From the library: Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter

Last updated on: October 20, 2015 at 7:46 am by Jane the Actuary

From the library: Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter 2015-10-20T07:46:43-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Yes, it’s “Jane the Actuary writes a book report” again, though at least this time around the book was fairly recently published, and, even though I wasn’t very impressed with it in the end, it’s a good jumping-off point for the issues it raises. But there are only so many synod-related posts I can write, when I’m, honestly, out of my depth there.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, if you didn’t know (and I hadn’t known) was a top-level State Department policy strategist, reporting to Hilary Clinton, who made waves when she left that post to return to her comparatively more family-friendly job as dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, in New Jersey, from which she had been commuting during the week, much to the distress of her preteen sons. Shortly thereafter, she wrote an article in The Atlantic, with the click-bait title of “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which exploded in popularity (2.7 million pageviews), and launched her into a sideline career of speaking and writing on related issues, leading to this book.

Her title, Unfinished Business, refers to the changes needed, she believes, in families, in the workplace, and in government, that will allow women to “have it all” — with the “all” being defined differently than it is today, but ultimately being defined the same for men and women. She thinks she’s speaking of all women, but her concern is squarely with that sort of young woman who aspires to being made partner, or getting tenure, or making it to the C-Suite, or the the top levels of government, the women who attend her talks and write to her for advice.

And that’s her world — she writes of a failed starter marriage, then working endless hours to achieve tenure, then marrying again a second time at 35 and, after some rounds of fertility treatment, having two children in her late 30s. After her children were born, she and her husband juggled schedules — though it seems they continued to work long hours, presumably achieved by a combination of daycare/nanny care and weekend/night work. Here’s one piece of advice she offers early on based on her experiences: “the faster you can become the boss, the easier it is to fit work and family together” — never mind that neither the vast majority of women nor the vast majority of men, will ever become “the boss.”

One of the key items on her agenda is prodding the workforce to be more accommodating of not just women and mothers, but also fathers, caregivers of elderly parents, any anyone who wants to pursue a hobby. Too few employers offer their employees the opportunity to work part-time, or, if they do, they judge the employee to be insufficiently dedicated to their job and all hope of career advancement is lost. Men, in particular, fear ridicule for any reduction in work hours or even a modest paternity leave. Even for those working full-time, she calls for employer accommodation of schedule irregularities for school meetings, sick kids, snow days, etc., and for employers to embrace an attitude of valuing productivity over face time, and permitting working at home to the greatest extent possible, though she overestimates the benefit of working remotely, buying into the mythology of “multitasking” and the notion that multitasking parents, because of their superior motivation, can be more productive in fewer hours, than a typical worker. (In reality, one simply cannot care for small children and be a productive employee simultaneously — here’s my prior post on the subject).

Here’s where she briefly ventures into the issues that blue-collar women, and blue-collar workers generally face — the fact that shift workers have little flexibility, and are often punished excessively for missed shifts, with retail workers having an even more difficult time with unpredictable work hours. Of course, for these workers, and for blue-collar work generally, you can’t imagine that telecommunting is an answer, either.

In a perfect world, especially with later retirement ages, men and women could work reduced hours during their childrearing years (which, let’s face is, ought to occur earlier than her late 30s/40s experience — but, then, my third was born when I was Slaughter’s age when she had her first), then push themselves harder as their kids become more independent, and begin climbing the career ladder, just perhaps later than usual. The trouble is that, as it stands, employers have their pick of employees willing to put in long hours. Slaughter’s vision is, so far as I can see, for men and women to collectively reject this demand, or perhaps for employers to be pressured into making advancement possible even after time away; it’s not clear which. She also doesn’t seem to recognize that it’s a numbers game — not everyone will get that promotion.

Slaughter is very clear as well that she views accommodation for parenting to be an issue for men and women both. In her view, there is nothing special about “mothering”; no reason, other than cultural conditioning, why women should feel more drawn to being caregivers for their children than men, or why their aptitude for the task should be any greater than men’s. She believes that men are particularly unlikely to take on the task because of the ways in which they’re discouraged from doing so by the culture: from ridicule at work, to a popular culture that demeans men as parents, to the very idea that a man taking care of his children is “babysitting” them. She wants male caregivers to be enough the norm that couples decide among themselves how they divide the load based on their individual situation, with each partner in turn alternatingly prioritizing career vs. childcare as they pursue advancement and achievement and their full (non-staying-at-home) potential — though at the same time, she does recognize that, in the present day, ambitious women tend to aim at marrying equally-ambitious men, which then places them in a struggle for which of them lets go of their ambition, even temporarily, not just for childcare reasons but when a job requires a transfer or the career climb requires a new job elsewhere.

