Anne Marie Slaughter's article in the Atlantic caused quite a buzz yesterday. It's a long enough piece, so there's plenty for the critics and the cheerleaders to latch onto.
Slaughter's article was significant, because her work credentials are unmatched. She really did do everything right. She's not a semi-employed blogger who's complaining about the system. That makes her statements about the limitations of the office extremely damning and uncomfortable for people who try to minimize the struggles.
There are some criticisms of her ideas from the usual circles. They tend to latch onto Slaughter's ideas about men and women and their commitment to the children. It's funny. That part of her article I completely blipped over it. For me, that was the least interesting part of her article.
Her article is significant because she says that parents want and need to spend time with their children. Elite jobs do not allow this to happen. People who work those jobs have hours that none of you experience. They may not see their children for days at a time. There's no fighting with a spouse about household chores, because a housekeeper does everything. Someone else pays the bills. Someone else keeps track of soccer appointments. You keep track of the people who keep track of those little things.
Now, very few of us are cut out for those elite jobs in the first place. But I do want to see more women in those positions. Is it possible to be an adequate parent when you see your children for an hour a day? Or not at all?
While Slaughter may be primarily about elite women and their jobs, her discussion is useful for the rest of us, because regular jobs aren't that flexible either. Unlike jobs in education, most jobs expect you at a desk from 9 to 5. There are 2 weeks of vacation. With the downturn in the economy, fewer workers are doing twice the usual jobs. Those workers might be home earlier than Slaughter, but their lives are still very complicated. Parents are constantly complaining that they don't get enough time with their children.
I'm trying not to be judgmental about the commentary on this article by young, childless women, but they aren't making it easy for me.
Apt. 11d 
Thank you, Laura, for boiling this down to the essential : “Now, very few of us are cut out for those elite jobs in the first place. But I do want to see more women in those positions. […] While Slaughter may be primarily about elite women and their jobs, her discussion is useful for the rest of us, because regular jobs aren’t that flexible either.”
I just thought you got to the nitty gritty in such an elegant way: if you want more women at the top, things have to change. And if work-life policies change for elites, this will have trickle-down benefits for men, women, and children.
By the way, the top-ranking American male employee, the President of the United States, works from home.
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I was disappointed that people skipped over the important points of the article to either (a) focus on the lede, which is unfortunate because I feel like the article really wasn’t about women but general work/life balance or (b) started accusing Slaughter of helicopter parenting (amusingly by a parent of an infant).
Is it so hard to look past someone’s gender and parenting style to focus on actual issues in our society?
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Elite jobs do not allow this to happen. People who work those jobs have hours that none of you experience.
I think we need some more relaxed elites. They keep working harder, but it doesn’t seem to be helping anybody but the most ambitious portion of the elites. I blame the half-assed SAT-based pseudo-meritocracy and the cross-regional homogenizing of the elites.
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I loved many things about this article. It was nuanced and fresh despite previous articles from writers that have addressed similar things.
But what I liked most, was the admission that she needed to be around for her teenage sons. Rarely do parents admit that even the teenage years require available parents. (They tend to focus on infant/toddlerhood.)
I also like how she emphasized the fact that she is still working full time, but that she has more autonomy and flexibility in her current schedule, which allows her to take care of family business.
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I don’t see this as a “woman and work” issue. In the Slaughter case, the question becomes, can a couple hold down two high pressure jobs in two different states, while raising a family to upper-class standards? The mother may feel that her son needs her at home now, but is that true? Or is she set upon the superhuman standard of showing up for every school conference or family counseling session, even though she works out of state?
(anecdote and personal opinion!) Some of the profesors I’ve met are fanatic practitioners of the Ivy-League-or-bust style of childraising. It can be very difficult to be the non-genius child of two professors. Think of Amy Chua’s book. Her family was only one of the ambitious professor families in New Haven. I presume Princeton’s similar.
So, was her son in grave difficulties? Who can tell? He might be a normal middle schooler.
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“Some of the profesors I’ve met are fanatic practitioners of the Ivy-League-or-bust style of childraising.”
Good point.
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I loved the article, sent it to all and sundry, and got tired of the comments as well. Absolutely loved the way you said it here: the trickle-down effect of having more women in power, and better work-life balance for all can only be good. I don’t know why that is hard to understand for so many people.
