Unfinished Business (13 page)

So why
don't
we value teachers? Or coaches, therapists,
nurses, nannies, primary care physicians, gerontologists, eldercare specialists—essentially any profession centered on helping others flourish rather than winning ourselves? I can think of a number of reasons for this distortion in our value structure. The most obvious, at least to most women, is that we are talking about men's traditional work versus women's traditional work, and we have traditionally valued men more than women.

Another possibility is that the professions that involve competition more than care have much more measurable outcomes; it is easy to figure out who won—the deal, the lawsuit, the sales contract, the race to invent a new product—and to compensate the winner accordingly. It is much harder, as teachers and education reformers both know, to measure learning outcomes. You can reduce those outcomes to multiple-choice tests, but real learning often suffers in the process. Parents know the drill: it often takes years to find out that a particular conversation or life experience with a child planted a valuable seed that actually flowered.

I first started thinking about these questions when I watched an elementary school class shortly after becoming a law professor at the University of Chicago. My beloved friend and college roommate Nora Elish was teaching first grade in New York. As I sat in the back and watched her guide a group of six-year-old boys through various reading exercises, carefully calibrating her interaction with each one, I kept thinking:
If I fail in my task of teaching civil procedure or international law, my students may do less well on their exams or go through their legal careers disliking those subjects. If Nora fails, however, her students' lives could be blighted forever. Learning to read is the foundation for almost everything else they will do in life
.

In terms of both prestige and compensation, that is not exactly
how the world sees it. I don't mean to diminish my own accomplishments in passing through the narrow needle that is the law school teaching market. But that's just it. The prestige and high salary that accompanies a teaching position at Chicago or Harvard law schools is a reward for winning out over many others on a fast and difficult track. It reflects the expectation that the professor will advance the frontiers of knowledge through his or her research; students who are admitted to those schools then have the opportunity to study with leading scholars. But at no point are we measuring the value of teachers in terms of what students actually
learn
.

I have had to re-educate myself to, when I meet a teacher, therapist, or coach next to a banker or businessperson, push back against the reflexive assumption that because the banker is richer and more powerful, he or she is thus somehow smarter, more interesting, and more
valuable
. I think to myself that the teacher has the harder and ultimately more important job, one with the potential of altering a life for good or ill. When I had minor but scary surgery right under my left eye, the nurse whose calm and experienced presence made such a difference told me she had left a career in advertising. At that moment, I was very glad she had chosen to apply her intellect and emotional intelligence to a caring profession rather than a commercial one. Teachers and nurses also have the courage and character not to respond to the dominant measures of value in our society.

It may be a constant in human history that having money is valued; even under communism humans found a way to become far richer than their fellows and wielded power as a result. But what we consider cool and attractive has changed continually across time and cultures, from men in wigs and elegant hose to jocks to geeks, from Rubenesque figures to social X-rays. What we value is ultimately up to us.

S
O IS MANAGING MONEY MORE
valuable than managing kids? It should be clear by now that I think the answer is emphatically no.

In theory, at least, the rest of the world agrees with me. Ann Crittenden opens
The Price of Motherhood
with the observation that it is a commonplace to say that being a mother is the most important job in the world. “
In the United States, motherhood is as American as apple pie. No institution is more sacrosanct; no figure is praised more fulsomely.”
A video circulated in the spring of 2014 that purported to show people being interviewed for a position called “director of operations.” It involved working all the time, with no breaks for holidays, lunch, or even sleep, and required “excellent negotiation and interpersonal skills.” The position was unpaid. The candidates responded to the job description by balking. “That's inhumane!” they cried, “That's insane!” Then, at the end of the video, the interviewer told them that someone actually holds this job already—in fact, billions of people. “Moms,” he tells the job seekers, who laugh and thank their mothers.

But behind this public approbation of motherhood lies a deep well of insincerity. I was reminded of a letter from a young woman who was at the time a first lieutenant in the Air Force Reserve. She wrote to tell me that when she accepted an offer for a tenure-track faculty position, the guy she was dating broke up with her because it was apparent that she would not be putting his nascent career first. At the same time, she reported, “
My commanding officer had a chat with me about my priorities. When was I going to stop working so much and start a family? He proceeded to show me a picture of his wife with their 5 children and told me that is what life is about.”

If that's what life is about, why don't these men stop working,
or scale back their careers, and spend more time caring for their families? There's the hypocrisy. If caring for those we love is just as important and valuable as competing in the marketplace or the military, then we should put our money where our mouth is by finding a range of ways to compensate both paid and unpaid caregivers, with prestige if not with cash.

And yet we don't, because there remains a hidden bias in American society, even among those of us who believe that men and women are equally talented human beings. I've called this the “competition bias”: the reflexive way in which we value competition over care. But perhaps, following Betty Friedan, this bias is better understood as a mystique—an ineffable something that we are drawn to and strive to imitate without fully understanding why.

So let us call it “the competitive mystique.” It is a mystique that is equally attractive to men and women—the sense that they are succeeding in setting and achieving their individual goals and winning out over others. More generally, it is a mystique that has steadily grown as the world itself has become more competitive over the past few decades, largely through the twin forces of globalization and technology. More people are continually competing in more ways.

