ORIGINALLY POSTED IN 2012 ON focusonsimple.co
I wouldn’t class myself as a feminist, per se. However. There are some accepted imbalances that really piss me off.
One of them, as previously posted, is the expectation that women give up their own name to take on their husband’s. There is no logic for this choice at this point in history. really, there’s none.
Another is how difficult it is for women to become really + truly successful in the workplace + in their careers. A friend sent me a link to an interesting article, on why women can’t have it all. It made so much sense to me, + validated a lot of what I feel is wrong with workplace culture + culture in general, + with society’s placement of value on workplace vs. home + family.
The article was written by Anne-Marie Slaughter, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She was previously the director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department and dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. The article can be found here.
I tried to discuss some of the themes found in this article with family members years ago. What I received in return was a bunch of confused or blank stares, along with an attitude of ‘that’s just how it is’. + I don’t buy that. I just don’t buy that. We’re smart people. We don’t have to accept that things are the way they are because that’s how they’ve always been.
There is an attitude I’ve observed that women who take maternity leave are indulgent + that maternity itself is a drain on society, but something we need to put up with. That women who take maternity leave are inconvenient. Getting a free ride. It seems that people struggle to realize that integrating child and family care into the fabric of a modern + equal functioning society should be normal. The work day is set up with complete disregard for child or family care – for either men or women. Because women are generally the default care-giver, this means that excelling as a women in the workforce during a regular workday can be challenging, because women are in the position to have to leave early or take time off to provide child care on sick days, school meetings, family care, etc. Exceptions shouldn’t be made so that the amount of work required to be successful is lessened, rather, that the location + timing of when the work required to be done is flexible. Therefore, the same amount of productivity is achieved while a family maintains a better balanced lifestyle.
Below are excerpts from the article.
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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You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce.
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The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today. Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family. Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s.
But more time in the office does not always mean more “value added”—and it does not always add up to a more successful organization.
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Long hours are one thing, and realistically, they are often unavoidable. But do they really need to be spent at the office? To be sure, being in the office some of the time is beneficial. In-person meetings can be far more efficient than phone or e-mail tag; trust and collegiality are much more easily built up around the same physical table; and spontaneous conversations often generate good ideas and lasting relationships. Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.
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If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us.
Employers + society have issues with valuing family + child care. + it’s something that’s not an option. The accepted attitude + belief that men don’t have to make choices between career + family, + women do, is not ok. People can choose to live their lives in the best way they see fit (ex. whether to have kids or not have kids), however, living within an archaic societal construct that limits or biases career success in favour of a particular gender is not something to just accept at face value because ‘that’s the way it’s always been done’. It’s not ok that there aren’t more women leaders in business + government. It’s not ok that women have to make choices between career + family. + this isn’t going to change unless we can adopt a mindset that family + child care have inherent + intrinsic value to our individual + societal well-being.