Read Anne-Marie Slaughter‘s latest article in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”
According to Slaughter, the work-life/family balance we expect of highly successful women is impossible. What’s more, if the balance is impossible for society’s most accomplished women, how can we expect it to be possible for society’s less skilled and or privileged women?
In a similar vein as Barbara Einreich‘s “breast cancer doesn’t kill you because you didn’t stay positive enough, it kills you because it’s cancer!” Slaughter argues that regardless of whether people are “committed enough,” or “try hard enough,” we expect too much of working women with families: the reality of work in America is such that women, but also men, with children have to make difficult decisions between work and family if they wish to pursue workplace success.
Said differently, there’s a structure in place, one that is damaging to people, and blaming individual’s isn’t getting us anywhere. (The sociologist, unimpressed, “Uh huh…”)
Unlike breast cancer, society’s work-life balance is something socially and politically determined. It’s something that occurs because of the choices each of us makes on a daily basis, and which we could choose to make differently. In fact, customs surrounding work-life/family balance vary considerably from place to place.
Over the last decade, Joya Misra and her colleagues have painstakingly documented the variety of apporaches to work-life/family balance among high-income countries and their effects.
For example, in “Reconciliation policies and the effects of motherhood on employment, earnings and poverty” (2007) Misra et al. outline four strategies and their differential impact on women’s work life and well-being—the primary caregiver, primary earner, choice and earner-carer strategies.
The strategies vary by the degree to which they reconcile the work-life/family balance for mothers—and fathers too. While primary caregiver, primary earner and choice strategies permit success in one domain, the earner-carer strategy is supposed to help women and men achieve success in both.
Some readers might be surprised to hear that there are countries that have already done a lot to implement the kinds of earner-carer strategies that Slaughter ends up advocating for.
The earner-carer strategy is,
characterized by generous support for care both within and outside of the home and shorter working weeks. Both men and women are encouraged to take parental leave, and high-quality childcare outside of the home is available (Gornick and Meyers 2003). Income transfers help families to balance care and employment. The earner-carer strategy attempts to break down gendered norms of care and employment (Fraser 1994, Crompton 1999, Gornick and Meyers 2003). For example, Sweden encourages women’s employment through substantial state provided care support, while also encouraging men’s caregiving through paternity leave that only men can take (Gornick and Meyers 2003) (Misra et al. 2007)
Misra et al. find evidence that the earner-carer strategy increases employment and decreases poverty among women and their families.
While the market might not care about poverty, higher employment rates tend to do wonders for GDP. In fact, Sweden’s employment rate is 6 points higher than that of the United States, at about 72%.
While Slaughter can be praised for raising an issue that’s difficult to raise—she explains why in the first section of the article—she doesn’t stop at merely raising the issue. She also provides a conceivable list of key processes and mechanisms that lead to this unhealthy state of affairs, and closes the article with a handful of recommendations for how the situation might be improved.
All this and more make for an instructive, insightful and all around enjoyable read (I’d say gripping too, but I can’t imagine that everyone will get quite as excited as I can about good writing on labour market dynamics).
So, read Anne-Marie Slaughter‘s latest article in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”
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