Overcoming the competitive mystique means dismantling its aura of mystery and power. Bluntly, it means asking ourselves why we think people who have made more money than anyone else or risen to the top of a particular hierarchy by beating out others are automatically role models. What about their values? How do they treat other people? What was the cost to their families—the people who brought them into the world, people they married, people they were responsible for bringing into the world? How can that part of the story not be relevant to who they are and how we should think about them?

Overcoming the competitive mystique also means rethinking
our assessment of the relative difficulty of different professions. In the title of this chapter, I deliberately asked whether managing money is
harder
than managing kids to challenge us all. Many of us, deep down, agree with the claim made by the economics student we heard from earlier: that the work we do as professionals is “harder,” in the sense that it takes more skill and education, than the work we do as parents or caregivers.

I certainly understand and respect paying for expertise, but over the past three years, I've come to think that although much of the work I do in foreign policy and nonprofit management is intellectually harder than being a mother, parenting is emotionally harder and often far more perplexing. I have also come to believe that we should think about paid care work, from home health service to therapy to teaching, the same way we think about any other profession, including money management. You can do it at a basic level and at a highly advanced level. Your compensation should depend on a combination of your education, experience, and the value we place on the activity as a society.

Don't get me wrong. I'm plenty competitive. I'm the granddaughter of an all-American football player recruited by the NFL; I got none of his athletic ability but I can still remember being in the second-best reading group in first grade and being determined to make it into the first reading group. Competition, with myself as well as with others, has helped drive many of the best things I have done in my life. But loving and caring for my family and friends, teaching and mentoring my students, helping and watching staff members grow into and then out of their jobs is every bit as rewarding. In each of those cases I get as much as I give. Indeed, I often feel that even if my work dies with me, enabling and empowering others will live on in ways I cannot predict.

Overall then, I am not proposing to
devalue
competition; I am proposing to
revalue
care, to elevate it to its proper place as an
essential human instinct, drive, and activity. If we can actually teach ourselves to value competition and care equally, to think that managing money and managing a household full of other human beings are equally valid and valuable occupations, we will be on the way to real equality between men and women. We will no longer see work and family as a woman's issue but as a parent's issue, a son's or daughter's issue, a spouse's or sibling's issue, a devoted friend's issue. An issue for anyone who works and who also loves and cares for someone else.

It won't be easy. My generation of feminists was raised to think that the competitive work our fathers did was much more important than the caring work our mothers did. We were socialized to believe that work that leads to winning, to individual achievement and success, is much more important than work that leads to giving, to empowering others to succeed. The generations after us have gotten that message ever more strongly, as girls have been raised to believe that of course they can combine their careers with caregiving, that that is what being a successful woman means. Moreover, for younger generations the competition—for everything—has steadily become more intense. Simply consider how much harder it is to get into a good college and get a decent job with decent wages and opportunities for promotion in 2014 than it was in 1974, 1984, or 1994.

I do not question the importance of equipping girls and boys with equal education, encouraging them to have equal aspirations and to gain sufficient independence that they can support themselves financially. From that perspective, the message we send our children about the importance of competition is absolutely right. But the message that a woman's traditional work of caregiving—anchoring the family by tending to material needs and nourishing
minds and souls—is somehow less important than a man's traditional work of earning an income to support that family and advance his own career is false and harmful. It is the result of a historical bias, an outdated prejudice, a cognitive distortion that is skewing our society and hurting us all.

In the long quest for gender equality, women first had to gain power and independence by emulating men. But as we attain that power and independence, we must not automatically accept the traditional man's view—which is really the view of only a minority of men—about what matters in the world.

A Princeton alumna of the class of 2010, Cale Salih, wrote me a powerful letter shortly after my article came out. She began with the reflection, “I have often wondered why I should feel guilty for simply daring to say yes to a momentous personal opportunity.” She continued:

For the past two years, I have been consistently congratulated for making career choices that reflected great ambition, but often came at the expense of personal relationships. Now, I am considering moving to be closer to my long-distance boyfriend. In conversations with people in my own cohort, I find myself making up pretexts to hide the real reason for my move. On occasions that I do reveal the most important motivation behind my move, I am often met with subtle but noticeable eye rolls or, worse, patronizing lectures: “You're too young to make life-altering choices for a boy.” While making life-altering choices for a relationship is seen as weak or naive, making similar sacrifices for a job is often seen as a sign of strength and independence.

No more do I want to be unemployed than do I want to be the power woman who goes home after work to eat moo shoo pork alone in her apartment. Why, then, should I be
proud of investing in one goal, and be embarrassed of investing in the other?

The social pressures that Cale is responding to are very real.
In January 2013, Princeton senior Margaret Fortney published a reflection in the campus newspaper describing her friend “Molly,” who, toward the end of a conversation in which the two young women were contemplating their futures, “leaned in closer to me” and whispered: “I don't want to go to grad school. I don't even know if I want a career. I want to get married, stay at home and raise my kids.” Distraught after this admission, Molly said, “What's wrong with me?”

When I was a Princeton student in the late 1970s I certainly would have said that an Ivy League alumna who did not pursue a career was letting down our side. That was still an era in which many men questioned Princeton's decision to go coed at the beginning of the decade, precisely on the grounds that women would just “waste their education” by dropping out of the workforce and having kids. Indeed, if I am truly honest with myself, I would have to admit that a good part of me still questioned the value of being a stay-at-home mom right up until the set of experiences that led to my writing my
Atlantic
article.