M
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I think Slaughter’s points are valid, but not just for women. I think it’s a crime that many men see their kids an hour or two a day. When B’s job was working his corporate job, he missed the kid’s performances, conferences, birthdays, etc. I think there is something awful about that kind of thing consistently happening, but it was expected and there was no budging.
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“So, was her son in grave difficulties? Who can tell? He might be a normal middle schooler.”
I think I’m prepared to take her word for it, since she had consistently made choices to preserve her career up to that point.
Also having been through this on a small scale – my first grader got demoralized and stopped doing class work in class – I can tell you that at our mildly socialist lovely supportive neighbourhood school, the clear message from the teacher and principal was “well do something at home.”
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I think it goes back to some of Juliet Schor’s writing about productivity. I don’t agree with Schor on many issues but I think she nailed the core issue, that almost all white-collar workplaces and even some blue-collar ones have been for twenty years turning the screws tighter and tighter to produce more for basically static pay. First that happened through technological multipliers, then through longer hours, then through intensified intrusions of work into domestic life. But much of that productivity is performative rather than genuinely value-producing, people have to show more and more fanatic devotion to work in highly visible ways. And often this isn’t about hierarchy, about a boss who is demanding this autocratically. It’s about what we do to ourselves and each other. Academics who have tenure often still anxiously spy upon each other and gossip about the research productivity of the person in the office next door. Middle managers constantly buzz around looking to prove that they’re doing more, more, more even when what they’re doing isn’t wanted or useful. Lawyers have every billing second tracked; doctors work to the clocks that are set by insurance agencies.
I don’t think this is an issue just for women. I think this is the equivalent of secondhand smoke: an invisible poison pervading our air, killing us all slowly, to an end that serves no one except a small group of people selling the poison.
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I’m with Anjali; as a high school teacher, I see the results of this all the time, and my students often have high-flying-career parents. Teenagers don’t say it the way a 3 year old might, but they need you around just as much.
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Timothy Burke is right. People apply peer pressure relative to hours in order to compete. And the higher the competition for the job, the more this is present. Globalization is only making it worse.
The more easily/objectively measured your productivity, the more you are insulated from this kind of crap. One of the reasons I love software: doesn’t matter how many hours you put in, if you can’t get the problem fixed nobody cares about your face time.
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While she is in an Elite position, she was not making an elite salary. Mind you, I’m not saying that her salary was not HUGE, but it was not large enough to provide for the nannies, housekeepers, etc. to be raising her children.
I still haven’t processed through the part about men and women and the commitement to children; however, these articles usually allude to the fact that men are less committed/have less guilt, etc. but don’t make any effor to explain.
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Tim is right. Really right. But there are real dangers for not keeping up with the Jones’ work ethic. Getting fired sucks.
I wish we could do something about those nasty workplace gossipers and spreaders of poison.
But then some of us do this to ourselves voluntarily. I signed on to write an essay. I hate what I wrote yesterday, so I’m doing a complete rewrite as I pack for a family trip to Boston. I’m going to be writing on the bathroom floor of our hotel room until late tonight.
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I’m sure she was paid enough for a staff, Lee. She gives speeches ($) and consults ($). Her husband does the same. They are both at Princeton. If Elizabeth Warren and her husband made nearly $1m, I bet the Slaughter household did better.
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In one of her books, she thanks her in-laws for providing the summer house on Lake Como, Italy so she could finish the book. Funny how none of my relatives own property in Europe. Do yours?
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heh. Mine found my blog last month and I got in trouble over a comment that I buried deep in an old post. Keeping my mouth SHUT.
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“Funny how none of my relatives own property in Europe. Do yours?”
Yes, but they have the excellent excuse of being Europeans.
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I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I really do not think that the “big” career is worth it. I did at one time. But now, I don’t. Before anyone jumps on me, there is a lot between no paid work and elite job. Many, many ways of earning a living. And again, that privilege of choosing this job over that job or part-time over full-time, local job vs. travel is not universally enjoyed.
That being said, I just don’t think that an elite career with all of its sacrifices is worth it. Or less than elite knowing that most men and most women will never even come close to that status of paid work. There aren’t that many of them (the elite jobs). So debating those, as I backtrack a bit, is a bit of a straw person argument.
But the tier below, the jobs where you see your child only on the weekends or an hour a day – if you DO have a choice, is it really worth it? I mean, how can you have any relationship with a spouse or friends or family or kids on that small amount of free time?
So much of our lives happen in those small moments that cannot be scheduled or delegated.
