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http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-can-8217-t-have-it-all/9020/?single_page=true -
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July/August 2012 - Atlantic Magazine
WHY
WOMEN STILL CAN'T HAVE IT ALL !
It's
time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the
women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman,
rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women,
here’s what has to change.
Phillip Toledano
Eighteen
months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the
State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to
George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual
assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a
Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the
American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign
dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old
son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming
what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing
math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had
barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me.
And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on
the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from
Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he
lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my
career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside
of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.
As the evening wore on, I ran into a colleague who held a senior position in the White House. She has two sons exactly my sons’ ages, but she had chosen to move them from California to D.C. when she got her job, which meant her husband commuted back to California regularly. I told her how difficult I was finding it to be away from my son when he clearly needed me. Then I said, “When this is over, I’m going to write an op-ed titled ‘Women Can’t Have It All.’”
She was horrified. “You can’t write that,” she said. “You, of all people.” What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet. I had always assumed that if I could get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January 2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could.
A rude epiphany hit me soon after I got there. When people asked why I had left government, I explained that I’d come home not only because of Princeton’s rules (after two years of leave, you lose your tenure), but also because of my desire to be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible. I have not exactly left the ranks of full-time career women: I teach a full course load; write regular print and online columns on foreign policy; give 40 to 50 speeches a year; appear regularly on TV and radio; and am working on a new academic book. But I routinely got reactions from other women my age or older that ranged from disappointed (“It’s such a pity that you had to leave Washington”) to condescending (“I wouldn’t generalize from your experience. I’ve never had to compromise, and my kids turned out great”).
The first set of reactions, with the underlying assumption that my choice was somehow sad or unfortunate, was irksome enough. But it was the second set of reactions—those implying that my parenting and/or my commitment to my profession were somehow substandard—that triggered a blind fury. Suddenly, finally, the penny dropped. All my life, I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the faintly superior smile while another woman told me she had decided to take some time out or pursue a less competitive career track so that she could spend more time with her family. I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist cause, chatting smugly with her dwindling number of college or law-school friends who had reached and maintained their place on the highest rungs of their profession. I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).
Last spring, I flew to Oxford to give a public lecture. At the request of a young Rhodes Scholar I know, I’d agreed to talk to the Rhodes community about “work-family balance.” I ended up speaking to a group of about 40 men and women in their mid-20s. What poured out of me was a set of very frank reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children (even though my husband, an academic, was willing to take on the lion’s share of parenting for the two years I was in Washington). I concluded by saying that my time in office had convinced me that further government service would be very unlikely while my sons were still at home. The audience was rapt, and asked many thoughtful questions. One of the first was from a young woman who began by thanking me for “not giving just one more fatuous ‘You can have it all’ talk.” Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.
The striking gap between the responses I heard from those young women (and others like them) and the responses I heard from my peers and associates prompted me to write this article. Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.
I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can
too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not
with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My
experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of
uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.
Before my service in
government, I’d spent my career in academia: as a law professor and then as the
dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Both were demanding jobs, but I had the ability to set my own schedule most of
the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work
done. I had to travel frequently, but I found I could make up for that with an
extended period at home or a family vacation.
I knew that I was lucky in
my career choice, but I had no idea how lucky until I spent two years in
Washington within a rigid bureaucracy, even with bosses as understanding as
Hillary Clinton and her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. My workweek started at
4:20 on Monday morning, when I got up to get the 5:30 train from Trenton to
Washington. It ended late on Friday, with the train home. In between, the days
were crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the writing work
began—a never-ending stream of memos, reports, and comments on other people’s
drafts. For two years, I never left the office early enough to go to any stores
other than those open 24 hours, which meant that everything from dry cleaning
to hair appointments to Christmas shopping had to be done on weekends, amid
children’s sporting events, music lessons, family meals, and conference calls.
I was entitled to four hours of vacation per pay period, which came to one day
of vacation a month. And I had it better than many of my peers in D.C.;
Secretary Clinton deliberately came in around 8 a.m. and left around 7 p.m., to
allow her close staff to have morning and evening time with their families
(although of course she worked earlier and later, from home).
In short, the minute I
found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women
(and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be
both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child
experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been
obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type
of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible
in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very
long.
I am hardly alone in this
realization. Michèle Flournoy stepped down after three years as undersecretary
of defense for policy, the third-highest job in the department, to spend more
time at home with her three children, two of whom are teenagers. Karen Hughes
left her position as the counselor to President George W. Bush after a year and
a half in Washington to go home to Texas for the sake of her family. Mary Matalin,
who spent two years as an assistant to Bush and the counselor to Vice President
Dick Cheney before stepping down to spend more time with her daughters, wrote:
“Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have
a career and a family can make it work.”
Yet the decision to step
down from a position of power—to value family over professional advancement,
even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on
career professionals in the United States. One phrase says it all about current
attitudes toward work and family, particularly among elites. In Washington,
“leaving to spend time with your family” is a euphemism for being fired. This
understanding is so ingrained that when Flournoy announced her resignation last
December, TheNew York Times covered her decision as follows:
Ms. Flournoy’s announcement surprised friends and a number of Pentagon officials, but all said they took her reason for resignation at face value and not as a standard Washington excuse for an official who has in reality been forced out. “I can absolutely and unequivocally state that her decision to step down has nothing to do with anything other than her commitment to her family,” said Doug Wilson, a top Pentagon spokesman. “She has loved this job and people here love her.
Think about what this
“standard Washington excuse” implies: it is so unthinkable that an official
would actually step down to spend time with his or her family that this
must be a cover for something else. How could anyone voluntarily leave the
circles of power for the responsibilities of parenthood? Depending on one’s
vantage point, it is either ironic or maddening that this view abides in the
nation’s capital, despite the ritual commitments to “family values” that are
part of every political campaign. Regardless, this sentiment makes true
work-life balance exceptionally difficult. But it cannot change unless top
women speak out.
