The End of Men and the Rise of Women (30 page)

In my midtwenties, I had a serious boyfriend I’d met right after college. We traveled together, traded novels, and talked about politics. I was just starting out as a journalist, and he generously praised my writing. If I had asked him how he felt about his wife working, he would have said he fully supported it. But I could tell that wasn’t quite true. I could tell by the way he talked about his mother and her attempt, late in life, to create a career for herself. I could tell by the way he talked about what his future kids would be doing over the summer. I could tell by his large ambitions, which left little space for any distractions. I was right to pay close attention to these cues: Today he is fabulously wealthy, and his highly credentialed wife does not work.

This is an economy where single childless women under thirty make more money than single childless men. This means that among the elite, who tend to marry later, there is a high chance that the woman is making more than the man when they first get married. Women can learn to let that early start set the rhythm of the marriage and to resist the impulse to defer. As a frustrated friend with a baby once said of her husband, like her a corporate lawyer, “It’s not that his job is less flexible. It’s that he is less flexible about his job.”

Before they married, Emily White’s husband assumed that she would probably be the one taking care of most things around the house. But he’s learned to be accommodating. He runs a private equity firm, which is a demanding job but still leaves him more space than she has. He now “does the majority of house stuff,” White says—paying bills, fixing leaks, getting dinner, planning the rare vacations. She takes their child to school in the morning but he does
the evening nanny handoff—“arguably the bigger sacrifice,” she admits, so she can work later. White chose him consciously, because whatever his worldview was when they met, she could tell he was the kind of guy who was “open to having that worldview rocked.” White’s personal experience has left her with the impression that “the men around here”—meaning in Silicon Valley—“are becoming more comfortable with all that. There’s no shame here if you’re the one doing more of the child care.”

A few years ago I wrote a story in
The Atlantic
called “The Case Against Breast-Feeding.” The title is a slight exaggeration—I understand perfectly what the proven health benefits of breast-feeding are. But my point was, those benefits are not so tremendous that they should automatically outweigh all the factors on the other side of the ledger. My conclusion was:

I’ve seen so many friends nearly quit their jobs because they did not want to stop breast-feeding or deal with the stress of pumping breast milk at work. In that myopic, desperate moment of early motherhood, women demote their own ambition to the near moral equivalent of starving your baby.

Even after all these years in the working world, women tend to portray parenting decisions as a choice between the mother’s selfish
desire and the baby’s needs. But this is a very narrow way of looking at things. It might surprise people to learn that over the course of the century, as women have flooded the workforce, time-use studies show they spend at least as much or even more time with their children than women did in earlier decades. In fact, one study found that since 1995, women have almost doubled the amount of time they spend directly caring for their children, to 21.2 hours a week. I’ve seen this statistic come up in several different studies and I still do not understand how it’s possible. But it does confirm one thing without a doubt: The sin of our parenting generation is definitely not neglect.

As a reporter I was once assigned to cover a comprehensive 2006 study by the National Institute of Child Health. My editor had described it to me as a study showing that the kids in day care had more temper tantrums, because this is how early news stories had summarized it. In fact, the study—one of the most long-term and comprehensive ever done—shows that there are virtually no differences in either cognitive development or behavior between children raised at home with mothers, at home with nannies, or in day care. A small minority who spent long hours in day care showed a few behavioral problems, but the study found that they resolved over time. Yet the storyline about selfish mothers persists no matter what the data.

Too often, what’s left out of the conversation over child care are the benefits a mother brings back to the house when she works; not just her paycheck and her own professional satisfaction, but her example of a woman engaged with the outside world. A mean story: When my first child was in preschool, I overheard a conversation between another mother and her child in the same class. The mother was a prevalent type in the school, a corporate lawyer who had married a lobbyist in the high-earning category and then quit her job.
The mom was explaining that they would be going to look at some elementary schools that afternoon, because it was important to pick the right school for the daughter so she could get a great education and love to learn. “Why is that important” the daughter asked, “if I’m just going to grow up and be a mommy like you?” Ouch.

Often there are obvious solutions to the mother time crunch, but women won’t use them. Like a husband, for example. As I am writing this chapter, my husband is packing to take our three children away to his parents’ summer house in Vermont. He is taking them without me because my deadline is approaching and he wants to give me space and time to work. It’s an act of great generosity and love. Still, the thoughts forming in my head are not driven by gratitude: He’s taking the wrong boots for the youngest child, the wrong pair of gloves for the middle one, and the eldest is about to forget her pile of books. He’s taking the water bottle with the busted top and a giant bag of pretzels instead of little baggies he can easily distribute in the car. I am already imagining the little frozen fingers and toes and the moment when, having fought over who gets to keep the pretzels on their lap, they let go of the box and all the pretzels tumble out and gleefully nestle under the floor mats.

But I am disciplining myself to wipe those images from my mind and say nothing. For one thing, it’s not fair. I would never go up to a colleague and tell him a story he’d worked hard on, which I had asked him to do, was all wrong just because I would have done it differently. Secondly, it doesn’t matter. Eleven years of parenting and three children have taught me that it honestly and truly doesn’t matter. Cold fingers and smushed pretzels are not what vacation memories are made of. They can borrow boots from the neighbors and turn the visit into an opportunity to enlist them in a snowball fight. They will probably drop the pretzels out the window and stop at a
great diner. And in the meantime, I will get my work done, simple as that.

Once you start calling the baby “my baby,” you have a problem. If diversity is good in the workplace, then it’s also good at home. In her book
Getting to 50/50
, Sharon Meers, a former managing director at Goldman Sachs and now an executive at eBay, points out that a father’s involvement is the critical factor in a child’s success. In a massive Department of Education study, a child’s grades were more closely correlated to how many times the dad showed up at a school event than any other factor. Children with involved fathers measure as having higher IQs by age three, higher self-esteem, and in the case of daughters, grow up to be less promiscuous.

