling about male and female differences. I truly don’t get a lot of humor that both my husband and sons find hilarious, almost invariably involving bodily functions. And they are often bewildered by female behavior that seems perfectly obvious to me. Overall, I am happy to acknowledge and embrace gender differences.

  But I’m not talking about difference here. I’m talking about presumed superiority: the ways in which a majority of American women actually think we are better than men in the entire domestic realm, from kids to kitchens. About the things we don’t actually want to give up. And about the roles many of us want men to play and the roles we are willing to let them play.

  Consider the following scenario. You walk into your office on your first day of work and your boss, a man, says, “I have evolved biologically to do this job better than you can, but I’m going to let you try. To be sure it’s done right, however, I will leave you detailed instructions for every individual task. And when I travel, I will call in every couple of hours to make sure you are following those instructions to the letter.”

  Most women in such a situation would complain immediately to human resources and perhaps start considering a lawsuit. But when I describe this hypothetical scene to audiences of women, the laughter of recognition begins to ripple along the rows by the time I get to “I will leave you detailed instructions.” They know exactly what I’m talking about. This is precisely the way the majority of us treat our husbands or male partners when we leave them in charge of the children. For every woman who remains frustrated by her husband’s description of an evening with the kids when she is out as “babysitting,” another would not dream of leaving the house without prepared meals in the fridge and long lists of what Dad needs to do. When I point out our own double standards in this regard, double standards we have long ago fiercely rejected in the workplace, I see a number of women looking slightly shamefaced. But inevitably at least one woman in the audience will raise her hand and say what many others are thinking:

  “But they really don’t know how to do it.”

  “Do you have any idea what the house would look like if I weren’t there?”

  “My husband would feed them pizza every night.”

  I laugh and agree. But then I point out that I have spent many years in my career wondering why men seem to think that their way of getting work done is the best or only way. The cult of face time; the endless sports metaphors; the assumption that bigger is (almost) always better. I often have a different way of doing things, and who are my male colleagues to say I’m wrong, as long as the work gets done and done well? The first round of pioneering feminists had to accept the roles and routines of office work on male terms; increased equality today means that women are increasingly free to do it our way. Why shouldn’t men have that same liberty and equality at home?

  Men are certainly aware of a widespread female presumption that we really do know better when it comes to home and kids. In an article in New York magazine, therapist Barbara Kass calls many of us out on this account: “So many women want to control their husbands’ parenting. ‘Oh, do you have the this? Did you do the that? Don’t forget that she needs this. And make sure she naps.’ Sexism is internalized.” On Huffington Post, dad blogger Aaron Gouveia notes it’s mostly the moms “who claim to be overworked and desperate for dads to do more” who also criticize dads for not doing things right when they do step up. “And by right, I mean their way. I’ve seen dads criticized and made fun of for how they dress the baby [and] for how they feed the baby.”

  Still, for the sake of argument, let’s assume for the moment that the average woman you know is better at managing all the household tasks and childcare than the average man. Now ask yourself why that might be so. Both practice and confidence come to mind.

  Think about the household division of duties in areas where gender stereotypes don’t necessarily operate. Doing the taxes, for instance. Did your mom or your dad d
o them? In my household my dad did them, but I did them the first time Andy and I filed a joint return because I had a bigger salary and had been doing mine before we were married. I did them once, then became the person who knew what to do, a competence that inevitably grew over the years such that it would make no sense for him to take it over now. Similarly, he is the trip planner. His father always planned every detail of his family’s trips, so he planned our first vacation and every vacation since. But it could quite easily have worked out the other way. The point is that if you gather the knowledge to do it once, you become the designee for that task, a status that only expands the more knowledge you gain and more expert you become.

  Now transpose that pattern to children. In families with biological children, the mother bears the child and typically breastfeeds. That means she instantly begins gaining competence, even if at first she’s having a whole new experience. Babies don’t come with instruction manuals. Confidence—or lack of confidence—are self-fulfilling prophecies, as we know from social psychologist Claude Steele’s work on priming. Steele and his disciples have shown over and over again that reinforcing positive stereotypes a fraction of a second before challenging a student to do a task produces better outcomes, while reinforcing negative stereotypes leads to lower performance.

  In Steele’s book, Whistling Vivaldi, he discusses how stereotypes can be both cultural and situational. For example, women, blacks, and Latinos are told they are bad at math, and so they don’t do as well in math overall as Asians and men. But Steele showed that “stereotype threat” can be situational, too. He did a study where researchers told one group of white male Stanford students with high math ability that they were taking a difficult eighteen-question test on which “Asians tend to do better than whites.” A control group of white male students was told nothing. The results were stark. The white men who were told that Asians do better on the test performed three questions worse than the students who were told nothing at all, the difference between an A and a B grade.