Only recently have I begun
to appreciate the extent to which many young professional women feel under
assault by women my age and older. After I gave a recent speech in New York,
several women in their late 60s or early 70s came up to tell me how glad and
proud they were to see me speaking as a foreign-policy expert. A couple of them
went on, however, to contrast my career with the path being traveled by
“younger women today.” One expressed dismay that many younger women “are just
not willing to get out there and do it.” Said another, unaware of the
circumstances of my recent job change: “They think they have to choose between
having a career and having a family.”
A similar assumption underlies Facebook Chief
Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s widely publicized 2011 commencement speech
at Barnard, and her earlier TED
talk, in which she lamented the dismally small number of women at the top and
advised young women not to “leave before you leave.” When a woman starts
thinking about having children, Sandberg said, “she doesn’t raise her hand
anymore … She starts leaning back.” Although couched in terms of encouragement,
Sandberg’s exhortation contains more than a note of reproach. We who have made
it to the top, or are striving to get there, are essentially saying to the
women in the generation behind us: “What’s the matter with you?”
They have an answer that we
don’t want to hear. After the speech I gave in New York, I went to dinner with
a group of 30-somethings. I sat across from two vibrant women, one of whom
worked at the UN and the other at a big New York law firm. As nearly always
happens in these situations, they soon began asking me about work-life balance.
When I told them I was writing this article, the lawyer said, “I look for role
models and can’t find any.” She said the women in her firm who had become
partners and taken on management positions had made tremendous sacrifices,
“many of which they don’t even seem to realize … They take two years off when
their kids are young but then work like crazy to get back on track professionally,
which means that they see their kids when they are toddlers but not teenagers,
or really barely at all.” Her friend nodded, mentioning the top professional
women she knew, all of whom essentially relied on round-the-clock nannies. Both
were very clear that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how
to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to
family.
I realize that I am blessed
to have been born in the late 1950s instead of the early 1930s, as my mother
was, or the beginning of the 20th century, as my grandmothers were. My mother
built a successful and rewarding career as a professional artist largely in the
years after my brothers and I left home—and after being told in her 20s that
she could not go to medical school, as her father had done and her brother
would go on to do, because, of course, she was going to get married. I owe my
own freedoms and opportunities to the pioneering generation of women ahead of
me—the women now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who faced overt sexism of a kind I
see only when watching Mad Men, and who knew that the only way to make
it as a woman was to act exactly like a man. To admit to, much less act on,
maternal longings would have been fatal to their careers.
But precisely thanks to
their progress, a different kind of conversation is now possible. It is time
for women in leadership positions to recognize that although we are still
blazing trails and breaking ceilings, many of us are also reinforcing a
falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal
determination. As Kerry Rubin and Lia Macko, the authors of Midlife Crisis
at 30, their cri de coeur for Gen-X and Gen-Y women, put it:
What we discovered in our research is that while the empowerment part of the equation has been loudly celebrated, there has been very little honest discussion among women of our age about the real barriers and flaws that still exist in the system despite the opportunities we inherited.
I am well aware that the majority
of American women face problems far greater than any discussed in this article.
I am writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are
privileged enough to have choices in the first place. We may not have choices
about whether to do paid work, as dual incomes have become indispensable. But
we have choices about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women
who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership
ranks.
Millions of other working
women face much more difficult life circumstances. Some are single mothers;
many struggle to find any job; others support husbands who cannot find jobs.
Many cope with a work life in which good day care is either unavailable or very
expensive; school schedules do not match work schedules; and schools themselves
are failing to educate their children. Many of these women are worrying not
about having it all, but rather about holding on to what they do have. And
although women as a group have made substantial gains in wages, educational
attainment, and prestige over the past three decades, the economists Justin
Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have shown that women are less happy today than
their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.
The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.
The Half-Truths We Hold Dear
Let’s briefly examine the
stories we tell ourselves, the clichés that I and many other women typically
fall back on when younger women ask us how we have managed to “have it all.”
They are not necessarily lies, but at best partial truths. We must clear them
out of the way to make room for a more honest and productive discussion about
real solutions to the problems faced by professional women.
It’s possible if you
are just committed enough.
Our usual starting point,
whether we say it explicitly or not, is that having it all depends primarily on
the depth and intensity of a woman’s commitment to her career. That is
precisely the sentiment behind the dismay so many older career women feel about
the younger generation. They are not committed enough, we say, to make
the trade-offs and sacrifices that the women ahead of them made.
Yet instead of chiding, perhaps we should face some basic facts. Very few women reach leadership positions. The pool of female candidates for any top job is small, and will only grow smaller if the women who come after us decide to take time out, or drop out of professional competition altogether, to raise children. That is exactly what has Sheryl Sandberg so upset, and rightly so. In her words, “Women are not making it to the top. A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, [the share of] women at the top—C-level jobs, board seats—tops out at 15, 16 percent.”
Also
see:
Ask
Anne-Marie Slaughter a Question
The author will be online on Friday, June 29, at 11 a.m. Eastern time to
discuss her story. Click the link above to submit your questions in advance.
Can “insufficient
commitment” even plausibly explain these numbers? To be sure, the women who do
make it to the top are highly committed to their profession. On closer
examination, however, it turns out that most of them have something else in
common: they are genuine superwomen. Consider the number of women recently in
the top ranks in Washington—Susan Rice, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Michelle
Gavin, Nancy-Ann Min DeParle—who are Rhodes Scholars. Samantha Power, another
senior White House official, won a Pulitzer Prize at age 32. Or consider
Sandberg herself, who graduated with the prize given to Harvard’s top student
of economics. These women cannot possibly be the standard against which even
very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard
sets up most women for a sense of failure.
What’s more, among those
who have made it to the top, a balanced life still is more elusive for women
than it is for men. A simple measure is how many women in top positions have
children compared with their male colleagues. Every male Supreme Court justice
has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children. And
the third, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, began her career as a judge only when her
younger child was almost grown. The pattern is the same at the National
Security Council: Condoleezza Rice, the first and only woman national-security
adviser, is also the only national-security adviser since the 1950s not to have
a family.
