Unfinished Business

by Anne-Marie Slaughter

  If that’s what life is about, why don’t these men stop working, or scale back their careers, and spend more time caring for their families? There’s the hypocrisy. If caring for those we love is just as important and valuable as competing in the marketplace or the military, then we should put our money where our mouth is by finding a range of ways to compensate both paid and unpaid caregivers, with prestige if not with cash.

  And yet we don’t, because there remains a hidden bias in American society, even among those of us who believe that men and women are equally talented human beings. I’ve called this the “competition bias”: the reflexive way in which we value competition over care. But perhaps, following Betty Friedan, this bias is better understood as a mystique—an ineffable something that we are drawn to and strive to imitate without fully understanding why.

  So let us call it “the competitive mystique.” It is a mystique that is equally attractive to men and women—the sense that they are succeeding in setting and achieving their individual goals and winning out over others. More generally, it is a mystique that has steadily grown as the world itself has become more competitive over the past few decades, largely through the twin forces of globalization and technology. More people are continually competing in more ways.

  Overcoming the competitive mystique means dismantling its aura of mystery and power. Bluntly, it means asking ourselves why we think people who have made more money than anyone else or risen to the top of a particular hierarchy by beating out others are automatically role models. What about their values? How do they treat other people? What was the cost to their families—the people who brought them into the world, people they married, people they were responsible for bringing into the world? How can that part of the story not be relevant to who they are and how we should think about them?

  Overcoming the competitive mystique also means rethinking our assessment of the relative difficulty of different professions. In the title of this chapter, I deliberately asked whether managing money is harder than managing kids to challenge us all. Many of us, deep down, agree with the claim made by the economics student we heard from earlier: that the work we do as professionals is “harder,” in the sense that it takes more skill and education, than the work we do as parents or caregivers.

  I certainly understand and respect paying for expertise, but over the past three years, I’ve come to think that although much of the work I do in foreign policy and nonprofit management is intellectually harder than being a mother, parenting is emotionally harder and often far more perplexing. I have also come to believe that we should think about paid care work, from home health service to therapy to teaching, the same way we think about any other profession, including money management. You can do it at a basic level and at a highly advanced level. Your compensation should depend on a combination of your education, experience, and the value we place on the activity as a society.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m plenty competitive. I’m the granddaughter of an all-American football player recruited by the NFL; I got none of his athletic ability but I can still remember being in the second-best reading group in first grade and being determined to make it into the first reading group. Competition, with myself as well as with others, has helped drive many of the best things I have done in my life. But loving and caring for my family and friends, teaching and mentoring my students, helping and watching staff members grow into and then out of their jobs is every bit as rewarding. In each of those cases I get as much as I give. Indeed, I often feel that even if my work dies with me, enabling and empowering others will live on in ways I cannot predict.

  Overall then, I am not proposing to devalue competition; I am proposing to revalue care, to elevate it to its proper place as an essential human instinct, drive, and activity. If we can actually teach ourselves to value competition and care equally, to think that managing money and managing a household full of other human beings are equally valid and valuable occupations, we will be on the way to real equality between men and women. We will no longer see work and family as a woman’s issue but as a parent’s issue, a son’s or daughter’s issue, a spouse’s or sibling’s issue, a devoted friend’s issue. An issue for anyone who works and who also loves and cares for someone else.

  —

  It won’t be easy. My generation of feminists was raised to think that the competitive work our fathers did was much more important than the caring work our mothers did. We were socialized to believe that work that leads to winning, to individual achievement and success, is much more important than work that leads to giving, to empowering others to succeed. The generations after us have gotten that message ever more strongly, as girls have been raised to believe that of course they can combine their careers with caregiving, that that is what being a successful woman means. Moreover, for younger generations the competition—for everything—has steadily become more intense. Simply consider how much harder it is to get into a good college and get a decent job with decent wages and opportunities for promotion in 2014 than it was in 1974, 1984, or 1994.

  I do not question the importance of equipping girls and boys with equal education, encouraging them to have equal aspirations and to gain sufficient independence that they can support themselves financially. From that perspective, the message we send our children about the importance of competition is absolutely right. But the message that a woman’s traditional work of caregiving—anchoring the family by tending to material needs and nourishing minds and souls—is somehow less important than a man’s traditional work of earning an income to support that family and advance his own career is false and harmful. It is the result of a historical bias, an outdated prejudice, a cognitive distortion that is skewing our society and hurting us all.

  In the long quest for gender equality, women first had to gain power and independence by emulating men. But as we attain that power and independence, we must not automatically accept the traditional man’s view—which is really the view of only a minority of men—about what matters in the world.

