Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  The tour of duty concept fits perfectly with the idea of planning your career in terms of intervals of different intensity: these tours will only work if you can either get back in or ramp back up after a down interval. I see an enormous talent pool of women in their late forties through their late fifties coming out of just such a down interval, ready and waiting to throw themselves into full-time work again as their kids leave the house. Men will increasingly need and want those options as well.

  My sister-in-law Laurie is a great example. She was a magna cum laude graduate and thesis prize winner at Princeton who made senior vice president at a major auction house by her early thirties. When she and my brother Hoke had children, one of whom has moderate special needs, they felt that it was critical for one of them to be at home full-time. Given the travel necessary for Hoke’s job and the income it generates, the responsibility fell to her. In the conventional narrative, Laurie “sacrificed her career for her family.” In fact, she’s a woman in her early fifties who has combined an impressive professional track record early in her career with logistical abilities, management skills, and personal resilience, all strengthened by her work as a mother. She’s ready for her next tour of duty.

  The military—where the term and concept of tour of duty originates—is itself finding ways to let its members step out and step back in, precisely because they spend an enormous amount of time, effort, and expense in training their employees and thus suffer enormously if they cannot retain them. Beginning in 2009, the U.S. Navy launched a program called the Career Intermission Pilot Program (CIPP) to determine, in navy speak, “if retention in critical skills sets can be enhanced by permitting temporary inactivation from active duty and providing greater flexibility in career paths of service members.” The program provides for a onetime temporary transition from active duty to the reserves for a period of up to three years, with a means for “seamless return to active duty.”

  The air force is planning to launch its own CIPP in 2015, hoping that with their program they’ll be able to retain more female airmen. “Some women leave the Air Force because they want to start a family,” air force personnel chief Lt. Gen. Samuel Cox told the Air Force Times. “So why don’t we have a program that allows them, in some cases, to be able to separate from the Air Force for a short period of time, get their family started, and then come back in?” Exactly.

  In the civilian sector, McKinsey has a program that allows its consultants to take up to ten weeks per year away from the office between projects. It’s called Take Time, and employees have used it to travel, take care of family, and embrace hobbies. These programs are just a few years old, so it’s hard to know what the long-term effects are going to be. However, McKinsey has reported that in the near term, Take Time has helped with employee retention and recruitment. Take Time participants report that they return to work feeling refreshed and engaged, instead of burnt out and bitter. These are baby steps in terms of the enormous need for greater career customization on the part of millions of American workers, but they are steps in the right direction.

  It’s still up to you, however, to start thinking now about what might happen later. A frequent comment from young women I meet goes something like this: “When I read your Atlantic article I thought it was interesting but not really relevant to my life. But I just got married [or ‘we just had our first child’], and suddenly I get it. I’m trying to figure out what to do and it’s a lot harder than I expected.”

  I sympathize, believe me. But don’t wait. Assume that if you are expecting to have a family, or if your parents are sick or aging, you will face times when it will be very hard to focus intensely on your work. Start imagining the kinds of trade-offs you may need to plan for. Here are a few hypotheticals to help you anticipate what life likely has in store, compiled from actual situations a wonderful mother I know has faced:

  • Your child has a fever of 101 for the third day in a row. The doctor says it will run its course, but daycare won’t take him back until his fever has been below 100 for twenty-four hours. You have used up all your sick time for other childhood illnesses and doctor appointments and have no family in the area to help. Your partner has a major work presentation and can’t stay home either. What do you do?

  • The school play this year takes place during school hours and conflicts with a meeting you have been told you are required to attend. Your partner is going to be out of town. If you don’t go, your child will likely be the only kid with no parent there. What do you do?

  • You haven’t slept more than one or two hours a night for the past three months due to your colicky newborn. How will you/can you still handle the demands of your job?

  • You have to leave at four P.M. to pick up your child from daycare on time. Everyone else in the office works at least till six P.M. and resents you because they feel you are a slacker they have to cover for. You fear you will be let go, or at least never promoted. At best, it is not at all a collegial work environment. You work in an unusual field, and jobs are scarce. What will you do?

  • To cover the school summer vacation between kindergarten and first grade, you have enrolled your daughter in a highly regarded summer day camp. However, she is unable to handle such a big transition and is acting out. The camp director has told you she is too disruptive and cannot stay. At this point, all the other quality camps are full and you are not sure she could handle them anyway. What will you do?