Deciding on more equitable child-care arrangements is not just a logistical matter; it’s about rooting out deep and crippling assumptions women hold long before they even have children.

Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook beautifully reframed the issue of women and work in her 2010 TED talk with her memorable phrase “Don’t leave before you leave.” The phrase was attached to a story about a young woman at Facebook who came into her office agonizning about how she would balance work and a child. The woman looked very young, so Sandberg asked her, “Are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?” It turned out that the woman didn’t have a husband. She didn’t even have a boyfriend. She was just doing that thing that young women tend to do, which is hesitate before she’d even gotten started. “I watch it all day long,” Sandberg told me. “Women are making room for kids they don’t have, years before they try and get pregnant. Then when they do get pregnant, they would be coming back to a job they no longer want.” The men, meanwhile, are “super aggressive and focused. They are in your office every day. ‘Can I do that? Can I lead this?’ They don’t have to be talked into things.”

Women tend to be fatalistic about children and work, so even if there are possible solutions to the problem, they don’t look for them. At Facebook, Sandberg forces optimism on her employees by giving them the opposite of the usual advice. Recently Sandberg offered a woman a new job in business development. The woman came into her office worried that she might not be able to handle it. Why? asked Sheryl. She was pregnant, the woman confessed. “Congratulations,” said Sandberg. “That’s all the more reason for you to take this job. Then you’ll have something exciting to come back to.” The logic is, it’s hard to leave for work in the morning when your warm, delightful toddler is clinging to your leg, so what’s at the other side of that better be pretty compelling or you’ll just give up. Sandberg herself leaves work at five thirty and then like most of her colleagues tunes back in after her children have gone to bed.

Gone are the days when hard-driving women had to hide their pregnancies from their bosses. In the 1960s, Barbara Walters went back to work a day after her miscarriage. When she finally adopted a baby girl, she didn’t mention it, and she didn’t slow down. “There was no having it all,” Walters has said about her situation. If Walters were a news anchor today, she would do a series on adoption and live-tweet the moment she picked up her daughter from the orphanage. She would show her baby pictures on air, as Fox’s Megyn Kelly did, getting into vicious arguments with any viewers who complained. Kelly also got into one with a fellow conservative TV host who complained that her maternity leave was a “racket.” Earlier she had squeezed her milk-enhanced boobs into a tight black dress for a sexy photo shoot for
GQ
.

A space has opened up for women—and yes, we are talking mostly about professional women (and men) here—to get creative about how they conduct themselves in the workplace as parents. High-profile
companies have begun to adopt radical flexibility programs. Best Buy recently instituted a Results-Only Work Environment for managers and executives, which goes by Silicon Valley rules. As long as you get your work done, you don’t have to show up; you can conduct meetings by cell phone from your fishing boat if you want. The top accounting firms—KPMG, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers—are in a PR race to see who can come up with more creative options for flexibility, and now financial firms are joining in, too. The key is not to place pressure on individual women to ask for special deals, but to make flexibility the default option, for everyone.

If a company doesn’t have a blanket flexibility policy, then the same strategy that works for women negotiating pay raises works for negotiating a flexible schedule: Present your solution as good for yourself and the company. When Sukhinder Singh Cassidy had her first child, she was working at Google. “I went into Eric’s office”—meaning then-CEO Eric Schmidt—“and I said I need to pay for my nanny and my daughter to travel business class around the world.” This was, on its face, an outrageous request, even for the permissive culture of Silicon Valley. “Why did I do it? Because I love my daughter and I love my job and I have the energy to manage them both. And at that point I had earned that flexibility,” she said. Cassidy made her case with a spreadsheet showing that the extra cost “is nothing compared to what it would cost to recruit another person who you know can perform in this job.” Her boss assented.

Sallie Krawcheck has referred to being a mother on Wall Street as an “extreme sport.” In the early years she managed it by choosing her firm, and what she calls her “microclimate”—meaning her specific boss and assignment—carefully. She became a research analyst, which was a job she could do largely on her own time. Although she is a Southern WASP, she sought out firms where the culture was
renegade outsider, which in this case meant essentially Jews. One of the firms she worked for was most proud of having hired a former taxi driver as an analyst, “not the typical Joe from Harvard.” One weekend she and her husband were packed up to move when she got a call from her boss, who wanted to review an earnings model she’d drawn up. Krawcheck called a colleague, panicked—all her work clothes were boxed up and being shipped to her new place. “Don’t worry,” her colleague told her. “All he will see is your brain.” Krawcheck went to the office in sweatpants and a T-shirt and nobody cared. She got her first promotion when she was six months pregnant. “There was none of this 1970s thing of pretending I don’t have kids. Every Friday afternoon I went to the mommy and me sing-along. I never missed a single one.”

Many great working women reach the point where they stop and wonder whether the mad daily rush is worth it. Sometimes the moment is forced on them by some job frustration or layoff, but sometimes it starts to preoccupy them for no apparent reason at all. The typical male midlife crisis tends to hit out of the blue and take men by surprise, but for women it’s been lingering there all along. They might have felt it during maternity leave, or on the day they walked into the fourth meeting of the morning and desperately wanted to walk back out and find some quiet place to sit and read a magazine. What they need is not a room of their own—they probably have one at home, even if it’s called an office—but just more
room
, in the crammed minute-by-minute calendars that are their lives. Maybe they think, I could get away with slipping away—not for an hour, with a magazine, but for good. There are, after all, usually children to tend to and a household to manage; it could be justified.