Work v life: the great balancing act

It’s hardly a new debate: whether women can hold down a demanding job while juggling the demands of a family. But an article by a former Obama administration official in the Atlantic magazine has attracted more hits than any other piece in the journal’s history, while sparking a furious debate about the nature of success in the modern workplace.

Anne-Marie Slaughter spent two years as the first woman policy director at the US State Department, acting as a key advisor to Hillary Clinton: it was, she says, her dream job. The problem was the insane working hours: in at seven in the morning, home around eleven at night. “And when things got truly intense”, she says, “much later than that”.

Even trickier, Slaughter’s time with her family was confined to weekends, when she commuted back from Washington DC to join her husband and two sons in Princeton, New Jersey. Eventually, in 2011, she decided to call it quits: her 14-year-old son was acting up. “Juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible.”

Juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible. Anne-Marie Slaughter

The answer, she concludes, is to change the way the American workplace is run: saner hours, working from home, career breaks, more flexible time off. And – just as importantly – more women at the top, even a woman in the White House, to set the kind of example other working women could be inspired by.

Slaughter admits she is writing for a particularly elite audience: “Highly-educated well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place.” And there’s not much in her article about the pressing needs of those at the other end of the scale, struggling not just with work and family, but also to make ends meet.

The illusion of having it all

Nonetheless, her premise that all this striving to maintain the illusion of “having it all” is just that: an illusion, has struck a chord. It is a response, in part, to a speech by the Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who told last year’s graduating class at Barnard that women all too often “leave before they leave”, by deliberately limiting their own ambitions once they begin thinking about starting a family.

Many feminist writers have complained that the debate here is all wrong. This is about social responsibility, they say: while Slaughter’s description of her high flying career set an impossible standard for anyone else. Doree Shafrir, in Buzzfeed, confessed that all this ‘having it all’ just sounded completely exhausting and unappealing: “I don’t think I want it”, she said.

Others argued that merely changing conditions for those at the very top wouldn’t neccessarily filter down to help everyone else. What about subsidised daycare, a higher minimum wage, better public transport, improved school meals? And the pressure, said others, was still all on the woman’s shoulders. Dahlia Lithwick, from Slate magazine, pointed out: “As long as women see life as a sum of choices, they will always fret and regret.”

Isn’t that just compromise?

Another Slate writer, Lauren Sandler, insisted the answer was not to blame feminism for society’s ills – instead, a bit of realism was crucial: “Feminism doesn’t tell us we never have to compromise – America does.”, she wrote. “Feminism tells us we don’t just have to be a mother, or we don’t have to be a mother at all. It doesn’t say we have unlimited time and unlimited resources.”

Slaughter gave up her dream job, but not for the kitchen sink: she’s now professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton – to most people, she’s still one of the world’s high fliers. “That recognition of wanting to go home was a revelation”, she says, “as somebody who’s always been a career woman and very proud of that… to realise, ‘Wait a minute, we had children.’.. I didn’t want to be torn in two.”

Forty years after the sexual revolution, women are still paid less than men, often trapped in low paid jobs with few career options, forced to go part time not through choice, but by economic troubles. It would be refreshing if this debate were not still just about women – but how everyone, men and women, could manage a better balance between work and life.

Slaughter says she never expected her article to inspire such a worldwide sensation: her call for social changes and new role models to inspire young women rather than frighten them off, has clearly resonated. Decades of social and political change may have got us this far: but it seems there’s still plenty of room to improve womens’ opportunities, while giving them space to enjoy the rest of their lives.

In 2012, that surely can’t be too much to ask – whether you’re a top Government advisor, or an office cleaner, whether you have children, or not. In an age of financial crisis provoked by consumerism and acqusition gone crazy, maybe ‘having it all’ isn”t what we should be aiming for, after all.

Felicity Spector writes about US affairs for Channel 4 News