  HAVE THAT CONVERSATION WITH YOUR PARTNER

  AFTER I GAVE A SPEECH to a roomful of eight hundred women and men—mostly women—at a conference hosted by the Women’s Leadership Center in northern Virginia, a young woman asked me about my claim that women who wanted to be at the top of their professions while also having a family would likely need a supportive spouse on the home front in the same way that male leaders do. She asked what to do if she and her boyfriend both wanted high-flying careers. As I began to answer, her boyfriend came over, saying that he certainly wanted to listen as well. I said that they might both be able to reach the top of their chosen professions and have a family, but not at the same time; that they would have to recognize that trade-offs and indeed sacrifices would be likely at various points; and that they should discuss how they would plan to make those choices up front. I could tell it was not a message that either of them particularly wanted to hear, but you can’t run away from it.

  In the past far too many couples simply never had that conversation. They put off planning before marriage or having a child, and then, when the time came, as it so often did, that they realized their children—or their aging parents—were going to make it impossible for both of them to travel and work with the intensity their careers demanded, it was already too late. It may be hard for young men and women to believe, but many of the couples even of my generation, coming out of school in the 1980s, pledged themselves to full equality. We were determined to create different gender patterns than the ones we grew up with. But once children arrived, most of us discovered that we had to make choices; the choices we ended up making systematically disadvantaged the women’s careers.

  Now it’s your turn. You are a young woman in a relationship. He says he fully supports your career, and he was raised by a working mother, so of course he believes in full equality. What more do you need? (This hypothetical applies equally if you’re a young man in a relationship with another young man or a young woman in a relationship with another woman, although lesbian couples seem to have a somewhat easier time with the division of labor.)

  As it turns out, you need to get much more specific—less about the little things than the big ones. In 1970, the feminist writer Alix Kates Shulman wrote a now-famous essay called “The Marriage Agreement,” which stipulated that all household and childcare tasks should be shared between Shulman and her husband equally. It listed all the details of their shared responsibility, down to the most picayune, like brushing their children’s hair. Forty-odd years later, Slate writer and academic Rebecca Onion wrot
e an essay in 2014 about how she would only consider motherhood if she and her husband made a Shulman-style agreement. But hair brushing is far less of a problem than travel planning.

  Start by being as honest as possible with yourself and each other about your deepest career aspirations. If you could wave a magic wand, where would you ideally find yourself in twenty or thirty years? Whom do you wish you could be? How ambitious are you? What will you consider a life well lived? What life goals do you have other than career success?

  Then ask yourselves about your family plans. Do you want children? Do you—as is often the case with men—simply assume that you will have them someday? Do you imagine yourselves caring for your parents when they reach that stage of life?

  If you see caring for loved ones in your future, particularly for children, and you both aspire to careers that will require you to work largely on someone else’s time and at someone else’s direction, here are some scenarios you should consider along with some questions you should ask each other:

  • I come home all excited because my boss has told me that he really thinks I am leadership material and he wants to promote me. In my company, however, the top managers have all had line experience in many different parts of the company across the country and around the world. My next job will certainly require a move. Will you move with me? Even if that means taking a step down or sideways in your career? And when we move, will you be willing to reweave the fabric of our own and our children’s lives in terms of schools, friends, doctors, and activities while I try to get a handle on my new job?

  • We both come home all excited because we each see a fabulous promotion on the horizon. Your boss has had a similar conversation with you, but if we move for my new job, you will not be able to work in another branch of the same firm and your boss really hates the idea of your working remotely. Will you defer your promotion so I can take mine?

  • If I take a job that requires lots of travel, will you be the available parent for everything from teacher conferences to snow and sick days, not to mention after-school activities requiring parental involvement? Will you be the lone dad among the moms on the school trip? Will you still love and support me when the kids are crying and the house is a mess and I walk out the door to head for the airport?

  • Are you comfortable hiring a great deal of outside help to raise our children? If not, are you willing to move to my family’s hometown (or your family’s) so that we have grandparents and siblings nearby to help make it work?

  • If one of our children has special needs, or a particularly stormy adolescence, or would be more likely to flourish with more parental attention, will you consider being the parent who downshifts to be at home more? Will you still think I’m a good parent too, even though I am providing more cash than care? Will you believe that we can seesaw up and down over the course of our marriage and that I will support you when your turn comes?

  • Can you handle it if I earn more than you do and have a more conventionally successful career? (This is particularly true if it is a woman asking this question of a man, but it is relevant for many gay couples as well, and for women who have never thought about being financially dependent in any way.) Are you secure enough to accept the denigrating remarks that are likely to come your way from other men, but even more frequently from women, in-laws, and even your own parents?

  You probably won’t have answers to all of these questions now, but it’s essential to have the conversation to focus both your minds on the real issues and trade-offs that combining career and family are likely to entail. If he says that of course he wants you to have your career, but that he cannot actually imagine deferring his own advancement or even changing jobs so that you can reach for the stars, you may want to think again. At the very least, you will both learn something important about yourselves and each other.

