Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  Still, let’s not indulge in revisionist history, where we pretend that the trade-off between being a full-time caregiver and a full-time breadwinner was traditionally equal and both sexes would have been happy with more of what the other had. After all, Carl Friedan, Betty’s husband, didn’t write a book called The Masculine Mystique describing a “problem with no name” afflicting men. Men have not complained about being financially dependent, left in poverty when their wives ran off with younger male secretaries. Men have never been regarded as the weaker sex, less capable of reason or brilliance. Men have not had to fight for equal pay for equal work. And men still have far more control over the levers of power and influence in American society than women.

  HALF-TRUTH: “CHILDREN NEED THEIR MOTHERS”

  I SPEND A LOT OF time being driven back and forth to the train station to catch Amtrak to Washington or New Jersey Transit to New York. One of my favorite local taxi drivers, whom I’ll call Steve, is a fount of stories and folk wisdom. He is a little older than I am, with three grown kids and a couple of grandkids. He’s devoted both to his wife and to the memory of his own mother. He has very fixed ideas on what men and women are good at, and not so good at. And he tells me regularly, with the confidence born both of conviction and life experience, “Children need their mothers.”

  What he means is that mothers give children something special, something children cannot live without, something that fathers cannot supply. He means that mothering is distinct and different from fathering, that children cannot fully thrive without their mother’s care. He means it as a compliment to mothers—that they provide a special and irreplaceable mother love. But I hear it as a statement of the natural order of things, a mantra that ends any discussion of genuinely equal parenting.

  Of course children do need their mothers. And their fathers. And their grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, and close family friends who will follow them on Facebook and look out for them during the years when parental advice, or even conversation, suddenly becomes unendurable. “Children need their mothers” is true. But “Children need their mothers more than they need other loving adults in their lives” is false.

  The one time children genuinely cannot do without their biological mothers is during pregnancy. Even surrogate and adopted babies need someone to gestate them. Particularly in the United States, we don’t always recognize that enough. Along with Liberia and Papua New Guinea, we are one of the few countries that doesn’t offer paid maternity leave. The unpaid leave we do offer only covers women who work for companies that have fifty or more employees and who have been at those companies for more than a year.

  Even if you have an understanding employer who provides adequate leave, pregnancy can still throw you—and your career—for a loop. I remember, when I was teaching at Harvard Law School, one of my younger colleagues announced that she was planning to take a two-week maternity leave, much as Marissa Mayer did when she became CEO of Yahoo seven months into a pregnancy. In both cases I thought to myself, I certainly hope everything goes smoothly, but clearly this is your first pregnancy! What about an unexpected Cesarean section, as happened with my first son? Or other complications? My experience with our second son, who was born three weeks early, shows that even with the very best medical care available it is still possible to have medical problems that can land you in bed for nearly a month. Virtually every mother I know has a similar story about what she didn’t expect when she was expecting.

  All that said, after pregnancy, birth, and breast-feeding, nothing a mother does can’t be done equally well by a father (and plenty of fathers bottle-feed breast milk to their babies). Yet the stereotypes and cultural expectations about mothers remain out-sized when compared to the expectations about fathers, even as we try to challenge them. No one wrote a book called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Father. No one wrote a book called Perfect Madness: Fatherhood in the Age of Anxiety talking about the unrealistic expectations suddenly placed on fathers. No one developed a theory of good-enough fathering, telling dads they did not need to be perfect parents to create thriving children.

  The Oscar-winning movie Kramer vs. Kramer addressed exactly this issue. The movie opens with Meryl Streep as a beautiful young mother sitting by the bedside of her six-year-old son, Billy, steeling herself to leave him and divorce his father, played by Dustin Hoffman. At the outset of the movie, Hoffman’s character, a successful ad executive, is so preoccupied with work he doesn’t know what grade his son is in. But over time as a single parent, Hoffman learns to be a fully engaged dad and takes a less stressful job. Streep’s character returns after this evolution and after a nasty custody battle is awarded custody of Billy. Even though she abandoned him completely, the judge believes that the child is best raised by his mother. (Ultimately, Streep gives the child back to his dad, realizing that he’s better off with Hoffman.)

  Kramer vs. Kramer came out in 1979, more than thirty-five years ago. But astonishingly, in light of the tens of millions of divorces since and substantial changes in the custody laws, we are still clinging to and having to combat the deep assumption that a mother’s love and care are somehow better and more essential than a father’s, even when that father has time and energy that the mother does not.

  And really, what are we to say to gay fathers, if it is only mothers who matter? Despite the fact that numerous studies have shown that children raised by gay parents are just as well-adjusted as children raised by straight parents, our culture hasn’t caught up with these truths. Frank Ligtvoet, a gay dad, wrote a moving essay in The New York Times about his experience raising a daughter and a son with his partner. Ligtvoet’s children were adopted in an open adoption, and their biological mother remains part of their lives and part of their birth narrative. Even so, when Ligtvoet is doing something like picking a sick child up from school, the world looks askance at him. “Every step we as a family take outside in public comes with a question from a stranger about the mother of the children: a motherless child seems unthinkable,” Ligtvoet writes.