The line of high-level
women appointees in the Obama administration is one woman deep. Virtually all
of us who have stepped down have been succeeded by men; searches for women to
succeed men in similar positions come up empty. Just about every woman who
could plausibly be tapped is already in government. The rest of the
foreign-policy world is not much better; Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations, recently surveyed the best data he could find across the
government, the military, the academy, and think tanks, and found that women
hold fewer than 30 percent of the senior foreign-policy positions in each of
these institutions.
These numbers are all the
more striking when we look back to the 1980s, when women now in their late 40s
and 50s were coming out of graduate school, and remember that our classes were
nearly 50-50 men and women. We were sure then that by now, we would be living
in a 50-50 world. Something derailed that dream.
Sandberg thinks that
“something” is an “ambition gap”—that women do not dream big enough. I am all
for encouraging young women to reach for the stars. But I fear that the
obstacles that keep women from reaching the top are rather more prosaic than
the scope of their ambition. My longtime and invaluable assistant, who has a
doctorate and juggles many balls as the mother of teenage twins, e-mailed me
while I was working on this article: “You know what would help the vast
majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK
SCHEDULES.” The present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer
exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms were
the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed.
Consider some of the
responses of women interviewed by Zenko about why “women are significantly
underrepresented in foreign policy and national security positions in
government, academia, and think tanks.” Juliette Kayyem, who served as an
assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2011
and now writes a foreign-policy and national-security column for The Boston
Globe, told Zenko that among other reasons,
the basic truth is also this: the travel sucks. As my youngest of three children is now 6, I can look back at the years when they were all young and realize just how disruptive all the travel was. There were also trips I couldn’t take because I was pregnant or on leave, the conferences I couldn’t attend because (note to conference organizers: weekends are a bad choice) kids would be home from school, and the various excursions that were offered but just couldn’t be managed.
Jolynn Shoemaker, the
director of Women in International Security, agreed: “Inflexible schedules,
unrelenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office are common
features of these jobs.”
These “mundane” issues—the
need to travel constantly to succeed, the conflicts between school schedules
and work schedules, the insistence that work be done in the office—cannot be
solved by exhortations to close the ambition gap. I would hope to see
commencement speeches that finger America’s social and business policies,
rather than women’s level of ambition, in explaining the dearth of women at the
top. But changing these policies requires much more than speeches. It means
fighting the mundane battles—every day, every year—in individual workplaces, in
legislatures, and in the media.
It’s possible if you marry the right
person.
Sandberg’s second message
in her Barnard commencement address was: “The most important career decision
you’re going to make is whether or not you have a life partner and who that
partner is.” Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection
Agency, recently drove that message home to an audience of Princeton students
and alumni gathered to hear her acceptance speech for the James Madison Medal.
During the Q&A session, an audience member asked her how she managed her
career and her family. She laughed and pointed to her husband in the front row,
saying: “There’s my work-life balance.” I could never have had the career I
have had without my husband, Andrew Moravcsik, who is a tenured professor of
politics and international affairs at Princeton. Andy has spent more time with
our sons than I have, not only on homework, but also on baseball, music
lessons, photography, card games, and more. When each of them had to bring in a
foreign dish for his fourth-grade class dinner, Andy made his grandmother’s
Hungarian palacsinta; when our older son needed to memorize his lines
for a lead role in a school play, he turned to Andy for help.
Still, the proposition that
women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are
willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately) assumes
that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from
their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience,
that is simply not the case.
Here I step onto
treacherous ground, mined with stereotypes. From years of conversations and
observations, however, I’ve come to believe that men and women respond quite
differently when problems at home force them to recognize that their absence is
hurting a child, or at least that their presence would likely help. I do not
believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem
more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem
more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.
Many factors determine this
choice, of course. Men are still socialized to believe that their primary family
obligation is to be the breadwinner; women, to believe that their primary
family obligation is to be the caregiver. But it may be more than that. When I
described the choice between my children and my job to Senator Jeanne Shaheen,
she said exactly what I felt: “There’s really no choice.” She wasn’t referring
to social expectations, but to a maternal imperative felt so deeply that the
“choice” is reflexive.
Men and women also seem to
frame the choice differently. In Midlife Crisis at 30, Mary Matalin
recalls her days working as President Bush’s assistant and Vice President
Cheney’s counselor:
Even when the stress was overwhelming—those days when I’d cry in the car on the way to work, asking myself “Why am I doing this??”—I always knew the answer to that question: I believe in this president.
But Matalin goes on to
describe her choice to leave in words that are again uncannily similar to the
explanation I have given so many people since leaving the State Department:
I finally asked myself, “Who needs me more?” And that’s when I realized, it’s somebody else’s turn to do this job. I’m indispensable to my kids, but I’m not close to indispensable to the White House.
To many men, however, the
choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on
issues that affect many lives, seems selfish. Male leaders are routinely
praised for having sacrificed their personal life on the altar of public or
corporate service. That sacrifice, of course, typically involves their family.
Yet their children, too, are trained to value public service over private
responsibility. At the diplomat Richard Holbrooke’s memorial service, one of
his sons told the audience that when he was a child, his father was often gone,
not around to teach him to throw a ball or to watch his games. But as he grew
older, he said, he realized that Holbrooke’s absence was the price of saving
people around the world—a price worth paying.
It is not clear to me that
this ethical framework makes sense for society. Why should we want leaders who
fall short on personal responsibilities? Perhaps leaders who invested time in
their own families would be more keenly aware of the toll their public
choices—on issues from war to welfare—take on private lives. (Kati Marton,
Holbrooke’s widow and a noted author, says that although Holbrooke adored his
children, he came to appreciate the full importance of family only in his 50s,
at which point he became a very present parent and grandparent, while
continuing to pursue an extraordinary public career.) Regardless, it is clear
which set of choices society values more today. Workers who put their careers
first are typically rewarded; workers who choose their families are overlooked,
disbelieved, or accused of unprofessionalism.
In sum, having a supportive
mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is
not sufficient. If women feel deeply that turning down a promotion that would
involve more travel, for instance, is the right thing to do, then they will
continue to do that. Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to
value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work
ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people
who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything
possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them
to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot
easier.