  Once again, you can of course point to the tiny handful of couples who have equally high-powered careers and seemingly perfect children, but surely you should also consider the millions of women who started out on an equal track with their mates and then found that something had to give. Or look hard at the domestic arrangements of the women you most admire and see how many have an indispensably supportive mate who is the lead parent and either does or oversees much more than half the housework!

  You will want to keep having these discussions at regular intervals down the road. And they are relevant even if you aren’t sure about having children. It’s very hard to anticipate at twenty-five what you will want at thirty-five. Many people also end up having unanticipated caregiving responsibilities for elderly and sick relatives, so it’s worth at least beginning to talk about what that might look like for you. You are very likely to find yourselves both making choices that you did not anticipate at the beginning, but you will be far happier if they are explicit and open choices in which each partner recognizes what the other is gaining and what he or she is giving up. You can also plan together about how you will switch places down the road.

  IN THE THICK OF IT…

  THIS CHAPTER WAS ABOUT PLANNING your career, which assumes that you are early enough in your working life to be in the planning stage. For those of us who are already in the middle of “the juggle,” the concept of intervals and tours of duty may be lovely, but they have little to do with our daily reality. Moreover, intervals assume a degree of financial stability that many families simply don’t have—taking downtime and working on a freelance or consulting basis, in particular, can mean sharp monthly variations in income.

  To take advantage of the talent of the millions of women who are doing their best just to hang on, and to make intervals of competition and care a much more realistic option for everyone, it’s time to talk more about the future of work and insist on sweeping cultural change of the same magnitude as attitudes about smoking or same-sex marriage.

  The good news is that change is already under way. You just have to find the right workplace….

  10

  THE PERFECT WORKPLACE

  How many articles have you read about the amazing benefits of exercise? Hundreds if not thousands have told us that just walking briskly for thirty minutes a day can regulate our weight, lower our blood pressure, reduce stress, boost our immune systems, and stimulate our brain. As journalists routinely write, if a single pill could do all that we would all take it every morning. But somehow many of us find it hard to take the fairly small steps necessary, no pun intended, to become more active.

  That’s the way I feel about businesses that just don’t get it when it comes to the benefits of allowing employees to fit together work and family. Reams of research demonstrate the impact on recruitment, retention, productivity, creativity, and employee morale. Moreover, in an age of continual CEO laments about the war for top talent and of national worries about whether the American workforce is educated enough to be competitive in a digital and global economy, it’s astounding that an enormous pool of highly educated and credentialed women in their forties and fifties remain completely shut out of leadership-track positions because they chose at one point to ramp down in order to make time for care.

  So why are we still stuck in this rut? Because, as I have argued throughout this book, drawing on decades of work by legal scholars, economists, and feminists, the majority of Americans are mired in a 1950s mindset when it comes to assumptions about when and how we work, what an ideal worker looks like, and when to expect that ideal worker to peak in his or her career. Men who came up through the old system and succeeded in it simply find it very hard to believe that their businesses could flourish any other way.

  Fortunately, help is not only on the way, it’s here. As the head of human resources for a company where I serve on the board recently told us, millennials want to be able to work “anywhere, anytime, anyhow.” The U.S. economy is also evolving in ways that are already changing working conditions for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Further, a growing number of traditional companies are starting to get it an
d are finding new ways of working that allow their employees much more flexibility and even cash support for parental leave and daycare, and in some cases even eldercare.

  These large-scale changes are important. Over time, they will affect how each of us lives and works, but it is hard for us to figure out how to effect them. At the other end of the spectrum are the small changes that each of us can make on a daily basis in terms of how we think, talk, and plan. The workplace offers a middle ground where economic and social forces and individual efforts can meet at a practical level. Workers and managers can decide, separately and together, to create an environment that allows everyone to fit care and career together in ways that benefit both.

  THE FUTURE OF WORK

  THE LANDSCAPE OF WORK IN the United States is changing as radically as it did in the move from the agricultural to the industrial age. Digital technology pushes the workplace away from centralized offices and toward distributed networks. No one can actually foresee the full scope and scale of these changes, although commentators and prognosticators abound. I will oversimplify a mass of complex processes that are already under way to identify at least some of the biggest changes that I see coming, so you can understand what kind of workplace you want to be in and take charge of your own career trajectory.

  The On-Demand Economy

  IN THE ON-DEMAND ECONOMY, INDEPENDENT contractors—freelancers—work on demand for whoever needs their services rather than for fixed periods of time for a single employer. They are connected only by a platform that matches them with customers and provides verification, security, and payment systems. This is the world of Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit. It will increasingly be the world of just about everything: handyman services, cooking, laundry, shopping, personal training, coding, doctoring, lawyering, bossing, and creating everything from television ads to Ebola suits.