I remember in my 20’s thinking that women who took a lesser job on a slower career track were suckers – now I know that they were the wise ones!
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Certainly critiques of her male-female stereotyping are valid, but I agree with you that they overlook a deep problems. That is, the all-or-nothing mindset (what Joan Williams identifies as the ‘ideal worker’ paradigm) means that individuals dedicated to such jobs and such employers must neglect family, community, culture, art, thoughtfulness, etc. They must live in a way that allows interaction only with other people who are exactly alike. There is no chance of even glimpsing hand how other people live. And these are the people who are — quite rigidly — ruling our society. (Thanks to my friend Kenny for his analysis, which I paraphrase here.)
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To be fair, culture, art, and thoughtfulness are usually really stupid.
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Catherine Johnson has a response to the Slaughter piece. Here are a couple of snippets:
“Anne-Marie Slaughter is talking about a phenomenon I never see addressed in popular articles about “balancing work and family”: the teen years are the hard ones.”
“So I like the fact that this high profile woman has actually spoken, out loud, about what happens to a high profile career when a teenager is in distress.
“That said, I was struck by the list of problems Ms. Slaughter’s son is having:
skipping homework
disrupting classes
failing math
tuning out adults who try to reach him
With the possible exception of the fourth item, all of these issues are school problems, requiring school solutions.”
“Nominally high-performing schools believe it is up to parents to solve school problems. More accurately, nominally high-performing schools believe students don’t actually have school problems. Students have student problems, which stem from the student’s upbringing and genes and have nothing to do with the school one way or another.”
http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2012/06/in-leafy-suburbs.html
[I personally think that homework is a joint home/school issue, because it’s school work that happens to be done at home.]
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Amy, I agree with you and most high-achieving, professional parents wouldn’t be willing to let all of those issues be dismissed as “school problems”. Even if it’s an academic problem, 100%, you want your kid to get that problem solved and get back on track ASAP not when someone manages to stumble upon something approaching a solution. . . or not.
I don’t think it’s helicopter parenting as some have suggested with Slaughter’s behaviour when you see your kid in distress and want to make a difference. The window for doing so is sometimes very small.
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Agree with you–after she left the administration. She certainly would not have been making speeches for money while she was at the State Dept. If she was living out of state, her husband was likely not doing a lot of extra consulting either. All speculative, as I’ve never seen their tax returns either before, during or after her appointment.
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Laura — If you haven’t yet, you might want to check out Daniel Drezner’s blog on foreign policy. He links to some people who are saying that she has a lot of nerve, making plans to put troops in Syria and in harm’s way, and simultaneously whining about how she doesn’t have enough time to be a “Mommy”. It reinforces a lot of the writing on feminist IR — in that the moment she stops behaving like a man at work, and says “Look, I’m a woman and sometimes that creates problems” she’s accused of not having the cojones to make foreign policy. Very interesting . . .
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It was a great piece, but I kept returning to the friend who wouldn’t set the microwave to 1:00 or 2:00, because 1:11 and 2:22 were quicker. Um, is that extra half a second a day going to allow you to read three more words in a report?
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Come to think of it, if you are a child whose mother has a big career, having BIG PROBLEMS may be the only way to get her attention. (I have one high-flying female relative whose younger child is a huge mess, and it’s often occurred to me that that may be a partial explanation.)
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Yes, I agree with Stuart. Microwave woman sounds a little strange.
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AmyP: is it somehow not the father’s problem?
I so agree about the schools issue. Half my work-life stress this year would have vanished if only my kid were not grade levels ahead and bored out of his mind with a teacher who believes it doesn’t matter if he can do long division he has to sit and do the 15 (not exaggerating) counting worksheets. The resulting issues sucked the will out of me.
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“AmyP: is it somehow not the father’s problem?”
He was a SAHD, actually, and VERY devoted to her schooling and activities. It’s always hard to assign casaulity in these situations (individual psychological differences and free will and all that), but I can say for a fact that 1) the daughter had been very vocal about wanting more of her mom’s time and attention for years and 2) she certainly got it after she went kablooey.
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For non-elite job, I would like to see more flexibility from employers. I do think we have made progress, certainly as long as I have been working, things have become more flexible. Or, I’m just really good at negotiating flexibility and I don’t think that is it.