But this isn’t enough to get us where she wants. She develops a notion of twin values of Care and Competition, and says we need to increase the degree to which we value Care — including paid and unpaid care, such as that of parents of small children, and children of aging parents. She even fits singles into her framework because they may do volunteer work or need time for “self-care.” The fact that daycare workers and home health workers for the elderly are paid poorly she calls “discrimination against Care” which must be remedied.

At this point, she devotes some pages to discussing how difficult a job it is to care for young children, and suggesting that only extremely skilled people are up to the task. She references favorably the high status of Finnish school teachers, who must complete a master’s degree in the subject — and yet, well, to begin with, this section does read as if the majority of parents aren’t themselves qualified to raise their own children. And beyond this, the skills needed to do a great, rather than just adequate job, caring for small children, or for the frail elderly, are not skills which are acquired through years spent in university classrooms, and, accordingly, those skills cannot be measured by means of counting the years of schooling.

And here bottom line: a long wish list of items needed to build an “infrastructure of care” including daycare and elder care (and with the employees paid higher wages than the parents who place their children there), financial support for single parents, paid family and medical leave, a right to part-time or flex schedules, and “reform of elementary and secondary school schedules to meet the needs of a digital rather than an agricultural economy and to take advantage of what we now know about how children learn” — which I presume to mean year-round, full-day schooling (though, by the way, our June – August vacation schedule wasn’t driven by farm rhythms; or, at least, in the Little House books, it was spring and fall where kids were needed in the fields, not summer). How to make this happen? By electing women to Congress.

So that’s Slaughter’s book, in a nutshell.

Now, it is certainly true that couples should be freer to plan their family life in the way that best suits them, whether it’s a mom or a dad as primary caregiver. And if there are still a few Neanderthals calling men who care for their children “babysitters,” well, cut it out!

But, in general, it is still the case that women are more likely than men to feel that tug to be at home with their children, and even many “high-potential” women will choose to do so. Slaughter’s pitch for high-quality government-paid childcare, provided by highly-paid employees at daycare centers, comes pretty close to rejecting staying-at-home altogether; she throws in a mention of part-time work, but her operating assumption is that all women will, and should, work full-time, and what needs to be figured out is simply how to enable parents to manage (and prod bosses to accommodate) the child and family-related interruptions to their 40-hour week, and how to restore jobs back to 40 hours of work, rather than ever-increasing hours.

Certainly the wish list of accommodations at work is a laudable one: part-time work and flexibility to work at home where the nature of the job permits this, opportunity to work a standard 40 hours rather than mandatory overtime, flexibility with midday absences. (Withe respect to the last of these: in my line of work, my colleagues are so often out of pocket at client meetings that there’s not necessarily a greater issue of unavailability, if someone’s out for personal reasons.) I would add that, in general, men and women, and society, would be better off with an earlier marriage/childbearing norm, and if employers gave women seeking to return to the workforce in their 30s the same consideration as more recent college graduates, and treated both groups as worthy of consideration for advancement — I think Slaughter’s approach of, in your 20s and early 30s, working your tail off for career advancement, then having kids and slowing down briefly, has the timing wrong.

But there are two very real roadblocks: a still very weak labor market in blue-collar and white-collar non-management ranks (and, let’s face is, the willingness by employers and legislators to keep it weak by immigration), and the continued willingness of many in, or aiming for upper management, to work those long hours, motivated by the large paychecks they earn, or hope to earn — whether they plan to spend them on a Manhattan apartment, or the latest in designer duds, or just on dining out at the sort of places with the sort of prices that I can’t comprehend spending.

And besides this: with respect to the women she cites, tragically wasting their potential because they’ve been unable to keep climbing the corporate ladder after they have children: why, in their younger years, are they dreaming of being executives, partners, high achievers? Is it because they want the big paychecks? Is it the nature of the work at that high level, engaging, stimulating, that draws them? Is it the feeling of accomplishment? The desire to have that label? To what extent is it, now, a matter of feeling an obligation to reach those high levels — because the high-potential young women she interacts with have been told that they have an obligation to do their share for women’s equality, by their success, and have been told that it’s practically shameful not to “lean in”? When these women have kids (if they have kids) will they still want that corporate reward?

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