It’s possible if you sequence it right.
Young women should be wary
of the assertion “You can have it all; you just can’t have it all at once.”
This 21st-century addendum to the original line is now proffered by many senior
women to their younger mentees. To the extent that it means, in the words of
one working mother, “I’m going to do my best and I’m going to keep the long
term in mind and know that it’s not always going to be this hard to balance,”
it is sound advice. But to the extent that it means that women can have it all
if they just find the right sequence of career and family, it’s cheerfully
wrong.
The most important
sequencing issue is when to have children. Many of the top women leaders of the
generation just ahead of me—Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader
Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, Patricia Wald, Nannerl Keohane—had their
children in their 20s and early 30s, as was the norm in the 1950s through the
1970s. A child born when his mother is 25 will finish high school when his
mother is 43, an age at which, with full-time immersion in a career, she still
has plenty of time and energy for advancement.
Yet this sequence has fallen
out of favor with many high-potential women, and understandably so. People tend
to marry later now, and anyway, if you have children earlier, you may have
difficulty getting a graduate degree, a good first job, and opportunities for
advancement in the crucial early years of your career. Making matters worse,
you will also have less income while raising your children, and hence less
ability to hire the help that can be indispensable to your juggling act.
When I was the dean, the
Woodrow Wilson School created a program called Pathways to Public Service,
aimed at advising women whose children were almost grown about how to go into
public service, and many women still ask me about the best “on-ramps” to
careers in their mid-40s. Honestly, I’m not sure what to tell most of them.
Unlike the pioneering women who entered the workforce after having children in
the 1970s, these women are competing with their younger selves. Government and
NGO jobs are an option, but many careers are effectively closed off.
Personally, I have never seen a woman in her 40s enter the academic market
successfully, or enter a law firm as a junior associate, Alicia Florrick of The
Good Wife notwithstanding.
These considerations are why
so many career women of my generation chose to establish themselves in their
careers first and have children in their mid-to-late 30s. But that raises the
possibility of spending long, stressful years and a small fortune trying to
have a baby. I lived that nightmare: for three years, beginning at age 35, I
did everything possible to conceive and was frantic at the thought that I had
simply left having a biological child until it was too late.
And when everything does
work out? I had my first child at 38 (and counted myself blessed) and my second
at 40. That means I will be 58 when both of my children are out of the house.
What’s more, it means that many peak career opportunities are coinciding
precisely with their teenage years, when, experienced parents advise, being
available as a parent is just as important as in the first years of a child’s
life.
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.
Given the way our work
culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in your career
first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or else freeze your eggs,
whether you are married or not. You may well be a more mature and less
frustrated parent in your 30s or 40s; you are also more likely to have found a
lasting life partner. But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both
involve trade-offs that men do not have to make.
You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce. The rest of this essay details how.
Changing the Culture of Face
Time
Back in the Reagan
administration, a New York Times story about the ferociously competitive
budget director Dick Darman reported, “Mr. Darman sometimes managed to convey
the impression that he was the last one working in the Reagan White House by
leaving his suit coat on his chair and his office light burning after he left
for home.” (Darman claimed that it was just easier to leave his suit jacket in
the office so he could put it on again in the morning, but his record of
psychological manipulation suggests otherwise.)
The culture of “time
macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more
all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the
international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among
professionals today. Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more
value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across
the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope
to integrate work and family. Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly
reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early,
stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on
Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten
worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that
nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50
hours a week has increased since the late 1970s.
But more time in the office
does not always mean more “value added”—and it does not always add up to a more
successful organization. In 2009, Sandra Pocharski, a senior female partner at
Monitor Group and the head of the firm’s Leadership and Organization practice,
commissioned a Harvard Business School professor to assess the factors that
helped or hindered women’s effectiveness and advancement at Monitor. The study
found that the company’s culture was characterized by an “always on” mode of
working, often without due regard to the impact on employees. Pocharski
observed:
Clients come first, always, and sometimes burning the midnight oil really does make the difference between success and failure. But sometimes we were just defaulting to behavior that overloaded our people without improving results much, if at all. We decided we needed managers to get better at distinguishing between these categories, and to recognize the hidden costs of assuming that “time is cheap.” When that time doesn’t add a lot of value and comes at a high cost to talented employees, who will leave when the personal cost becomes unsustainable—well, that is clearly a bad outcome for everyone.
I have worked very long
hours and pulled plenty of all-nighters myself over the course of my career,
including a few nights on my office couch during my two years in D.C. Being
willing to put the time in when the job simply has to get done is rightfully a
hallmark of a successful professional. But looking back, I have to admit that
my assumption that I would stay late made me much less efficient over the
course of the day than I might have been, and certainly less so than some of my
colleagues, who managed to get the same amount of work done and go home at a
decent hour. If Dick Darman had had a boss who clearly valued prioritization
and time management, he might have found reason to turn out the lights and take
his jacket home.
Long hours are one thing,
and realistically, they are often unavoidable. But do they really need to be
spent at the office? To be sure, being in the office some of the time is
beneficial. In-person meetings can be far more efficient than phone or e-mail
tag; trust and collegiality are much more easily built up around the same
physical table; and spontaneous conversations often generate good ideas and
lasting relationships. Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and
videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the
office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.
Being able to work from
home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or
snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for
mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial
moments. State-of-the-art videoconferencing facilities can dramatically reduce
the need for long business trips. These technologies are making inroads, and
allowing easier integration of work and family life. According to the Women’s
Business Center, 61 percent of women business owners use technology to
“integrate the responsibilities of work and home”; 44 percent use technology to
allow employees “to work off-site or to have flexible work schedules.” Yet our
work culture still remains more office-centered than it needs to be, especially
in light of technological advances.
One way to change that is
by changing the “default rules” that govern office work—the baseline
expectations about when, where, and how work will be done. As behavioral
economists well know, these baselines can make an enormous difference in the
way people act. It is one thing, for instance, for an organization to allow
phone-ins to a meeting on an ad hoc basis, when parenting and work schedules
collide—a system that’s better than nothing, but likely to engender guilt among
those calling in, and possibly resentment among those in the room. It is quite
another for that organization to declare that its policy will be to schedule
in-person meetings, whenever possible, during the hours of the school day—a
system that might normalize call-ins for those (rarer) meetings still held in
the late afternoon.
