If you've been living under a rock for the past week, here's the Atlantic article by Anne-Marie Slaughter. Everyone I know has emailed this to me, and I have emailed this to everyone I know if I didn't get it from them first. Clearly it resonates with all of us.
I just finished the article yesterday, reading a page here and there while the kids played. I haven't read a lot of the commentary out there yet, so I'm sure that many of my thoughts about the article have already been said. But here's one: I was so glad that she responded to Sheryl Sandberg's talk about "leaning back."
Sandberg sort of skirted the issue by saying that women who don't already have kids are "leaning back" from their careers and turning down opportunities. And I think seizing the day and taking on opportunities is great career advice. The thing is, after hearing her talk, my reaction was to shrug and say, "I guess I can't have a high-powered career like her, because I do lean back. I don't seize every professional opportunity. And I still sometimes feel like I don't have enough energy for my family, so I will continue to lean back and watch my childless colleagues pass me by because this is what I feel like I need to do. Maybe when I'm fifty and the kids are out of the house I'll seize those professional opportunities again, and maybe then it will be too late and I'll never ascend to the career heights of some of my peers, but I can't worry about that now because I have two little boys at home who need me."
It was such a relief to hear a well-respected woman in an established career acknowledge the reality that if both of you have some ambition and want to devote time and energy to your careers, you need to balance that with your family life and sometimes your family life should win. That when you're faced with a professional opportunity that conflicts with your family life, you should weigh your options and that when your kids still live at home, it may often make sense to turn down or scale down that professional opportunity. And that we should all, men and women, reimagine our careers as a series of positions and responsibilities that we fit in with the rest of our lives, rather than as a steady upward trajectory where we fail if we stop going up. I think the massive response to her article is all of us going, "Finally, someone is telling the truth!" Not the truth that, duh, it's hard to juggle work and kids, but the truth that right now there are two alternatives. You can have career success and power at the expense of your family, or we need to make changes so that career success and power can be compatible with family obligations.
Update: Here's an excerpt from LL's comment (read in full). Amen, sister!
Working parents in general can't have it all. . . . I think it's limiting to always
frame it as a "women's issue" and it ignores a whole lot of men who also
make the choice of family over career. . . . I think all of her points apply to working parents generally and
should be framed as such. Until my husband's employer sees his role of
father as as important as they see (or at least pretend to see) their
female workers' role as mother, it is never going to be as balanced or
easy at it should be for me, the working wife of the working man, to
make the choices I might want to make.
I loved the article! And I agree with your thoughts on it as well. People we live with and love should win out over people who give us money!
ReplyDeleteIt definitely was interesting to see this issue get so much attention. I think it's hard because there are people out there who take a straight upward path (e.g. men with SAHM wives who handle everything), and the traditional go to law school straight out, make partner in 8 years by 32, or make SVP, or whatever, and with kids, I just can't put in those hours.
ReplyDeleteBut I also think that it's pretty much just women who sit around thinking about all the options and constantly fretting if they have set their gauge properly in the balance. like you, i've turned down several work opportunities - mostly minor, but they do add up. but anyway. glad you liked the article, and fwiw, you inspire me - you _are_ a successful, smart lawyer.
I thought the article made a lot of really good points, and I liked the frankness and honesty of it, but the framing of it seriously annoyed me. It might be true that women can't have it all, but you know what? Men can't have it all either. Working parents in general can't have it all. "All" is simply too much to possibly be had. We both make choices and we do the best we can every step along the way, but the continual phrasing of it as "women" (meaning "mothers") makes me crazy. I think it's limiting to always frame it as a "women's issue" and it ignores a whole lot of men who also make the choice of family over career. (And ignoring them is contrary to everything we read and write about the value in making that exact decision if you're female.)
ReplyDeleteThe author make some really good points at the end at how the work place could do a better job, but again, I think all of her points apply to working parents generally and should be framed as such. Until my husband's employer sees his role of father as as important as they see (or at least pretend to see) their female workers' role as mother, it is never going to be as balanced or easy at it should be for me, the working wife of the working man, to make the choices I might want to make. (Not sure if that makes sense- basically, it's not enough that I as the working mom might have choices like part time, flex time, and on/off-ramps. I need JP to have those choices too, so that we can make the best choices for our whole family.)
Thanks, CP and Anon!
ReplyDeleteLL, +1 to everything you said! I sort of read "and men" into it, but you're absolutely right that framing it as a "women's issue" is part of the problem. One part of the article where I stopped nodding and wasn't so sure was when she said that women just see these issues differently than men. She acknowledges that this could be more nurture than nature, the result of many years of history telling us that a man's role is to be a breadwinner while a woman's role is to care for the family, but I feel like she doesn't really buy this. But I do. I think it's actually harder for men who sincerely want to be caregivers and have careers, because like you said, it's much harder for them to have and to exercise these choices to step off the traditional path.
So agree with LL's comment - I heard an interview with the author & it kind of devolved into "moms biologically feel the tug of parenting more," which I think is total bunk, as well as being a cop-out, for the reasons LL explains so well above.
ReplyDeleteMP: That's too bad, because I think it detracts from the value of the article. I was thinking about this the other day when I heard yet another male colleague say he wished he could spend more time with his kids, but... *shrug*. To generalize, but not a lot, my male colleagues tend to be resigned to the fact that our hours are crazy and don't allow us to see our families enough, while my female colleagues tend to say, "This is a problem, what can I do to fix it?" I think it's easy to point to women's efforts to reconcile our jobs with our home lives and say it's because of our maternal instincts, but in reality I think it's that we perceive that both our jobs and our families are key responsibilities in our lives while men tend to think of jobs as their primary responsibility and family as their secondary responsibility. For these men, if breadwinning conflicts with childcare, breadwinning wins whether they like it or not. It would be better for all of us if we ALL saw the work/home divide as an issue we can and should deal with.
ReplyDelete