But with regard to elite jobs demanding so much, I have little sympathy. Slaughter took the job in DC because she wanted to influence decisions. She wanted power. And if you want the ability to influence whether or not an 18 year old is humping his gear in Uganda to look for Kony, I really don’t care if reviewing that decision plays hell with your private life. If Sandberg’s decisions can mean that Joe engineer has to look for a job at 55 and his kids suddenly can’t go to college, then she better be reviewing the numbers between 8 and 11pm, one more time.
People who want that kind of power over others get paid well, in money and influence, and if they face a tradeoff, I don’t care. They should face a tradeoff and it should be steep.
Most jobs don’t have that kind of power, and they shouldn’t call for the same sacrifice. I agree with Laura that that is where our focus should be, not on Slaughter’s job
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Louisa, I think the issue isn’t “I’m a mommy” it is the sense that her family is more important than the lives of kids she sends to Syria. If you want to argue that you are the best person to make those decisions, you really do need to demonstrate that you recognize the seriousness and the impact on others as well.
Saying it creates problems isn’t the issue to me, but saying, I’m a mommy and need to pick up my kids, so I’m not going to review this, or I’ll put that off for now and we need to adjust this job to accomodate that is a problem. It is disrespectful to the lives of the people you want to send to Syria.
If you are a middle manager and you put off calling the client until tomorrow – good for you. But that is a different situation than sending soldiers to Syria.
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Ok, I apologize for the repeated posts, but my cousin just called about this article. As background, she is a forensic accountant and a partner in a CPA firm. Her husband has done two tours in Iraq through the National Guard. They have two kids, 11 and 7. Her response with regard to Slaughter is: “Your kid has bad year in school vs my husband going overseas again: Sit your ass back in that chair and get to work”
It’s just the difference between an elite vs a non elite job. Any job that has serious power over others lives, I don’t care if you sacrifice your personal life. If you are a child protection social worker, I think you should be paid much much more, but I don’t care if your personal life sucks because job demands you work long hours and be available 24/7.
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I agree with Tulip about the soldiers, but I think this argument extends beyond the super-elite like Slaughter and others who influence national policy. The work-family balance is hard, and it is not going to stop being hard. It will be harder the smarter, more educated, and more privileged you are, because you have more to offer the world at large. I know small-town lawyers and high school teachers and social workers, big city doctors, former Peace Corps workers, and all sorts of other people who are always aware that the time they spend on their families is time they could be spending helping people who at most times, and by almost all definitions, are less fortunate. They are hungry, scared, uneducated, abused, etc., etc., etc. There always is a lot that could be done for people outside of your family.
The stupid structural issues (requiring “face time” at work, etc.) should of course be dealt with, and in some cases are being dealt with, but the root of the problem is a classic ethical dilemma: what do we owe to other people, and what is the most moral way to spend our time?
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Peace Corps won’t even let you be a volunteer if you have dependent children or a spouse who isn’t also going to be a volunteer, which is one of the reasons why volunteers are generally either very young or at least well into middle age. (I’m not sure how they handle divorced people who are non-custodial parents, but custodial parents simply are not allowed.) When I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 90s, the manual said that they’d only let a volunteer go to 3 months of pregnancy, and then the choices were a) an abortion and return to service or b) end of service.
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I think the Slaughter piece has received as much attention as it has because of its title (which I really, really do not like) and its decision to foreground women, mothers, gender. It might actually have been a more meaningful article had it foregrounded instead the tensions between parenting and work which (as many here have commented) are an equally difficult balance for the increasing number of fathers who choose not to pursue professional ambitions in order to be able to spend more time home with their children. The real problem may be implied in the phrase “having it all,” since it seems that no one can have it all, if part of the all actually includes spending significant time with one’s children, and if high powered jobs actually require as much time commitment as they currently do. Slaughter’s proposals to alter the latter are a step in the right direction, but these changes ought to be advocated on behalf of all working parents, not just women, and not just ones with high-powered positions.
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totally agree.
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With these super-elite positions, while you’re doing them you really do have to live for the job. But let’s not assume every woman would choose her kids over her work, any more than every man would choose an elite job over his family.
In my mind the point of feminism is that people will eventually make this family-vs-career decision without regard to their gender. But there will *always*, in my mind, be people who choose the elite position over their families. And if we’re serious about our critiques here we’re saying no parent of children who are still at home should be taking on these intense jobs. (Wow – just think about the ramifications.)
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Here’s a really good response to Slaughter.