One real-world example
comes from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a place most people are
more likely to associate with distinguished gentlemen in pinstripes than with
progressive thinking about work-family balance. Like so many other places,
however, the FCO worries about losing talented members of two-career couples
around the world, particularly women. So it recently changed its basic policy
from a default rule that jobs have to be done on-site to one that assumes that
some jobs might be done remotely, and invites workers to make the case for
remote work. Kara Owen, a career foreign-service officer who was the FCO’s
diversity director and will soon become the British deputy ambassador to
France, writes that she has now done two remote jobs. Before her current
maternity leave, she was working a London job from Dublin to be with her
partner, using teleconferencing technology and timing her trips to London to
coincide “with key meetings where I needed to be in the room (or chatting at
the pre-meeting coffee) to have an impact, or to do intensive ‘network
maintenance.’” In fact, she writes, “I have found the distance and quiet to be
a real advantage in a strategic role, providing I have put in the investment up
front to develop very strong personal relationships with the game changers.”
Owen recognizes that not every job can be done this way. But she says that for
her part, she has been able to combine family requirements with her career.
Changes in default office
rules should not advantage parents over other workers; indeed, done right, they
can improve relations among co-workers by raising their awareness of each
other’s circumstances and instilling a sense of fairness. Two years ago, the
ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts decided to replace its “parental leave” policy
with a “family leave” policy that provides for as much as 12 weeks of leave not
only for new parents, but also for employees who need to care for a spouse,
child, or parent with a serious health condition. According to Director Carol
Rose, “We wanted a policy that took into account the fact that even employees
who do not have children have family obligations.” The policy was shaped by the
belief that giving women “special treatment” can “backfire if the broader norms
shaping the behavior of all employees do not change.” When I was the dean of
the Wilson School, I managed with the mantra “Family comes first”—any
family—and found that my employees were both productive and intensely loyal.
None of these changes will happen by themselves, and reasons to avoid them will seldom be hard to find. But obstacles and inertia are usually surmountable if leaders are open to changing their assumptions about the workplace. The use of technology in many high-level government jobs, for instance, is complicated by the need to have access to classified information. But in 2009, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, who shares the parenting of his two young daughters equally with his wife, made getting such access at home an immediate priority so that he could leave the office at a reasonable hour and participate in important meetings via videoconferencing if necessary. I wonder how many women in similar positions would be afraid to ask, lest they be seen as insufficiently committed to their jobs.
Revaluing Family Values
While employers shouldn’t
privilege parents over other workers, too often they end up doing the opposite,
usually subtly, and usually in ways that make it harder for a primary caregiver
to get ahead. Many people in positions of power seem to place a low value on
child care in comparison with other outside activities. Consider the following
proposition: An employer has two equally talented and productive employees. One
trains for and runs marathons when he is not working. The other takes care of
two children. What assumptions is the employer likely to make about the
marathon runner? That he gets up in the dark every day and logs an hour or two
running before even coming into the office, or drives himself to get out there
even after a long day. That he is ferociously disciplined and willing to push
himself through distraction, exhaustion, and days when nothing seems to go
right in the service of a goal far in the distance. That he must manage his time
exceptionally well to squeeze all of that in.
Be honest: Do you think the
employer makes those same assumptions about the parent? Even though she likely
rises in the dark hours before she needs to be at work, organizes her
children’s day, makes breakfast, packs lunch, gets them off to school, figures
out shopping and other errands even if she is lucky enough to have a
housekeeper—and does much the same work at the end of the day. Cheryl Mills,
Hillary Clinton’s indefatigable chief of staff, has twins in elementary school;
even with a fully engaged husband, she famously gets up at four every morning
to check and send e-mails before her kids wake up. Louise Richardson, now the
vice chancellor of the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, combined an
assistant professorship in government at Harvard with mothering three young
children. She organized her time so ruthlessly that she always keyed in 1:11 or
2:22 or 3:33 on the microwave rather than 1:00, 2:00, or 3:00, because hitting
the same number three times took less time.
Elizabeth Warren, who is now
running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, has a similar story. When she had
two young children and a part-time law practice, she struggled to find enough
time to write the papers and articles that would help get her an academic
position. In her words:
I needed a plan. I figured out that writing time was when Alex was asleep. So the minute I put him down for a nap or he fell asleep in the baby swing, I went to my desk and started working on something—footnotes, reading, outlining, writing … I learned to do everything else with a baby on my hip.
The discipline,
organization, and sheer endurance it takes to succeed at top levels with young
children at home is easily comparable to running 20 to 40 miles a week. But
that’s rarely how employers see things, not only when making allowances, but
when making promotions. Perhaps because people choose to have children?
People also choose to run marathons.
One final example: I have
worked with many Orthodox Jewish men who observed the Sabbath from sundown on
Friday until sundown on Saturday. Jack Lew, the two-time director of the Office
of Management and Budget, former deputy secretary of state for management and
resources, and now White House chief of staff, is a case in point. Jack’s wife
lived in New York when he worked in the State Department, so he would leave the
office early enough on Friday afternoon to take the shuttle to New York and a
taxi to his apartment before sundown. He would not work on Friday after sundown
or all day Saturday. Everyone who knew him, including me, admired his
commitment to his faith and his ability to carve out the time for it, even with
an enormously demanding job.
It is hard to imagine,
however, that we would have the same response if a mother told us she was
blocking out mid-Friday afternoon through the end of the day on Saturday, every
week, to spend time with her children. I suspect this would be seen as
unprofessional, an imposition of unnecessary costs on co-workers. In fact, of course,
one of the great values of the Sabbath—whether Jewish or Christian—is precisely
that it carves out a family oasis, with rituals and a mandatory setting-aside
of work.
Our assumptions are just that: things we believe that are not necessarily so. Yet what we assume has an enormous impact on our perceptions and responses. Fortunately, changing our assumptions is up to us.