  What children need above all is love, stability, stimulation, care, nurture, and consistency. Those are things that can come from an array of caregivers. Stability is key here, no matter what the parental arrangement is. A study from Ohio State showed that children from stable one-parent homes (homes where the caregiver was always single, from birth) fared as well on test scores as children from stable married homes. Conversely, a 2013 report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation demonstrates that the biggest barriers to a child’s social, emotional, and physical well-being are rooted in poverty. It’s much easier, though, for pundits to fall back on the crutch of long-held cultural norms—that children need their mothers—than it is to confront and attempt to solve the more serious, endemic issues facing children.

  HALF-TRUTH: “A MAN’S JOB IS TO PROVIDE”

  THE ORIGINS OF THE DEEPLY held assumption and conviction that it is “a man’s job to provide” are actually biblical, from the New Testament. Saint Paul writes to Timothy, a young priest, that “if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.”

  Understood as a command to take responsibility for those you love—those you either brought into the world or who cared for you in various ways—the injunction to provide is uncontroversial. Anyone who cares for anyone else is a provider. We provide love, food, clothing, shelter, nurture, education, solace, support, nursing, stimulation, and many other things for one another’s benefit. In an industrial or post-industrial economy, some of us provide income, in the form of money coming in from the outside in return for labor or investment. Others of us convert that income into the necessities and luxuries of life. Without income, there is nothing to convert, but without that conversion, the income itself cannot sustain life.

  Understood as a command to men only to provide income for the support of their households, however, Saint Paul’s dictum has very different and much more negative impl
ications. There are similar precepts in chapter 4 of the Quran: “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women, because Allah has given the one more [strength] than the other, and because they support them from their means.” But why does “providing” or “supporting” mean money rather than care? The production of food rather than the preparation of it? The growing of flax rather than the spinning of it? The purchase of a car rather than the driving of it? The building of a house rather than the making of a home?

  Still, the idea that men have to provide is taken literally and quite seriously. Though stay-at-home dads have received considerable media coverage of late, a mere 2 million men identified themselves as such in 2012. Only 8 percent of Americans say they believe that children are better off with dads at home, compared with more than half who say children are better off with a stay-at-home mom. Furthermore, when Pew Research asked the question “How important is it for a man to be able to support a family financially if he wants to get married?” almost two-thirds of respondents said very important. When asked the same question with a gender flip, only a third of Americans say it is very important for women to be able to support a family before she gets married.

  These ingrained cultural assumptions, however, do not track with economic reality. The waves of globalization that hit us in the 1990s and 2000s created outsourcing opportunities that hit traditionally male factory jobs much harder than the traditionally female sectors of education and medicine. The resulting shift in economic power from men to women has prompted books like The Richer Sex and The End of Men. One simple statistic says it all: 40 percent of American women are the primary breadwinners in their families. That number includes single mothers, but it still tracks a major trend.

  The even bigger story is the way in which economic trends in the United States since the 1980s have been hard on everyone outside of the educated elite. Most families with two adults have responded by sending Mom to work. Senator Elizabeth Warren and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi dubbed this development the “two-income trap.” When their book of the same name came out in 2003—more than a decade ago—average mortgage expenses had risen seventy times faster than the average father’s income. In the intervening years, fixed costs have risen further; wages have continued to stagnate or even decline; and in the post-recession universe, jobs are even more precarious, particularly for people without a college education. For all these families, it is equally the woman’s job to provide, even if she does not necessarily frame it in those terms.

  And despite the resistance to the idea of stay-at-home dads, a growing number of men say that they are committed to caregiving. Nearly 50 percent of millennial men say that being a good parent is one of the most important things in their lives, compared with 39 percent of Gen X men. In her book The Richer Sex, journalist Liza Mundy talks to many happy stay-at-home dads, like Danny Hawkins. His wife, Susan, is a senior VP with the Henry Ford Health System. Danny used to be in financial services, but he hated the long hours, so he stepped back to take care of the couple’s two daughters. “I have told Susie several times that my job is to make her life easier….And I like doing it,” Hawkins said to Mundy. Though fewer companies are offering paternity leave, more men are taking advantage of whatever leave is available. According to Mundy in an article in The Atlantic, in the decade since the state of California started offering paid paternity leave, “the percentage of ‘bonding leaves’ claimed by men has risen from 18.7 in 2005 and 2006 to 31.3 in 2012 and 2013.”

