No, Virginia, you can’t have it all
Posted on June 21st, 2012
If you haven’t yet read “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” in the Atlantic, it’s well worth the time. Anne-Marie Slaughter discusses why women can’t have a family and a high-powered career at the same time — and do both well. Yes, she come out and says it.
The article is much, much more than the excerpts below, but I did like that she blows away “the half-truths we hold dear” including:
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It’s possible if you are just committed enough.
Our usual starting point, whether we say it explicitly or not, is that having it all depends primarily on the depth and intensity of a woman’s commitment to her career. That is precisely the sentiment behind the dismay so many older career women feel about the younger generation. They are not committed enough, we say, to make the trade-offs and sacrifices that the women ahead of them made.
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It’s possible if you marry the right person.
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Still, the proposition that women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately) assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case.***
It’s possible if you sequence it right.
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The most important sequencing issue is when to have children. Many of the top women leaders of the generation just ahead of me—Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, Patricia Wald, Nannerl Keohane—had their children in their 20s and early 30s, as was the norm in the 1950s through the 1970s. A child born when his mother is 25 will finish high school when his mother is 43, an age at which, with full-time immersion in a career, she still has plenty of time and energy for advancement.Yet this sequence has fallen out of favor with many high-potential women, and understandably so. People tend to marry later now, and anyway, if you have children earlier, you may have difficulty getting a graduate degree, a good first job, and opportunities for advancement in the crucial early years of your career. Making matters worse, you will also have less income while raising your children, and hence less ability to hire the help that can be indispensable to your juggling act.
As someone who “opted out” for the benefit of my daughter and my family — and not for my own benefit — it’s a welcome, honest, harsh look at the reasons why.
One quibble is I know men who have made similar sacrifices — and I think they have paid a price for it in their careers, albeit one that’s easier to bounce back from.
Take the time to read the whole article when you can.
The most fascinating aspect of the article is the difference in attitude between older women and younger women in looking at “balance.” There is an attitude among older women that the younger women are giving up in opting out of the high-stakes game, whereas the younger women are looking at the older women whose children were raised by nannies and saying, we want the career, but we also want time with our children. Where is the model for that?
I loved this article. Though I didn’t belong to the high-powered position club, I did have a better paying job with more potential for advancement prior to kids: I was the therapy manager in the rehab department of a hospital. There was potential for me to move into district management, as well.
And I quit.
The hours were hard, even in the years before kids: ten hour days (salaried, unfortunately), working weekends and holidays with floating days off.
In the end, what mattered was having a schedule to match the kids’. So now I work in the schools, where both the pay and the respect is less, and often the stress is greater. But, for the most part, I can schedule the after school stuff to match the kids’ schedules, and do the extra stuff (IEPs, lesson plans, returning emails) after they’ve gone to bed.
I’m as ambitious as I ever was. I still have goals, and I will get there eventually. But for now, my ambitions have changed. I want to be present as my parents never were.
As much as women agonize over these decisions, the best bet is just to act like a guy. I refuse to be guilted. I miss the prestige (such as it was) and I miss the paycheck. I miss having a “calling” and being told how much I was helping people. But now I am a a better parent, I’m not wasting 30 hours a week in a car, and I have time to be creative again. It’s not perfect, it’s not having it all, but it’s my life and I’m OK with it.
The notion that young women are somehow not ambitious enough is incredibly obnoxious. It just smacks of a ‘kids these days!’ sort of attitude. I think we’re more likely to have seen women struggle ahead of us, as the article notes, and try to avoid those pitfalls in advance.
I agree. It really smacked of generational snottiness. As if these women — who had no debt, who had husbands with great salaries who could afford for them to recreate their careers later — are living the same life.