Redefining the Arc of a
Successful Career
The American definition of a
successful professional is someone who can climb the ladder the furthest in the
shortest time, generally peaking between ages 45 and 55. It is a definition
well suited to the mid-20th century, an era when people had kids in their 20s,
stayed in one job, retired at 67, and were dead, on average, by age 71.
It makes far less sense
today. Average life expectancy for people in their 20s has increased to 80; men
and women in good health can easily work until they are 75. They can expect to
have multiple jobs and even multiple careers throughout their working life.
Couples marry later, have kids later, and can expect to live on two incomes.
They may well retire earlier—the average retirement age has gone down
from 67 to 63—but that is commonly “retirement” only in the sense of collecting
retirement benefits. Many people go on to “encore” careers.
Assuming the priceless
gifts of good health and good fortune, a professional woman can thus expect her
working life to stretch some 50 years, from her early or mid-20s to her
mid-70s. It is reasonable to assume that she will build her credentials and
establish herself, at least in her first career, between 22 and 35; she will
have children, if she wants them, sometime between 25 and 45; she’ll want
maximum flexibility and control over her time in the 10 years that her children
are 8 to 18; and she should plan to take positions of maximum authority and
demands on her time after her children are out of the house. Women who have
children in their late 20s can expect to immerse themselves completely in their
careers in their late 40s, with plenty of time still to rise to the top in
their late 50s and early 60s. Women who make partner, managing director, or
senior vice president; get tenure; or establish a medical practice before
having children in their late 30s should be coming back on line for the most
demanding jobs at almost exactly the same age.
Along the way, women should
think about the climb to leadership not in terms of a straight upward slope,
but as irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips) when they
turn down promotions to remain in a job that works for their family situation;
when they leave high-powered jobs and spend a year or two at home on a reduced
schedule; or when they step off a conventional professional track to take a
consulting position or project-based work for a number of years. I think of
these plateaus as “investment intervals.” My husband and I took a sabbatical in
Shanghai, from August 2007 to May 2008, right in the thick of an election year
when many of my friends were advising various candidates on foreign-policy
issues. We thought of the move in part as “putting money in the family bank,”
taking advantage of the opportunity to spend a close year together in a foreign
culture. But we were also investing in our children’s ability to learn Mandarin
and in our own knowledge of Asia.
Peaking in your late 50s and
early 60s rather than your late 40s and early 50s makes particular sense for
women, who live longer than men. And many of the stereotypes about older
workers simply do not hold. A 2006 survey of human-resources professionals
shows that only 23 percent think older workers are less flexible than younger
workers; only 11 percent think older workers require more training than younger
workers; and only 7 percent think older workers have less drive than younger
workers.
Whether women will really
have the confidence to stair-step their careers, however, will again depend in
part on perceptions. Slowing down the rate of promotions, taking time out
periodically, pursuing an alternative path during crucial parenting or
parent-care years—all have to become more visible and more noticeably accepted
as a pause rather than an opt-out. (In an encouraging sign, Mass Career
Customization, a 2007 book by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg arguing that
“today’s career is no longer a straight climb up the corporate ladder, but
rather a combination of climbs, lateral moves, and planned descents,” was a Wall
Street Journal best seller.)
Institutions can also take
concrete steps to promote this acceptance. For instance, in 1970, Princeton
established a tenure-extension policy that allowed female assistant professors
expecting a child to request a one-year extension on their tenure clocks. This
policy was later extended to men, and broadened to include adoptions. In the
early 2000s, two reports on the status of female faculty discovered that only
about 3 percent of assistant professors requested tenure extensions in a given
year. And in response to a survey question, women were much more likely than
men to think that a tenure extension would be detrimental to an assistant
professor’s career.
So in 2005, under President
Shirley Tilghman, Princeton changed the default rule. The administration
announced that all assistant professors, female and male, who had a new child
would automatically receive a one-year extension on the tenure clock,
with no opt-outs allowed. Instead, assistant professors could request early
consideration for tenure if they wished. The number of assistant professors who
receive a tenure extension has tripled since the change.
One of the best ways to
move social norms in this direction is to choose and celebrate different role
models. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and I are poles apart politically,
but he went way up in my estimation when he announced that one reason he
decided against running for president in 2012 was the impact his campaign would
have had on his children. He reportedly made clear at a fund-raiser in
Louisiana that he didn’t want to be away from his children for long periods of
time; according to a Republican official at the event, he said that “his son
[missed] him after being gone for the three days on the road, and that he
needed to get back.” He may not get my vote if and when he does run for
president, but he definitely gets my admiration (providing he doesn’t turn
around and join the GOP ticket this fall).
If we are looking for high-profile female role models, we might begin with Michelle Obama. She started out with the same résumé as her husband, but has repeatedly made career decisions designed to let her do work she cared about and also be the kind of parent she wanted to be. She moved from a high-powered law firm first to Chicago city government and then to the University of Chicago shortly before her daughters were born, a move that let her work only 10 minutes away from home. She has spoken publicly and often about her initial concerns that her husband’s entry into politics would be bad for their family life, and about her determination to limit her participation in the presidential election campaign to have more time at home. Even as first lady, she has been adamant that she be able to balance her official duties with family time. We should see her as a full-time career woman, but one who is taking a very visible investment interval. We should celebrate her not only as a wife, mother, and champion of healthy eating, but also as a woman who has had the courage and judgment to invest in her daughters when they need her most. And we should expect a glittering career from her after she leaves the White House and her daughters leave for college.
Rediscovering the Pursuit of
Happiness
One of the most complicated
and surprising parts of my journey out of Washington was coming to grips with
what I really wanted. I had opportunities to stay on, and I could have tried to
work out an arrangement allowing me to spend more time at home. I might have
been able to get my family to join me in Washington for a year; I might have
been able to get classified technology installed at my house the way Jim
Steinberg did; I might have been able to commute only four days a week instead
of five. (While this last change would have still left me very little time at
home, given the intensity of my job, it might have made the job doable for
another year or two.) But I realized that I didn’t just need to go home.
