Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  The stories go on. A young lawyer I know from Virginia was offered a general counsel position, which she determined she could take but only if she could work from home one day a week to be with her two children. Her employer refused. Still another woman wrote,

  I aspire to a C-level position, but have had to face up to the very real predicament of trying to climb the C-level ladder with a 2-year-old tugging at my heels. The dilemma is in no way the result of having a toddler: after all, executive men seem to enjoy increased promotions with every additional offspring. It is the way work continues to be circumscribed as something that happens “in an office,” and/or “between 8–6” that causes such conflict. I haven’t yet been presented with a shred of reasonable justification for insisting my job requires me to be sitting in this fixed, 15 sq foot room, 20 miles from my home.

  As one of my Twitter correspondents wrote in response to Goldberg’s story, “There has to be something better than Lean In or Get Out.”

  Another way to frame the issue is that leaning in when you have significant caregiving responsibilities requires an intensive support structure at home and lots of flexibility at work. Think about simple physics. Imagine a tree leaning over the water or a ballerina on pointe. Lean in too far without a counterweight—an anchoring root system, the supporting arms of another dancer—and you will tip over.

  Such a support system is even more essential for the 42 million women in America whom Maria Shriver describes as “women on the brink.” These women are on the brink of poverty, “living one single incident—a doctor’s bill, a late paycheck, or a broken-down car—away from economic ruin.”

  Tipping over for these women means that they can no longer care properly for their children—some 28 million—and other relatives who depend on them. They are often working two jobs already and suffering not from too little flexibility but too much, as many low-wage service jobs no longer have a guaranteed number of hours a week. They need reliable work at a decent wage that allows them to save for a rainy day; access to affordable, high-quality daycare and early-education programs; paid days off and family leave for the inevitable times that their children or other loved ones who depend on them are sick or in need; and recognition and respect for the care work they do.

  HALF-TRUTH: “YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL IF YOU MARRY THE RIGHT PERSON”

  A SECOND POPULAR AND POWERFUL message that many successful women drive home to their younger peers is that the most important career decision you’re going to make is choosing the right life partner. You must be sure that he or she will be an equal partner at home so that you’ll have an equal chance to take advantage of opportunities at work. Once again, this advice is true in many ways. But it’s also not so simple.

  I could never have had the career I have had without Andy, who 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. As academics at wealthy and progressive universities, we were both entitled to maternity and paternity leave; we each took a semester off, sequentially, after each of our sons was born. That meant Andy quickly became proficient at baby care; he could change, dress, feed, burp, and soothe our sons just as well as I could. I travel much more than he does and always have; I could never have done that—or accepted the kinds of jobs that require such travel—without the assurance that a loving and competent parent would be at home.

  So I certainly believe that marrying a man or woman who will step up to do what it takes to support your career is essential to fulfilling your professional ambitions and having a family at the same time. The problem is that “fifty-fifty” is just too pat. Life rarely works out that way. And it’s much harder to be honest about what it really takes.

  “Equal” Isn’t So Easy

  ALL THESE DISCUSSIONS OF CHOOSING your mate again suffer from the lovely illusion that we can control our lives. As hard as we try, we don’t always make the best choices. The divorce rate, which for people in my age group is nearly half, speaks for itself. I was married at twenty-four and divorced at thirty. My ex-husband and I met right after college; we simply grew in different directions as we developed our professional identities. Because we didn’t have children, our divorce didn’t affect our career trajectories. But if we had had children, we would not have been able to head off to different cities to pursue our respective jobs in law and medicine, much less put in the fifteen-plus hours a day necessary, at least in my case, to get tenure.

  So even if you think you’re choosing well, you might find yourself single again at some point, often with children and an ex-spouse with whom you must now coordinate your life. Divorced parents who share custody often have more time on their own than when they were together because many couples now divide up the time each spends with their children. But when they have the children, they have far less flexibility to handle a work crisis or sudden trip. And the many divorced mothers who have full custody rather than joint custody are much more likely to be both much poorer than they were when they were married and to have no one with whom to share household chores and caregiving responsibilities.

  Even couples who stay together often find they’re quite different people in their thirties, forties, and fifties than they predicted they would be when they first married. At a conference in Colorado just a month after my article came out, a woman told me that she’d gone to Harvard Business School and that very few of her female classmates were where they had expected to be in their careers. They had all married men like themselves, who pledged to be equal partners over the life of the marriage. But when equality actually came down to a choice of his career advancement versus hers, he could not actually imagine slowing down and sacrificing his own ambitions.

