Free Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter Page B

days.
    In 2014 alone,
Huffington Post
founder Arianna Huffington and
Washington Post
reporter Brigid Schulte each wrote a bestselling book about stressed-out American workers, another sign thatwe’re desperate for solutions to our currently unsustainable pace of work. Desperate for solutions, but still trapped in a culture that values quantity over quality, assuming that he who works most works best. Or, less poetically, that he who takes time off is a wimp.
    This underlying culture makes a mockery of so many purported work-life “fixes.” They are never going to achieve real equality between men and women in the workplace, at the top or the bottom, no matter how hard employers try to make workplaces more family-friendly by adopting policies aimed at women. They will not work because they are at best half-measures based on half-truths.
    The first half-truth is that the issue of work-life balance is a “women’s problem.” If we define it that way, then it is up to women to find or at least implement the solution. The second is that employers can make room for caregiving by offering flextime and part-time arrangements. While these policies certainly represent progress over rigid “all-in or get out” workplaces, they’re not nearly enough for many workers with caregiving responsibilities. Third is our assumption that wanting “work-life balance”—or even just wanting a life outside of work—signals a lack of commitment to that work. That assumption reflects a mindset that promotes men with full-time wives and no lives.
    Once again, a half-truth is just that—it’s not wholly false. But it often obscures a bigger, deeper truth, something that we do not want or do not choose to face. Yet if we cannot even be honest about what the problem is and what it would actually take to fix it, we cannot possibly succeed.
    It’s time for some truth telling in the office.
HALF-TRUTH: “IT’S A WOMEN’S PROBLEM”
    F LORIDA S TATE SOCIOLOGIST I RENE P ADAVIC , Harvard Business School professor Robin Ely, and Erin Reid from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business were asked to conduct a detailed study of a midsized global consulting firm where top management thought they had a “women’s problem.” The firm had a paucity of women at the highest levels—just 10 percent of partners were women, compared with nearly 40 percent of female junior employees.The firm’s brass assumed that their company was shedding women along the way because of work-family conflict on the part of workers who had to care for families, i.e., women. As one partner put it:
What do I want people to worry about when they wake up first thing in the morning? For Business Development people, I want them to worry about business development. For project managers, I want them to worry about the project. Women are the Project Manager in the home, so it is hard for them to spend the necessary time, energy, and effort to be viewed here as senior leaders.
    The plethora of women’s leadership groups and support networks at companies across the United States all grow out of the same perception: the lack of women at the top is due to something women themselves are doing or not doing: a lack of ambition, the difficulty of juggling multiple roles at home and at work, or insufficient support from other women.
    This depiction of the problem is half true, in that it is indeed a problem that is showing up much more among women than among men. But it is a problem that affects some women much more than others, and it is also a problem for a growing numberof men. By thinking of it as a “women’s problem” we are missing a much bigger truth.
It’s Not a Women’s Problem, It’s a Care Problem…
    T HOUGH WOMEN HAVE MADE UNPRECEDENTED progress in the workforce over the past forty years, what doesn’t always come through in the statistics is the enormous and enduring discrepancy between women who have caregiving responsibilities and those who do not. As I