I worked all weekend writing about this topic and I’m totally burned out on it. My piece will appear on Wednesday. Please talk among yourselves. (But if you make a really good point that I forgot to include in my piece, I will have to strangle you.)
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What I am more concerned about than the fate of folks like Slaughter (and, yes, I know the demographic well) is the trickle down of the expectations to levels of work. I fear that the attention concentrated at the elite levels doesn’t have a trickle down effect (and, in contrast, actually has a negative trickle down). I do not think that negotiated balance by the elite creates more family friendly/balance for everyone and might actually hamper it. Slaughter’s argument creates a backlash, as expressed in gottlieb’s article — you can’t have it all, but many women do have to be able to have a job and to spend time with their children, and whining by can’t be personally involved with her children and be an astronaut at the same time creates a backlash. And, the balance needed by others isn’t the same as the accommodations needed by the elite.
One reason these elite jobs are so demanding is that there’s an implicit belief that the job needs to be done by one person, and more specifically by a particular person. Slaughter is the expert on something; Obama has to make the decision. That’s true for the super-elite jobs, the ones where the buck stops (it’s also true for astronauts, and specialist surgeons, elite pilots, SEAL teams, olympic athletes, . . . . ).
But there are other jobs where we can think creatively about how to lessen the work load for individuals (which in turn makes the individual less important). I’d rather concentrate on figuring out how to share workload for teachers, and nurses, and social workers, fireman, military, surgeons, doctors, . . . than to worry about how to make a high level state department job available to a person who also wants to spend significant time with their children.
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That is a good response. The only thing it might be missing by focusing solely on the issue of individual choice is something that I think the Slaughter piece was trying to get at (but this point kind of got lost in the details of her own personal dilemma): the problem that, in the end, all the folks sitting at the table of world leaders–or world banking/finance officials, or CEOs, or university presidents, etc.–will be the folks who chose to pursue their career ambitions over their family time (whether they are men or women). Their decisions, influenced by this history and perspective, will thus not likely make the world a better place to work or to parent in for the rest of us. Which is an argument for making some structural changes to the balance between workplace and parentspace, in addition to recognizing individual choice about which of those commitments to prioritize in one’s own life.
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This:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/07/02/120702crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=1
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“the problem that, in the end, all the folks sitting at the table of world leaders–or world banking/finance officials, or CEOs, or university presidents, etc.–will be the folks who chose to pursue their career ambitions over their family time (whether they are men or women).”
I would consider that a problem, if I felt Slaughter’s story indicated the impossibility of a woman like Slaughter not having a place in our government. But, I don’t think accommodating all the needs set out in Slaughter’s condition (a family that won’t relocate, a child who is in potential crisis, a job that can’t flex much at all) is the solution. For example, there might be another woman with children who can accommodate the needs of Slaughter’s old job. She could already live in DC, or have a family that’s happy to relocate. Her children could be comfortably navigating their teen years. And even Slaughter — we may not have access to her expertise now, but in 8 years? maybe then?
Letting people get off the work wheel and come back, figuring out ways to allow sharing of work among more people (social work, physician, teacher, for example), recognizing that people can be productive when they’re not in the same room with you (though that doesn’t mean that you can’t also require face time — human interaction demands it, for the most part), having elite jobs tat can flex (freelancing, consulting, professorial), and, protecting the labor of professions dominated by women (waitressing, service work, nursing, teaching). Those are my goals.
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There are many jobs that require parents to spend significant time away from home.
Soldier.
Long-haul trucker.
Factory inspector.
Oil rig worker.
Nurse.
Doctor.
Fisherman. (Fisherwoman? Fishing industry technician?)
…
Many of these jobs aren’t considered “elite,” but we all rely upon their labor.
Sometimes people who hold those jobs arrange to work intense shifts, so that they’ll receive more time off. I know several married nurses who will work double shifts on weekends, when their husbands can take care of the kids, to minimize the amount the family spends on sitters.
Yes, it can be brutal, but it isn’t an “elite” problem.
I also think there’s a generational rhythm to the elite jobs. My uncle and father-in-law both traveled a great deal for their work, while their children were small. This was before Skype, or even reliable telephone service. They supported their families, and their wives spent long periods raising their children alone.
Only one member of the next generation chose a profession which requires significant time away from home. People assign different values to the trade-off of money and power vs. the chance to raise your children. There isn’t one right answer to the question.
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