Unfinished Business (19 page)

Back in the early 1980s, as I began my first year of law school, I remember being startled by the way my professors talked. A handful of young male faculty members at Harvard (the roughly seventy-person department included only a few women at that point) were deliberately trying to change the gender messages they sent. So when, for example, my torts professor mentioned a judge, a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or any other profession, he would deliberately use the pronoun “she.” I jumped every time he did it. It just sounded so strange. I didn't know a single woman doctor, judge, or engineer. As I used to tell my students, I'm not that old, but as recently as the early 1980s a shift in pronoun opened up my world.

A decade earlier, the honorific “Ms.” (pronounced “Miz”), as opposed to “Miss” or “Mrs.,” had come into use. It may be hard to believe now, but the introduction of “Ms.” into the lexicon was a huge rallying cry for early feminists, led by the iconoclastic (and now iconic) magazine of the same name. “Miss” or “Mrs.” immediately identified a woman as married or unmarried, on the assumption that her status in that regard was the single most important piece of information anyone would want to know about her. “Ms.” gave women their own identities, regardless of marital
status. A seemingly small change in language had enormous symbolic significance.

I tell you these stories to show that how we talk matters. A lot. The words we choose reflect and reinforce deep assumptions about what is normal and what is not, what is approved and what is not, what is valued and what is not. While changing the way we speak may seem subtle, it can send a very powerful message of inclusion and alter the default assumptions of those we talk to. Back in law school, hearing the pronoun “she” applied to professions and positions that I had only seen men hold shifted my conceptions about what was possible.

In the 1980s it was important to modify our language simply to include women—half the human race. Forty years later we are still expanding that linguistic circle. In 2014, Facebook changed its gender identity options. Before, you could only choose male or female when you built your profile. This made some gender nonconforming people feel as if their identities were being erased. Today on Facebook, you can choose from a long list of customized gender options, including transgender male, transsexual female, gender nonconforming, and androgynous. As GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis put it, “
This new feature is a step forward in recognizing transgender people and allows them to tell their authentic story in their own words.” Language is one of the principal ways that we make the invisible visible and the silent heard.

Think about how often married mothers are asked, “Oh, is your husband babysitting tonight?” during a night out. Can you imagine a married man in the same situation being asked whether his wife is “babysitting”? And why don't we describe a male employee with children as a working father? On the flip side, why do we call a man who is a primary caregiver “Mr. Mom”? These linguistic distinctions may seem subtle or insignificant, but an entire
structure of assumed responsibility and approved behavior patterns hangs in the balance.

W
HEN
I
LEFT THE
S
TATE
Department to return to my full-time position as a tenured professor, I was hardly leaving the ranks of career women. Yet many of the responses to my
Atlantic
article framed the debate as just another mommy problem. One commenter said that I was “
backing away from [my] State Department job over mom-guilt.” Another put my story squarely
in the genre of women “dropping out, ramping down or finding they just can't combine career and family.”

In the immortal language of Calvin and Hobbes,
Arrrrgh!
What was particularly frustrating is that I had anticipated such characterizations and had deliberately tried to counter them in the article itself. I knew all along that if I had kept my mouth shut about my kids and simply said that I was returning to academia at the end of my two-year public service leave like countless others before me, no one would have blinked an eye. The news—to the extent it made news—would have been: “Anne-Marie Slaughter resigned at the end of her leave to return to her position at Princeton.”

But no. My brother Hoke, an investment banker who's always been hugely supportive of me and my career, faced his own frustrations trying to tell people he encountered in the financial world that I had hardly “dropped out.” As he wrote to me in the wake of the reactions, the clear message in the media was that I am “someone who bailed because trying to be both a mother and a high foreign policy professional was ‘too tough.' ” I was, in effect, painted as someone who just couldn't cut it or couldn't manage
the juggle of work and family, when in fact I was still teaching a full load, writing regular columns on foreign policy, giving thirty to forty speeches per year, and working on a new book. All I had really done was shift from inflexible intensive work to flexible intensive work that I could schedule myself and thereby spend more time with my family, and yet I was being described with a word we typically apply to students who fail to finish high school or college.

No wonder so many women and men, after making a choice to work at anything less than full tilt—whether part-time, in a less demanding job, or not at all—feel like failures. None of my critics were willing to say outright that I was a wimp, but that was certainly the message. Euphemisms like “opting out,” or certainly “dropping out,” send a deep cultural message about how we define success and failure, while also obfuscating that message in ways that make it very hard to challenge. Using coded language allows employers, journalists, and social critics to claim to be progressive while still marginalizing work-family conflicts as women's issues rather than work issues—and weak women's issues at that.

In Washington it's simply accepted that “
leaving to spend time with your family” is a euphemism for being fired. This understanding is so ingrained that when Pentagon undersecretary for policy Michèle Flournoy announced in December 2011 that she would be stepping down after three years to spend time with her three children, ages fourteen, twelve, and nine,
The New York Times
covered her decision as follows: “
Ms. Flournoy's announcement surprised friends and a number of Pentagon officials, but all said they took her reason for resignation at face value and not as a standard Washington excuse for an official who has in reality been forced out.”

