But agreed, that's no excuse to abandon my personal blog. I have, however, been ferociously typing away at LAist, enlightening readers on various Los Angeles issues, news and entertainment goodies. This weekend marks one of the few free couple of days I've had since my return from Southeast Asia, and I've so far spent a healthy portion of it reading Anne-Marie Slaughter's engrossing op-ed in The Atlantic, "Why Woman Still Can't Have It All." Though I urge you to carve out some time to read the piece in its entirety, which can be found in the July/August 2012 print issue and, of course, online here, I feel compelled to share a few snippets that especially grappled my attention and warranted a highlight.
The piece, which owns pages 84 though 102 in the magazine, explores the current social policies and career tracks that inhibit women from serving successfully as both mothers and full-time career superpowers in the present and offers steps as to how women someday can "have it all" on an equal playing field with men. Having just turned 29 with a marital status of "single" and without children, I can't say I share Slaughter's shoes. But I can proudly ring the feminist bell while pondering how I will shape my life once I decide to start a family.
Here are some of my favorite points from the rousing read:
The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.
My longtime and invaluable assistant, who has a doctorate and juggles many balls as the mother of teenage twins, e-mailed me while I was working on this article: “You know what would help the vast majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” The present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms were the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed.
I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.
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. The rest of this essay details how.
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.
Space for play and imagination is exactly what emerges when rigid work schedules and hierarchies loosen up. Skeptics should consider the “California effect.” California is the cradle of American innovation—in technology, entertainment, sports, food, and lifestyles. It is also a place where people take leisure as seriously as they take work; where companies like Google deliberately encourage play, with Ping-Pong tables, light sabers, and policies that require employees to spend one day a week working on whatever they wish. Charles Baudelaire wrote: “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google apparently has taken note.
These women [Hillary Clinton, Christine Lagarde, Angela Merkel, Susan Rice] are extraordinary role models. If I had a daughter, I would encourage her to look to them, and I want a world in which they are extraordinary but not unusual. Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words, “to be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.” That means respecting, enabling, and indeed celebrating the full range of women’s choices. “Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in her speech at Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.”
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.