  A Princeton alumna of the class of 2010, Cale Salih, wrote me a powerful letter shortly after my article came out. She began with the reflection, “I have often wondered why I should feel guilty for simply daring to say yes to a momentous personal opportunity.” She continued:

  For the past two years, I have been consistently congratulated for making career choices that reflected great ambition, but often came at the expense of personal relationships. Now, I am considering moving to be closer to my long-distance boyfriend. In conversations with people in my own cohort, I find myself making up pretexts to hide the real reason for my move. On occasions that I do reveal the most important motivation behind my move, I am often met with subtle but noticeable eye rolls or, worse, patronizing lectures: “You’re too young to make life-altering choices for a boy.” While making life-altering choices for a relationship is seen as weak or naive, making similar sacrifices for a job is often seen as a sign of strength and independence.

  No more do I want to be unemployed than do I want to be the power woman who goes home after work to eat moo shoo pork alone in her apartment. Why, then, should I be proud of investing in one goal, and be embarrassed of investing in the other?

  The social pressures that Cale is responding to are very real. In January 2013, Princeton senior Margaret Fortney published a reflection in the campus newspaper describing her friend “Molly,” who, toward the end of a conversation in which the two young women were contemplating their futures, “leaned in closer to me” and whispered: “I don’t want to go to grad school. I don’t even know if I want a career. I want to get married, stay at home and raise my kids.” Distraught after this admission, Molly said, “What’s wrong with me?”

  When I was a Princeton student in the late 1970s I certainly would have said that an Ivy League alumna who did not pursue a career was letting down our side. That was still an era in which many men questioned Princeton’s decision to go coed at the beginning of the decade, precisely on
the grounds that women would just “waste their education” by dropping out of the workforce and having kids. Indeed, if I am truly honest with myself, I would have to admit that a good part of me still questioned the value of being a stay-at-home mom right up until the set of experiences that led to my writing my Atlantic article.

  But no longer. I would advise all students fortunate enough to attend a top college or university to ensure that they will be able to use their education over the course of their lives to be able to support themselves and to enrich their lives and the lives of others, certainly including children. I continue to believe as an article of faith that the vast majority of people want both: to advance their own goals and create an identity through rewarding work, and to be able to care for their loved ones.

  I believe that individual women and men land in different places on the spectrum between extremely caring and extremely competitive. My aunt Mary falls way over on the competitive end. She was a tennis champion in the 1950s; was the first woman to win a varsity letter at the University of Virginia, on the men’s team; and is still winning happily at golf and bridge at eighty. My hairdresser, Aziz, is highly entrepreneurial, but he is also a born nurturer. Caring for others is what makes him happy.

  Moreover, the best competitors are often players who think about others enough to be able to play well on a team, subjugating their own ego to be able to make the pass that will allow another teammate to score. Similarly, the best caregivers are those who can take enough time for themselves to avoid burnout; the best managers, those who know how to get their team’s competitive juices flowing but also to look out for the needs of individual team members. Valuing care can mean understanding the many ways that care and competition complement each other.

  If we succeed in freeing ourselves from the competitive mystique, understanding that competition is a valuable human drive but no more valuable than care, we will no longer see the liberation of women as freedom only to compete. On the flip side, if we truly believe that care is just as valuable as competition, then we will realize that men who are only breadwinners are missing out on something deeply satisfying and self-improving. And if both men and women traded off caring and competition in more equal measure, then it would become much easier to customize both workplaces and careers to allow time for both.

  Such a vision may sound utopian, but it could happen tomorrow. It just needs one thing…

  6

  THE NEXT PHASE OF THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IS A MEN’S MOVEMENT

  There’s an all-too-common story of gender discrimination in America today, one that’s now as iconic as the old tales of women entering the workforce and being asked to serve coffee. It’s the story of what happens when a fully competent dad meets a well-intentioned but clueless woman at the park or the grocery store. In an article titled “I Hate Being Called a Good Dad” posted on the New York Times blog Motherlode, Matt Vilano writes:

  It started the way all of our twice-monthly trips to Target do—the 1-year-old in a backpack on my back, the 3-year-old leading the charge, yanking my hand like a sled dog with a view of the open trail.

  We charged through the automatic doors, waving at ourselves on the video screen as always. We grabbed a shopping cart. We stopped at the complimentary sanitary wipes. Then I engaged in what my Big Girl calls “the wipedown”: A comprehensive (read: wildly neurotic) disinfecting of any part of the cart she possibly might touch.

  About halfway through the ritual—let’s estimate nine wipes in—I noticed a middle-aged woman watching us, smiling.

  “You’re a good dad,” she remarked, in a tone that implied she had just seen a Sasquatch.