Deep down, I wanted to go home. I wanted to be able to spend time with
my children in the last few years that they are likely to live at home, crucial
years for their development into responsible, productive, happy, and caring
adults. But also irreplaceable years for me to enjoy the simple pleasures of
parenting—baseball games, piano recitals, waffle breakfasts, family trips, and
goofy rituals. My older son is doing very well these days, but even when he
gives us a hard time, as all teenagers do, being home to shape his choices and
help him make good decisions is deeply satisfying.
The flip side of my
realization is captured in Macko and Rubin’s ruminations on the importance of
bringing the different parts of their lives together as 30-year-old women:
If we didn’t start to learn how to integrate our personal, social, and professional lives, we were about five years away from morphing into the angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.
Women have contributed to
the fetish of the one-dimensional life, albeit by necessity. The pioneer
generation of feminists walled off their personal lives from their professional
personas to ensure that they could never be discriminated against for a lack of
commitment to their work. When I was a law student in the 1980s, many women who
were then climbing the legal hierarchy in New York firms told me that they
never admitted to taking time out for a child’s doctor appointment or school
performance, but instead invented a much more neutral excuse.
Today, however, women in
power can and should change that environment, although change is not easy. When
I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I decided that one of the
advantages of being a woman in power was that I could help change the norms by
deliberately talking about my children and my desire to have a balanced life.
Thus, I would end faculty meetings at 6 p.m. by saying that I had to go home
for dinner; I would also make clear to all student organizations that I would
not come to dinner with them, because I needed to be home from six to eight,
but that I would often be willing to come back after eight for a meeting. I
also once told the Dean’s Advisory Committee that the associate dean would
chair the next session so I could go to a parent-teacher conference.
After a few months of this,
several female assistant professors showed up in my office quite agitated. “You
have to stop talking about your kids,” one said. “You are not showing
the gravitas that people expect from a dean, which is particularly damaging precisely
because you are the first woman dean of the school.” I told them that I was
doing it deliberately and continued my practice, but it is interesting that
gravitas and parenthood don’t seem to go together.
Ten years later, whenever I
am introduced at a lecture or other speaking engagement, I insist that the
person introducing me mention that I have two sons. It seems odd to me to list
degrees, awards, positions, and interests and not include the dimension
of my life that is most important to me—and takes an enormous amount of my
time. As Secretary Clinton once said in a television interview in Beijing when
the interviewer asked her about Chelsea’s upcoming wedding: “That’s my real
life.” But I notice that my male introducers are typically uncomfortable when I
make the request. They frequently say things like “And she particularly wanted
me to mention that she has two sons”—thereby drawing attention to the unusual
nature of my request, when my entire purpose is to make family references
routine and normal in professional life.
This does not mean that you
should insist that your colleagues spend time cooing over pictures of your baby
or listening to the prodigious accomplishments of your kindergartner. It does
mean that if you are late coming in one week, because it is your turn to drive
the kids to school, that you be honest about what you are doing. Indeed, Sheryl
Sandberg recently acknowledged not only that she leaves work at 5:30 to have
dinner with her family, but also that for many years she did not dare make this
admission, even though she would of course make up the work time later in the
evening. Her willingness to speak out now is a strong step in the right
direction.
Seeking out a more balanced
life is not a women’s issue; balance would be better for us all. Bronnie Ware,
an Australian blogger who worked for years in palliative care and is the author
of the 2011 book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, writes that the
regret she heard most often was “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true
to myself, not the life others expected of me.” The second-most-common regret
was “I wish I didn’t work so hard.” She writes: “This came from every male
patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s
companionship.”
Juliette Kayyem, who several
years ago left the Department of Homeland Security soon after her husband,
David Barron, left a high position in the Justice Department, says their joint
decision to leave Washington and return to Boston sprang from their desire to work
on the “happiness project,”
meaning quality time with their three children. (She borrowed the term from her
friend Gretchen Rubin, who wrote a best-selling book and now runs a blog with
that name.)
It’s time to embrace a national happiness project. As a daughter of Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson and the university he founded, I grew up with the Declaration of Independence in my blood. Last I checked, he did not declare American independence in the name of life, liberty, and professional success. Let us rediscover the pursuit of happiness, and let us start at home.
Innovation Nation
As I write this, I can hear
the reaction of some readers to many of the proposals in this essay: It’s all
fine and well for a tenured professor to write about flexible working hours,
investment intervals, and family-comes-first management. But what about the
real world? Most American women cannot demand these things, particularly in a
bad economy, and their employers have little incentive to grant them
voluntarily. Indeed, the most frequent reaction I get in putting forth these
ideas is that when the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever
and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility, choosing the man
will add more value to the company.
In fact, while many of
these issues are hard to quantify and measure precisely, the statistics seem to
tell a different story. A seminal study of 527 U.S. companies, published in the
Academy of Management Journal in 2000, suggests that “organizations with
more extensive work-family policies have higher perceived firm-level
performance” among their industry peers. These findings accorded with a 2003
study conducted by Michelle Arthur at the University of Mexico. Examining 130
announcements of family-friendly policies in The Wall Street Journal,
Arthur found that the announcements alone significantly improved share prices.
In 2011, a study on flexibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai,
and Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed that increased
flexibility correlates positively with job engagement, job satisfaction,
employee retention, and employee health.
This is only a small
sampling from a large and growing literature trying to pin down the
relationship between family-friendly policies and economic performance. Other
scholars have concluded that good family policies attract better talent, which
in turn raises productivity, but that the policies themselves have no impact on
productivity. Still others argue that results attributed to these policies are
actually a function of good management overall. What is evident, however, is
that many firms that recruit and train well-educated professional women are
aware that when a woman leaves because of bad work-family balance, they are
losing the money and time they invested in her.
Even the legal industry,
built around the billable hour, is taking notice. Deborah Epstein Henry, a
former big-firm litigator, is now the president of Flex-Time Lawyers, a
national consulting firm focused partly on strategies for the retention of
female attorneys. In her book Law and Reorder, published by the American
Bar Association in 2010, she describes a legal profession “where the billable
hour no longer works”; where attorneys, judges, recruiters, and academics all
agree that this system of compensation has perverted the industry, leading to
brutal work hours, massive inefficiency, and highly inflated costs. The
answer—already being deployed in different corners of the industry—is a
combination of alternative fee structures, virtual firms, women-owned firms,
and the outsourcing of discrete legal jobs to other jurisdictions. Women, and
Generation X and Y lawyers more generally, are pushing for these changes on the
supply side; clients determined to reduce legal fees and increase flexible
service are pulling on the demand side. Slowly, change is happening.
At the core of all this is
self-interest. Losing smart and motivated women not only diminishes a company’s
talent pool; it also reduces the return on its investment in training and
mentoring. In trying to address these issues, some firms are finding out that
women’s ways of working may just be better ways of working, for employees and
clients alike.
Experts on creativity and
innovation emphasize the value of encouraging nonlinear thinking and
cultivating randomness by taking long walks or looking at your environment from
unusual angles. In their new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the
Imagination for a World of Constant Change, the innovation gurus John Seely
Brown and Douglas Thomas write, “We believe that connecting play and
imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture
of learning.”
Space for play and
imagination is exactly what emerges when rigid work schedules and hierarchies
loosen up. Skeptics should consider the “California effect.” California is the
cradle of American innovation—in technology, entertainment, sports, food, and
lifestyles. It is also a place where people take leisure as seriously as they
take work; where companies like Google deliberately encourage play, with
Ping-Pong tables, light sabers, and policies that require employees to spend
one day a week working on whatever they wish. Charles Baudelaire wrote: “Genius
is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google apparently
has taken note.
No parent would mistake
child care for childhood. Still, seeing the world anew through a child’s eyes
can be a powerful source of stimulation. When the Nobel laureate Thomas
Schelling wrote The Strategy of Conflict, a classic text applying game
theory to conflicts among nations, he frequently drew on child-rearing for
examples of when deterrence might succeed or fail. “It may be easier to
articulate the peculiar difficulty of constraining [a ruler] by the use of
threats,” he wrote, “when one is fresh from a vain attempt at using threats to
keep a small child from hurting a dog or a small dog from hurting a child.”
The books I’ve read with my children, the silly movies I’ve watched, the games I’ve played, questions I’ve answered, and people I’ve met while parenting have broadened my world. Another axiom of the literature on innovation is that the more often people with different perspectives come together, the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers the ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—whether they spend that time mothering or marathoning—will open the door to a much wider range of influences and ideas.
Enlisting Men
Perhaps the most
encouraging news of all for achieving the sorts of changes that I have proposed
is that men are joining the cause. In commenting on a draft of this article,
Martha Minow, the dean of the Harvard Law School, wrote me that one change she
has observed during 30 years of teaching law at Harvard is that today many
young men are asking questions about how they can manage a work-life balance.
And more systematic research on Generation Y confirms that many more men than
in the past are asking questions about how they are going to integrate active
parenthood with their professional lives.
Abstract aspirations are
easier than concrete trade-offs, of course. These young men have not yet faced
the question of whether they are prepared to give up that more prestigious
clerkship or fellowship, decline a promotion, or delay their professional goals
to spend more time with their children and to support their partner’s career.
Yet once work practices and
work culture begin to evolve, those changes are likely to carry their own
momentum. Kara Owen, the British foreign-service officer who worked a London
job from Dublin, wrote me in an e-mail:
I think the culture on flexible working started to change the minute the Board of Management (who were all men at the time) started to work flexibly—quite a few of them started working one day a week from home.
Men have, of course, become
much more involved parents over the past couple of decades, and that, too,
suggests broad support for big changes in the way we balance work and family.
It is noteworthy that both James Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, and
William Lynn, deputy secretary of defense, stepped down two years into the
Obama administration so that they could spend more time with their children
(for real).
Going forward, women would
do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and
economic issues that affect both women and men. After all, we have a new
generation of young men who have been raised by full-time working mothers. Let
us presume, as I do with my sons, that they will understand “supporting their
families” to mean more than earning money.
I have
been blessed to work with and be mentored by some extraordinary women.
Watching Hillary Clinton in action makes me incredibly proud—of her
intelligence, expertise, professionalism, charisma, and command of any
audience. I get a similar rush when I see a front-page picture of Christine
Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Angela
Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, deep in conversation about some of the most
important issues on the world stage; or of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to
the United Nations, standing up forcefully for the Syrian people in the
Security Council.
These women are
extraordinary role models. If I had a daughter, I would encourage her to look
to them, and I want a world in which they are extraordinary but not unusual.
Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words, “to be a strong
woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.”
That means respecting, enabling, and indeed celebrating the full range of
women’s choices. “Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in her speech at
Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating the
nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.”
I gave a speech at Vassar
last November and arrived in time to wander the campus on a lovely fall
afternoon. It is a place infused with a spirit of community and generosity,
filled with benches, walkways, public art, and quiet places donated by alumnae
seeking to encourage contemplation and connection. Turning the pages of the
alumni magazine (Vassar is now coed), I was struck by the entries of older
alumnae, who greeted their classmates with Salve (Latin for “hello”) and
wrote witty remembrances sprinkled with literary allusions. Theirs was a world
in which women wore their learning lightly; their news is mostly of their
children’s accomplishments. Many of us look back on that earlier era as a time
when it was fine to joke that women went to college to get an “M.R.S.” And many
women of my generation abandoned the Seven Sisters as soon as the formerly
all-male Ivy League universities became coed. I would never return to the world
of segregated sexes and rampant discrimination. But now is the time to revisit
the assumption that women must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our
mothers and mentors warned us about.
I continually push the
young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the confidence to value
their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. My husband
agrees, but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more
like the women—to speak less and listen more. If women are ever to achieve real
equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male
choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social
policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We
have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside
us.
We’ll create a better society in the process, for all women. We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart. But when we do, we will stop talking about whether women can have it all. We will properly focus on how we can help all Americans have healthy, happy, productive lives, valuing the people they love as much as the success they seek.