  I would not counsel my teenage sons to make it their life plan to marry a successful woman any more than I would counsel a daughter to marry a successful man as her meal ticket. If things go sour—a lost job, a divorce—a person of either gender who leaves the labor force for a prolonged period of time is vulnerable. But neither would I tell them that it is their job to provide for their families in the sense of bringing in income. I tell them that it is a man’s job to provide, and a woman’s too. Both are responsible for providing the combination of income and nurture that allows those who depend on them to flourish.

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  HALF-TRUTHS IN THE WORKPLACE

  Advice on how to achieve a sane work-life balance has become a cottage industry. Numerous books on the subject have been published within the past few years alone, many of which I’ve read with pleasure. But they are all aimed at workers, overwhelmingly women, who are presumed to have the responsibility of stretching the twenty-four hours in a day to cover an impossible and never-ending list of things to get done. Why not tackle this issue from a different angle? Perhaps the problem is not with women, but with work.

  American workers all over the socioeconomic spectrum, from hotel housekeepers to surgeons, have stories about working twelve- to sixteen-hour days (often without overtime pay), experiencing anxiety attacks and constant exhaustion. Public health experts have begun talking about stress as an epidemic. Indeed, the United States is one of the only industrialized countries that does not require paid sick leave, time off during the week, or vacation days.

  In 2014 alone, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and Washington Post reporter Brigid Schulte each wrote a bestselling book about stressed-out American workers, another sign that we’re desperate for solutions to our currently unsustainable pace of work. Desperate for solutions, but still trapped in a culture that values quantity over quality, assuming that he who works most works best. Or, less poetically, that he who takes time off is a wimp.

  This underlying culture makes a mockery of so many purported work-life “fixes.” They are never going to achieve real equality between men and women in the workplace, at the top or the bottom, no matter how hard employers try to make workplaces more family-friendly by adopting policies aimed at women. They will not work because they are at best half-measures based on half-truths.

  The first half-truth is that the issue of work-life balance is a “women’s problem.” If we define it that way, then it is up to women to find or at least implement the solution. The second is that employers can make room for caregiving by offering flextime and part-time arrangements. While these policies certainly represent progress over rigid “all-in or get out” workplaces, they’re not nearly enough for many workers with caregiving responsibilities. Third is our assumption that wanting “work-life balance”—or even just wanting a life outside of work—signals a lack of commitment to that work. That assumption reflects a mindset that promotes men with full-time wives and no lives.

  Once again, a half-truth is just that—it’s not wholly false. But it often obscures a bigger, deeper truth, something that we do not want or do not choose to face. Yet if we cannot even be honest about what the problem is and what it would actually take to fix it, we cannot possibly succeed.

  It’s time for some truth telling in the office.

  HALF-TRUTH: “IT’S A WOMEN’S PROBLEM”

  FLORIDA STATE SOCIOLOGIST IRENE PADAVIC, Harvard Business School professor Robin Ely, and Erin Reid from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business were asked to conduct a detailed study of a midsized global consulting firm where top management thought they had a “women’s problem.” The firm had a paucity of women at the highest levels—just 10 percent of partners were women, compared with nearly 40 percent of female junior employees. The firm’s brass assumed that their company was shedding women along the way because of work-family conflict on the part of workers who had to care for families, i.e., women. As one partner put it:

  What do I want people to worry about when they wake up first thing in the morning? For Business Development people, I want them to worry about business development. For project managers, I want them to worry about the project. Women are the Project Manager in the home, so it is hard for them to spend the necessary time, energy, and effort to be viewed here as senior leaders.

  The plethora of women’s leadership groups and support networks at companies across the United States all grow out of the same perception: the lack of women at the top is due to something women themsel
ves are doing or not doing: a lack of ambition, the difficulty of juggling multiple roles at home and at work, or insufficient support from other women.

  This depiction of the problem is half true, in that it is indeed a problem that is showing up much more among women than among men. But it is a problem that affects some women much more than others, and it is also a problem for a growing number of men. By thinking of it as a “women’s problem” we are missing a much bigger truth.

  It’s Not a Women’s Problem, It’s a Care Problem…

  THOUGH WOMEN HAVE MADE UNPRECEDENTED progress in the workforce over the past forty years, what doesn’t always come through in the statistics is the enormous and enduring discrepancy between women who have caregiving responsibilities and those who do not. As I noted in the last chapter, in 2013 women earned 82 cents on a man’s dollar. But hidden within that average is a stark difference. Single women without children made 96 cents on the male dollar. Married mothers? They make 76 cents. Indeed, many writers have pointed out that motherhood is now a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender is.

  This pattern is even clearer if we look through the lens of age. Girls and young women are surpassing boys in high school, college, and many graduate schools and often draw higher salaries during their early years in the workforce. Overall, women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four now make 93 percent of what their male contemporaries do. But those gains dissipate once they become mothers.