  She was speaking anecdotally, but the figures bear her out. A 2014 study of more than 25,000 Harvard Business School graduates—boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials—found that roughly half the women expected to “take primary responsibility for raising children,” which means that they were essentially setting themselves up for carrying a double load while competing with male peers who have more time and energy to spend on work. What’s more, the almost three-fourths of boomer women and two-thirds of Gen X women who did not expect to be the primary caregiver still ended up in that role. To give men credit, they now do much more housework than their fathers did—enough so that detergent commercials are now being pitched at men as well as women. On the whole, however, women still end up carrying much more of the domestic load.

  “Equal” Often Isn’t Enough

  THE IDEALIZED IMAGE OF A fifty-fifty partnership—where you marry a man who is every bit as successful professionally as you are and shares domestic responsibilities equally—is a lot easier for young women to accept than a much more difficult truth: that many of the women who have made it to the top in business have an unequal division of domestic work. Most of the time, these highly successful women have a spouse who carries much more than half the load at home. But while many young women are happy to think about sharing dishes and diaper duties with their husbands, they are much less comfortable acknowledging that if they want to reach the top, their husbands may have to remain in the middle ranks to be able to offer the necessary support at home. They find it difficult to accept the idea that they might be more professionally successful than their husbands, even though the overwhelming majority of men in top jobs have less professionally successful wives.

  This is the dirty little secret that women leaders who come together in places like Fortune magazine’s annual Most Powerful Women Summit don’t talk about: the necessity of a primary caregiver spouse. I have never seen a panel discussion titled, say, “Husbands at Home” or heard an interviewer ask a woman CEO about when her husband decided to subordinate his career to hers
.

  At one such Fortune conference, Marillyn Hewson, who was named CEO of Lockheed Martin in late 2012, talked about growing up in Kansas as one of five children raised by a widowed mother. She was inspirational, telling the audience that her mother had raised her to “believe she could be anything she wanted to be” if she just worked hard enough. In an interview in 2005 she sounded a similar note in offering advice to other corporate women: “Bottom line is, do your best and don’t set limits on what you think you can do.”

  But to make it to the top of Lockheed, Hewson held eighteen different leadership roles in the company. On the day she was appointed, the head of a think tank specializing in defense issues who knew her observed: “A reason she’s in this job is because she never turned down a promotion.” Among the jobs she held along the way were senior positions in Lockheed’s aeronautics and internal auditing divisions, requiring her to move around the country from Georgia to Texas to Maryland to New York. Overall, she moved eight times on her way to the C-suite.

  Could it really be possible for someone on that career trajectory to be an equal caregiver with her husband? To divide up all the family responsibilities fifty-fifty? Hewson has two sons and a lot of money. But even assuming a great deal of paid help, moving a family requires establishing new relationships with schools, doctors, dentists, coaches, and countless providers of different kinds of after-school activities and lessons. And what of all the games and school events that need to be attended? The long evenings helping with increasingly difficult homework? And how likely is it that your spouse will be able to continue a steady career rise in eight different places not of his or her choosing?

  Hewson’s secret appears to be her husband, James, who “elected to focus on raising their two sons…during [her] rise at Lockheed.” He got them through primary and secondary school; by the time Hewson was appointed CEO, both sons were in college. Accounts of Hewson’s appointment are full of information about her professional rise and management style, but far less forthcoming about her domestic arrangements. Fair enough; we are all entitled to a measure of privacy with regard to our families. But given that she had children, her husband was as indispensable to her career success as her own drive and determination.

  I respect and admire Marillyn Hewson, as I do any woman who makes it to the top job. But it is not enough to tell younger women that they need ambition and confidence, or even ambition, confidence, and a partner willing to share domestic duties. Women who plan to accept every promotion and move wherever the company wants them to go will need a spouse who supports them by taking on the full load, or at least the primary load, at home—exactly as male CEOs have always needed.

  Unexpected Desire

  EVEN IF YOU ARE COMPLETELY committed to your career, and even if you do have a spouse who is ready and willing to be a lead caregiver, you might still discover that the value you place on career success versus time with your family shifts as the years go by. In an interview with Hanna Rosin about my Atlantic article, she told me that she guessed the sentence “I wanted to go home” was probably the hardest sentence in the entire article to write. She was right. But though it was very difficult to admit publicly, I cannot choose other than I have chosen while my kids are still at home.

  I’m certainly not alone.

  Rebecca Hughes Parker, a former big-firm litigator and award-winning broadcast journalist in New York who now edits a legal publication, never stopped working even after having twins and then a third child. Her husband has stayed home with all three daughters as the “hands-on parent,” allowing her, in her words, to “reverse the gender roles and be the ‘father’ who goes to work.” Still, she writes in a blog post, even as a “power mom,” her trajectory has not been as straightforward as she expected it to be when she came out of law school. She reflects on the extraordinary pull of her children, pointing out that even with a husband who was home full-time, she felt an intense physical need to be with her baby and to be more a part of her children’s lives than big-firm litigation hours allowed.