The Pentagon itself was so concerned about this perception that they addressed it publicly. “ ‘
I can absolutely and unequivocally state that her decision to step down has nothing to do with anything other than her commitment to her family,' said Doug Wilson, a top Pentagon spokesman. ‘She has loved this job and people here love her.' ”

Consider what this standard Washington excuse implies: it's so unthinkable that an official would actually step down to spend time with his or her family that it must be a cover for something else. Anyone who willingly chooses family over career, even for a short time, must not be able to cut it in the workforce, for lack of either ability or motivation. That's simply ridiculous. It's also a sign of deeply distorted values. So a first step that we can all take toward creating a world of real equality is to stop using this kind of undermining language when we talk about the choices women and men make about their work.

I
F YOU
'
RE A WORKING MOTHER
, think about how often you're asked about how you manage to juggle your work with your family. Now ask your husband how often he's asked that same question. Or if you're a woman who doesn't have kids yet but you are contemplating them, or maybe you're just at an age where other people
assume
you're contemplating them, consider how often you're offered advice on how to balance work and family. Now compare notes with male friends your age about how often they've had similar conversations. I'm sure you'll find that your male counterparts are not having these conversations nearly as frequently, if at all!

If you're a young woman who has recently been through a job interview, did your interviewer bring up family-friendly policies? (It's illegal for an interviewer to ask whether you're planning to have children.) Do you have any male friends who interviewed at the same firm? Ask them whether anyone raised such policies with them.

One of my mentees, who wrote her undergraduate thesis on family-friendly policies in law firms and is now a talented young lawyer herself, reports that “
law firms trip all over themselves in an effort to showcase their ‘family-friendly policies' (which almost universally means permitting a few associates to work from home or to work part-time and allowing slightly longer maternity leaves than other places). When I interviewed with firms, without my saying anything, I met numerous part-time associates and, at more than one firm, every female litigation partner with children.” Her husband, however, is also a lawyer and had an almost identical résumé at the time, yet when he interviewed at many of the same firms he “met not a single woman,” nor did he hear a word about family-friendly policies in his interviews.

Whether you are a woman or a man, be really honest and ask yourself if you've ever talked to a younger man about how he's going to manage having kids and a career simultaneously. I have long had the kids conversation with my female students, but I have to come clean and admit that although I've been mentoring and advising students for over twenty years, I too have been guilty of this glaring double standard. Only in my last two years at Princeton, after thinking very hard about what needs to change, did I start talking to my male students about whether and when they are planning on having kids.

Another telling double standard is what I call the “halo dad syndrome.” Every mother I know with a caregiving husband has
witnessed this phenomenon, the same one Matt Vilano noted when he was called “a good dad.” Fathers do what is routinely expected of mothers and are treated as if they are extraordinary.

I ran into this phenomenon repeatedly when I was a young dean and Andy, who had a far more flexible schedule than I did, would show up for school events. I heard constantly from teachers and other mothers about what a fabulous father Andy was. In their eyes, his halo shined brighter just for working and taking care of his sons, behavior that was expected as a matter of course from me. As I've made clear, Andy has been indispensable as a father and I am deeply grateful. But the halo dad syndrome is an all-too-common example of double standards—holding men to a different standard of behavior for praise or censure than women. We need to stop overpraising dads for simply showing up—something working moms have been doing forever. What that praise really says is that we don't expect dads to behave in ways that are routine for moms, thereby reinforcing the very assumptions about traditional gender roles that we seek to change.

On the flip side, I have often, in a corporate setting, heard a woman introduced as a talented director, manager, marketer, or what have you. And then, after talking about her qualifications, the introducer will add something like, “And she has teenage twins on top of it all, so she is a master of work-life balance.” It is indeed important to make clear in the workplace that we have lives outside of work. But the problem is that the same presenter will then introduce a man and never mention whether he has a family, once again reinforcing the assumption that caregiving is the woman's responsibility.

The first generation of working mothers understood that in order to succeed they had to act like the men they worked with, so they never mentioned their children. And many senior women
today still play this game, saying that they have a doctor's appointment, or just an “appointment,” rather than revealing that they are missing work for a child. But as one small yet powerful step toward creating a world in which breadwinning and caregiving are equal, let's be honest about our caregiving commitments when we are at work. This doesn't mean insisting that your colleagues spend time cooing over the pictures of your baby or listening to tales of your kindergartner's prodigious accomplishments. It does mean that if you can't make an early morning meeting because it's your turn to drive the kids to school, you're honest about it.

I propose too that when a man announces to his colleagues that he and his partner are expecting a child, we show the same concern and ask the same questions about his work-life issues that we ask women. We could just stop asking at all, but that would deny what we all know is true: that caring for kids is important and time-consuming. It's right to acknowledge that; what's wrong is to assume that it's all a woman's responsibility. Changing the conversation to include men is another important step in the right direction.

Recently I was invited to give a foreign policy speech at a big annual forum for the top management of PIMCO, one of the world's largest investment management firms. The organizer asked if I could give a second speech on work and family. I agreed and was pleasantly surprised to find myself talking not to a group called “PIMCO Women,” but to “PIMCO Parents.” The audience of more than fifty people was at least one-third men. The name change may seem small, but it is a big step in the direction of ensuring that family responsibilities are the province of all family members.

Mark Weinberger, CEO of EY (formerly Ernst & Young), has a great catchphrase for this shift. In his words, “
Women don't want to be singled out; men don't want to be left out.” Exactly.

T
HE GREAT THING ABOUT LANGUAGE
is that it is within the individual control of all of us. Each one of us can commit to talking differently, to talking as if care and competition are genuinely equal and equally valued for both men and women; as if we hold men and women equally responsible not only for creating children but also for raising them; and as if the people we respect and value most have full lives in which the people and things they love are just as important as their work. Here are a few more steps we can take to make that happen: