First, thanks to Anne-Marie Slaughter for peeling the band-aid off an open wound of American womanhood. It's our dirty little secret: Balancing work and family is still impossible for elite American women because of the way we structure work, family, love, marriage, careers, masculinity and dignity.
Yes. It's that bad. Fifteen years ago, when I began to write Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflicts and What To Do About It, I thought that all we needed to do was to reshape work and careers. The key problem for women, I pointed out, is that workplaces still are designed around an ideal worker who starts to work in early adulthood and works, full time and full force, for forty years without a break, taking no time off for childbearing, childrearing or anything else. The result is a clash of social ideals. The ideal worker norm clashes with the norm of parental care: the widespread and uncontroversial sense that children need and deserve time with their parents.
The solution is to reshape workplaces around the values we hold in family life. Careers need to be more flexible, such that career breaks do not spell career doom. Hours expectations need to be more flexible, such that a failure to work "full time" does not derail one's career. Face time needs to end, allowing people to work when and where they need to, so long as the work gets done. Each of these ideas has subsequently been further developed. Here are two good examples.
One little problem. Not much has happened.
Why? The problem goes deeper than I ever anticipated. We know the solutions, but they remain at the margins. A chief reason is that gender pressures on men have not changed. Masculine dignity still is closely intertwined with the ability to be a "go-getter" and a "successful man" -- in other words, an ideal worker. Workplaces haven't changed, and they won't change, until we change gender pressures on men.
Meanwhile, let's not blame the situation on women. Slaughter is damn right that women can't have it all. They won't be able to unless and until we change the structure of work and careers. Slaughter is also right -- so right -- that women need to stop judging each other in the meantime. Ideal worker women (often of my generation) often preach to younger women who want to take longer leaves, career breaks and work part time: "You just don't understand what it means to succeed in this career." And the younger women snap back: "We don't want your pathetic lives. You just turned into men."
I call this Gender Wars, which occur when discrimination against women turns into fights among women. These mommy wars are so bitter because both groups' identities are at stake because of another clash of social ideals: The ideal worker is defined as someone always available for work, and the "good mother" is defined as always available to her children. So ideal-worker women need to prove that, although they weren't always there, their children are fine, fine, fine: "I've never had to compromise, and my kids turned out great," to quote Slaughter. Women who have rejected the ideal-worker norm and settled for a slower career (or no career) need to prove that their compromise was necessary for the good of their families. So you have each group of women judging the other, because neither group of women has been able to live up to inconsistent ideals.
How about banding together to change the ideals and the institutions driven by those ideals? This won't happen so long as we spend our time fighting with each other.
Don't fight with other women who are trying to help women. This is my precept. And it means that we shouldn't turn this into a Slaughter vs. Sandberg pissing match. Take a hint from our anatomy. This kind of thing is beneath us.
Subtly, in Slaughter's article, and more explicitly in the subsequent commentary, Slaughter's argument has been pitted against that of Sheryl Sandberg, who has become something of an icon of having it all. Sandberg, like Slaughter, is trying to help other women. She's just grasped a different part of the elephant. Sandberg is counseling young women not to be captured by what I call the Ideal Worker in Your Head. Young women "lean back," even before they have children, because they know that, after they do have children, they won't be able to, or even want to, be constantly available to their employer. Well, honey, even if you won't be constantly available it doesn't mean you're worthless. You may not even be worth less: After all, what should matter is whether you can do high-quality work, not whether you can do it constantly. Moreover, it just doesn't make sense to lean back before you have children, because the best advice, given the sorry state of the work world, is to work really, really hard before you have children so that you have the skills -- and the bargaining power -- to continue your career on your own terms after you have children.
Let's not turn this into a catfight. It's not a catfight. It's a situation where two prominent, influential women are talking -- a lot and influentially -- to two different audiences about the same problem. Young women, listen to Sheryl Sandberg. Corporations, listen to Anne-Marie Slaughter. And let's bring men into the conversation. Until men feel they have more freedom to buck the ideal-worker norm, ladies, nothing's going to change.
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But women have to help make at least one thing very clear to men. For many men there is an underlying assumption that it is not only the expectation of society that men be the major bread winner, but also the expectation of women that men be the major bread winner. Men have this deeply ingrained notion that women want to be "taken care of" and that this includes making the larger income.
We have an opportunity here to finally align our expectations with what has been proven to be a more beneficial paradigm for raising our children and for our own fulfillment. It is time for men to step up and take responsibility for helping to change the face of work-life balance and for women to make it clear that they are ready on all fronts including financial to make this work.
WHY won't you give it up?
NO ONE can have it all.
The feminists myth that today's women CAN have it all is one of, if not the most, destructive forces in our society.
Delusional entitlement helps no one.
Meanwhile, let's not blame the situation on women."
These two sentences PERFECTLY define modern feminism....
We must change men. We can't blame women.
That said, I think the "Ideal Worker" is not just in a woman's head: it's in her boss's head. Let's get real about that. It's hard to "lean in" as Sandberg exhorts women to do, when leaning in to work means leaning away from your kids.
I think what we really need is for more people to be calling woman-on-woman debates dogfights, or cockfights. More adjectives like 'brutal', 'intense', 'apocalyptic' 'horrific' and 'nuclear' being applied will also push up the respectfulness level.
Come to think of it, "a brutally intense apocalyptic catfight' has a totally different ring to it than just 'cafight'.... something to think about. I think a woman-on-woman debate described in those terms would generate some serious respecful interest.
I caution, however, against using language like "The solution is to reshape workplaces around the values we hold in family life". To the business world, this reads "being primary parent is more important than my job".
This language will not likely sell to a boss, the marketplace, or politically. I know many women who are thriving in the business world (and in government where Slaughter comes from) because they have given up that primary parent psychology and because they take very seriously their commitment to provide their share of $ to their families.
Sandberg is quite clear that she is not and does not desire to be primary parent in her family. She's actually quite astute, I think, about that and handles conversations with male reporters and others well.
I think there may be some generational conflict around this issue? For Gen-X women like Sandberg and younger women, it's just easier to take yourself seriously as an earner and to find a co-parenting partner. And this is, of course, due in no small part to the Baby Boomer and earlier generations who worked to make these opportunities possible.
I would ask that the Baby Boomer women be careful not to project primary parent psychology on us as I think it confuses this issue and obstructs some needed reforms (such as a gender-neutral and family-structure-neutral tax code, Social Security & Medicare system and parental leave laws (including anti-discrimination laws on parental leave)).
The inability of Boomer feminists to see change. They still see 1973 in everything.
Their misplaced bitterness only serves to poison the progress that has indeed been made.