WUNRN
THE BALANCING ACT - CAREER &
FAMILY - CHALLENGES FOR WOMEN & MEN
By
Stephanie Coontz, Special to CNN - June 25, 2012
(CNN) -- The
July/August cover story of the
One side accepts the author's argument: that feminism has set women up to fail by pretending they can have a high-powered career and still be an involved mother. The other side accuses Slaughter, who left her job as the first female director of policy planning at the State Department, of setting women back by telling them to "rediscover the pursuit of happiness," starting at home.
Slaughter's article contains a powerful critique of the insanely rigid workplace culture that produces higher levels of career-family conflict among Americans -- among men and women -- than among any of our Western European counterparts, without measurably increasing our productivity or gross national product. And she makes sensible suggestions about how to reorganize workplaces and individual career paths to lessen that conflict.
Unfortunately,
the way the discussion is framed perpetuates two myths: that feminism is to
blame for raising unrealistic expectations about "having it all" and
that work-family dilemmas are primarily an issue for women.
Let's start by recognizing that the women's movement never told anybody that they could "have it all." That concept was the brainchild of advertising executives, not feminist activists. Feminism insists on women's right to make choices -- about whether to marry, whether to have children, whether to combine work and family or to focus on one over the other. It also urges men and women to share the joys and burdens of family life and calls on society to place a higher priority on supporting caregiving work.
Second,
we should distinguish between high-powered careers that really are incompatible
with active involvement in family life and those that force people to choose
between work and family only because of misguided employment requirements and
inadequate work-family policies.
By her
account, Slaughter had one of the former. Before she "dropped out"
merely to become a full-time professor, write books and make 40 to 50 speeches
each year, Slaughter left
The
teaser at the top of the Atlantic article claims that "women who have
managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich or
self-employed." But that sentence is missing an adjective. What it really
means is that women who manage simultaneously to be involved mothers and top
professionals in the
Men who
manage to be involved fathers and top professionals are equally rare and
privileged.
The irony
is that most jobs, even top professional positions, do not actually require as
much absenteeism from family as employers often impose. University of Texas
sociologist Jennifer Glass, a senior fellow at the Council on
Contemporary Families, points out that corporate and government
professionals in the United States put in much longer workweeks than their
counterparts in Europe, where limits on work hours are common, workplace
flexibility is more widespread, and workers are entitled to far more vacation
days per year than most Americans -- and actually use them.
"In
a system where work hours are encouraged to spiral out of control at the
highest positions," Glass notes, "the people who make it to the top
-- male or female -- have little time for family or community commitments, and
little patience for the family commitments of the people they supervise."
Slaughter
ultimately suggests some excellent reforms that would allow both men and women
to meet their work and family commitments more successfully, although she
inexplicably describes them as "solutions to the problems of professional
women." Later she acknowledges that work-family issues plague all American
workers, regardless of their sex, income level, occupational niche or even
parental status since many childless workers have responsibilities to aging
parents or ill partners. In fact, according to the New York-based Families and Work
Institute, men now report even higher levels of work-family conflict than
women do.
It was a
great victory for gender equality when people finally stopped routinely saying
"she's awfully good at her job -- for a woman." The next big step
forward will be when people stop saying, "It's awfully tough to balance
work and family -- for a woman." It's tough for men and women. We need to
push for work-family practices and policies that allow individuals to customize
their work lives according to their changing individual preferences and family
obligations, not just their traditional gender roles.