  For Vilano, this incident reflects a “heinous double standard,” where he is praised for behavior that in a mother would be regarded as absolutely routine. Andrew Romano, author of a Newsweek cover story on masculinity, calls it the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

  Just for a moment, flip it and imagine that as a woman you’re praised for writing a good report at work, a completely routine action for a man, and praised in a way that makes clear that the person who is complimenting you didn’t actually expect you could do it so well. For years when Andy and I first knew each other, I would say something and he would respond, “That’s really smart,” in a tone that made it clear he was slightly surprised. I would blow up, of course. But Vilano concludes on exactly this point: “The act of labeling someone ‘a good dad’ suggests that most dads are, by our very nature as fathers, somehow less than ‘good.’ ”

  To counter these assumptions and carefully prescribed roles, men need a movement of their own. Most of the pervasive gender inequalities in our society—for both men and women—cannot be fixed unless men have the same range of choices with respect to mixing caregiving and breadwinning that women do. To make those choices real, however, men will have to be respected and rewarded for making them: for choosing to be a lead parent; to defer a promotion or work part-time to spend more time with their children, their parents, or other loved ones; to take paternity leave or to ask for flexible work hours; to reject a culture of workaholism and relentless face time.

  Men need to hear this message not as admonition so much as permission: not what they should do, but what they can do. They are free to be caregivers too, and they can be just as competent in these roles as the women in their lives. Women need to hear this message as encouragement to rethink how we imagine and value the men in our lives.

  Real equality for men and women needs a men’s movement to sweep away the gender roles that we continue to impose on men even as we struggle to remove them from women. To ensure that we socialize boys to believe that they can be anything they want to be, from full-time father to elementary school teacher to investment banker, on an equally valued continuum. To make providing for a family about time as much as about money. To make caregiving cool. To make being a family man just as masculine as being a he-man.

  Moreover, they will have to be respected and rewarded as men. In a column entitled “How Brad Pitt Brings Out the Best in Dads,” Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper discusses the value of seeing an undoubtedly masculine movie star “with a toddler strapped to his chest.” Pitt and his fellow baby-toting movie star dads are not actually spending their days chasing children, of course—most have an army of paid help. But the subconscious role modeling helps, Kuper argues. The images have the same impact on men that pictures of women CEOs have on women. Men are free to be caregivers too; they can be just as competent in these roles as the women in their lives; and yes, women will still be attracted to them.

  For all the skeptics who shake their heads and think I’m challenging nature itself, consider just how certain men have been for centuries that the highest and best role for women was as wives and mothers, daughters and sisters, nurturing and caring for others. My eyes were opened on this score by a letter from a young man who identified himself as “an African American male with a degree from a top 10 university and a salary of near 100k.” I’ll call him Charles. He took issue with my statement in The Atlantic that when choices have to be made, women seem to feel a deeper imperative to trade off work in favor of family than men do. He asked, “Couldn’t you write a ‘Why Men Can’t Have it All’ article with the exact same statistics arguing that social pressures on men force them to put work over family and women are better off because they more often get the family part?”

  Anticipating my skepticism, Charles went on: “One response might be that because we haven’t really heard that from men they likely don’t feel this way. However that would be to deny the larger implications of social pressures on men to be manly in general.” But of course, deep down, as a woman who has been surrounded by men all her life, I think I know what men think and want, whether I admit it or not. Charles was one step ahead of me here too. “When it was the norm that women were dutiful silent wives,” he wrote, “I’m sure many men believed women didn’t want careers. As a man, I may choose a high-powered career over child re
aring, and be deeply saddened by it, but I won’t cry, or complain, or let on at all publicly. Instead, it remains the norm for me to have to suck it up and take it like a man.”

  Check and checkmate. None of us are free from the biases we grow up with, imbibing them from the nursery on. Indeed, even in the process of writing this book, I realized that I never ask my teenage sons to clean up the kitchen the way I did as a girl, but instead to do more “boy” chores like taking out the trash, the kinds of chores my brothers did. They set the table and bus their plates, but I think that if I had daughters, I would have asked them to rinse those plates, load the dishwasher, wash the pots, and wipe down the counters long since. So we all have plenty of work to do. As men often discovered in the first couple of decades of the women’s movement, it’s tough to retrain yourself after years of knee-jerk thinking.

  The majority of American women have demanded over the last half century that society reject and revise traditional norms about what women want and what they can do. It is time to do the same for men.

  WHAT MEN WANT

  ABOUT SIX MONTHS AFTER MY Atlantic article came out, I had dinner with a group of Princeton undergraduates. We talked about a number of things that were on their minds: politics in general, the presidential debates, work and family. A number of students asked foreign policy questions, and then several young women asked me about the responses I received to the article. After about ten minutes of that conversation, I saw that the men in the room—roughly 50 percent of the attendees—had gone completely silent. When I commented on the suddenly one-sided nature of the conversation, one young man volunteered that he “had been raised in a strong feminist household” and considered himself to be fully supportive of male-female equality, but he was reluctant to say anything for fear he would be misunderstood. A number of the other guys around the table nodded in agreement.