  Hughes Parker ultimately asked to reduce her hours by 20 percent and was greeted with the standard “Are you still serious about your career?” question, perhaps precisely because her mate was at home. After all, even though many men want to spend more time with their kids, men with wives at home rarely ask for reduced hours. Hughes Parker was and is deeply committed to her career but needed enough flexibility in her life to be with her toddler before work and make enough school events so that missing one was no big deal. She knows she definitely married the right man but discovered she still could not reverse roles completely.

  Owning up to this desire feels like coming out of the closet. Abigail Pogrebin, a talented producer and writer, talks about “the ambivalence of motherhood and having a career.” She was raised to embrace her career choices but was deeply surprised to discover the pull of her first child once she had him. She said she broke down crying on the tarmac when she was supposed to leave for a reporting trip to Africa; ultimately that pull led her to quit her full-time TV job, which involved a lot of travel, and scale back to writing. “Ambivalence” may seem like a funny term to describe having both a career and children, but it means being pulled in two directions at once. We are pulled not just by duty, but by desire.

  HALF-TRUTH: “YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL IF YOU SEQUENCE IT RIGHT”

  WRITING ABOUT MARILLYN HEWSON’S ASCENSION to CEO of Lockheed Martin, think tank head Loren Thompson told a reporter at the Washington Business Journal: “If you turn down a promotion in these companies, you get left behind.” That, in a nutshell, is why young women should be wary of the mantra “You can have it all; you just can’t have it all at the same time.”

  In theory, it is perfectly possible to fit caring for those you love together even with a high-powered career. Lengthening life expectancies provide plenty of time for education, initiation into a profession, and quick progression up the ladder while work is your primary focus, a slower pace during caregiving years for kids or aging parents, and then a ramp-up into top leadership positions between the ages of fifty-five and seventy-five, or even, particularly for women, sixty and eighty. But we are not there yet. In practice, all too often Thompson’s observation holds. Get off the leadership track, even for a short time, and you cannot get back on.

  In the past few years, I’ve met a handful of inspirational women who have succeeded in starting legal careers later in life, whether in their forties or even their early fifties. But their number is dwarfed many times over by the number of women who start as associates in big law firms in their early thirties, put in the kind of performance that gets them on a partnership track, but then shift to part-time work after the birth of their first or more likely second child and take themselves out of the partnership competition for good. In a New York Times article about the dearth of female partners, Karen M. Lockwood, a former partner at Howrey LLP and currently the president and executive director of the National Institute for Trial Advocacy, used a term that was coined by Joan C. Williams: “the maternal wall.”

  Lockwood says the wall is “built on the unstated assumption among male partners that women who return to firms after having children will automatically be less willing to work hard or will be less capable than they were prior to that—resulting in less-choice assignments or less-senior postings.”

  The obvious answer is to make partner first and then have children. But that choice of sequence often simply isn’t up to us.

  Family Planning

  AS I’VE MENTIONED, I WAS first married at twenty-four and divorced at thirty. I remarried at thirty-five. Being single between thirty and thirty-five (those were still the old-fashioned days when it never occurred to me to have a child without a husband) meant that nothing stood in the way of my getting tenure at the University of Chicago Law School but determination and hard work. Andy and I were very much in love, but we were commuting between Cambridge and Chicago. That meant, in the two-week stints between visits, I could sta
y up and work whenever I needed to. And even on those wonderful weekends we had together, we were still two young academics both trying to get tenure, so we spent plenty of time hanging out laptop to laptop.

  It honestly never occurred to me that we wouldn’t be able to have children as soon as we started trying, which in our case was immediately after we got married in the fall of 1993. Edward was born three years later, when I was thirty-eight. After six months of trying on our own and eighteen months of various fertility treatments, he was conceived by in vitro fertilization (IVF). Those intervening two years were the worst period of my life. But we were lucky. We got pregnant on our first try with IVF; our second son was conceived naturally soon after we started trying, so by forty I had tenure and two biological sons. (Andy, however, who started teaching after I did and faced a much longer tenure track, was very worried that parenting two young children would make it much harder for him to get tenure.)

  Many women of my generation and the generation just ahead of me were not so lucky. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the fecundity of women decreases “gradually but significantly” up until age thirty-two, then it starts really going downhill after thirty-seven. Statistically, IVF is also less successful in women as they age. In her book Creating a Life, published in 2002, Sylvia Ann Hewlett reported that 42 percent of the women she had interviewed in corporate jobs had not had children by age forty and that most deeply regretted it.