Anne-Marie Slaughter was working in a high-ranking job in the United States state department when she declined a promotion to spend more time with her family. The range of reactions prompted her to write a 2012 article for The Atlantic, entitled Why women still can't have it all. It tapped a nerve and Slaughter went on to write a book, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family – a vision for what true equality between men and women really means, and how to get there. In some ways her book can be seen as an alternative to the Lean In ethos advocated by Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook. Below we present an exclusive excerpt from Slaughter's book, which is among the six finalists for this year's FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award:
How many articles have you read about the amazing benefits of exercise? Hundreds if not thousands have told us that just walking briskly for 30 minutes a day can regulate our weight, lower our blood pressure, reduce stress, boost our immune systems and stimulate our brain. As journalists routinely write, if a single pill could do all that we would all take it every morning.
But somehow many of us find it hard to take the fairly small steps necessary, no pun intended, to become more active.
That’s the way I feel about businesses that just don’t get it when it comes to the benefits of allowing employees to fit together work and family. Reams of research demonstrate the impact on recruitment, retention, productivity, creativity and employee morale. Moreover, in an age of continual CEO laments about the war for top talent and of national worries about whether the American workforce is educated enough to be competitive in a digital and global economy, it’s astounding that an enormous pool of highly educated and credentialed women in their 40s and 50s remain completely shut out of leadership-track positions because they chose at one point to ramp down in order to make time for care.
So why are we still stuck in this rut? Because, as I have argued throughout this book, drawing on decades of work by legal scholars, economists and feminists, the majority of Americans are mired in a 1950s mindset when it comes to assumptions about when and how we work, what an ideal worker looks like, and when to expect that ideal worker to peak in his or her career. Men who came up through the old system and succeeded in it simply find it very hard to believe that their businesses could flourish any other way.
Fortunately, help is not only on the way, it’s here. As the head of human resources for a company where I serve on the board recently told us, millennials want to be able to work “anywhere, anytime, anyhow”. The US economy is also evolving in ways that are already changing working conditions for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Further, a growing number of traditional companies are starting to get it and are finding new ways of working that allow their employees much more flexibility and even cash support for parental leave and daycare, and in some cases even eldercare.
These large-scale changes are important. Over time, they will affect how each of us lives and works, but it is hard for us to figure out how to effect them. At the other end of the spectrum are the small changes that each of us can make on a daily basis in terms of how we think, talk, and plan. The workplace offers a middle ground where economic and social forces and individual efforts can meet at a practical level. Workers and managers can decide, separately and together, to create an environment that allows everyone to fit care and career together in ways that benefit both.
Flexibility
New forms [of work such as the on-demand economy] will emerge, or rather new adaptations of old forms. MIT professor Thomas Malone, who wrote a prescient book called The Future of Work in 2004, predicted that freelancers with a craft or a specific profession would be likely to organise as guilds to exert the power necessary to even the playing field with employers. He used the example of the Screen Actors Guild, now known as SAG-Aftra, which brings together a wide range of media artists – actors, singers, dancers, broadcast journalists, voiceover artists – who work as independent contractors. SAG members come together on specific creative projects – a play, a movie, a sound recording, a broadcast – and disband again, much as plumbers, electricians, carpenters, roofers and other small businesses or individuals come together to build a house. The guild itself negotiates and provides health and pension benefits, allowing members to work flexibly on different projects as much as they want or need to.
If we can provide for contractors or freelancers in ways that ensure they can earn a living and provide for their families and their futures, the on-demand economy offers the prospect of far more flexible, self- scheduled work hours. It points to the end of the office as we know it, the place you must go to earn a living.
That is exactly what many workers who are trying to fit their work and their care-giving responsibilities together need.
Moving up the income scale, the on-demand economy is likely to be a godsend for professionals who are also caregivers.
Lawyers, business executives, bankers, doctors and many other professional women could continue to advance in their careers or at least stay in the game while being the kind of parents they want to be. Consider Axiom Law and Bliss Lawyers, both of which have a bench of high-quality law firm alumni whom they rent out on a project basis to large companies – doing the same work that law firms do but at a fraction of the cost and a multiple of the flexibility.
Topcoder matches freelance computer coders to projects; Eden McCallum provides project-based consulting services; Medicast allows patients to request a doctor through an app, charging a flat fee for a basic visit and paying malpractice insurance for the doctors on their roster. The Business Talent Group, based in Los Angeles, even rents out bosses who use their executive skills to get a specific project done.
If we can provide the right kind of portable social safety net, this deep flexibility will make it far easier for a wide range of platform workers to navigate the phases of life when they need to be caring for family members. But in the meantime, of course, millions of Americans still have day jobs with fixed hours, fixed locations and bosses who expect fixed amounts of work. How can we change that economy to make room for care?
Priorities
Even if your workplace gives you maximum control over when, where and how you do your work, it’s still up to you to put your family first. Over a decade ago, I formulated what has been my work mantra ever since: “If you are caught up on your email, your priorities are in the wrong place”. I realised that I could spend another hour at the office every night knocking down the daily pile of email – at least a third of which was unnecessary to anyone and all of which would quickly pile up again no matter what I did – or I could go home and read to my sons before bed. When I thought about what really mattered, the answer was obvious.
No one at a memorial service will ever remember if you answered all your email. Quite the contrary. When I worked in the State Department I noted an inverse relationship between how high up people were and how much email they actually answered – they simply had more important work on their plates. Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, read all her email but did not respond unless a response was absolutely necessary, and then she had it down to one letter – “k” instead of “OK”.
Email is just the most obvious manifestation of a much bigger issue: the 24/7 work culture and its associated feelings of responsibility and guilt. Many of us try so hard to respond to an ever-increasing set of demands from an ever- growing number of people who can now reach us at all hours. The key is to stop long enough to think through what your real priorities are. What’s really most important to you? If you don’t set your own priorities and draw the boundaries that will help you achieve them, no one else will do it for you.
If family comes first …
If CEOs, supervisors, and managers want to avoid missing out on the next great wave of productivity increases and morale improvements, they too need to adopt policies that provide true flexibility. It might seem daunting, but all it takes is understanding, vision and a little bit of nerve.
When I took my first big management job as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School in 2002, our sons were five and three. If one of them had a problem – from falling sick at school or daycare to a more sustained learning issue that might require diagnosis and outside assistance – that family matter came first.
The situation I’ve just described probably confirms many managers’ worst fears about hiring a mother. But since I had no doubt about my own commitment to my work and my ability to focus, reason and lead while I was a mother, and since I was the boss, I rejected the stereotype. After some trial and error, I found that if I attended to the family issue first, subject of course to meeting important obligations that could not be postponed or delegated, then I would be far more focused, productive and determined when I turned back to my work.
Once, during a day-long meeting I had with the Woodrow Wilson School’s advisory board, I told the board members that my associate dean would take over from 11 to noon while I went down the road to attend a teacher’s conference. It would have been better, of course, to schedule the teacher’s conference on a different day, but for whatever reason that was not possible and it was important that I be there. The world did not come to an end; my associate dean was perfectly capable of taking over; and although some of my board members may have been bemused, others recognised that missing one hour out of eight with them mattered far less than missing a crucial hour with my child’s teacher.
Over time, I developed a slogan: “If family comes first, work does not come second. Life comes together”.
Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family by Anne-Marie Slaughter is published by Oneworld.
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