Saturday, July 14, 2012

eating your cake too?


As I’ve been experiencing, thinking, reading, and writing about motherhood and feminism, there’s been something that has continued to bug me. The more I encounter the language of ‘income penalties’, ‘mommy tracks’, ‘balancing acts’, and ‘having it all’, alongside the demands for high-quality childcare, extended paid parental leave, and family subsidies, the more it bugs me. And what might ‘it’ be?
It’s cake. The having of and, more especially, the eating of it too.
As I read Rebecca Asher’s book Shattered, which articulated policy programmes for more equitable parenting parental leave, I found myself questioning her assumptions. She talked about ‘income penalties’ faced by mothers: assuming a heterosexual, stable couple - not always a given - one or other parent would suffer an income penalty by staying at home, for however little time, to look after young children in terms of lost earnings and opportunities. But, even if our hypothetical couple were able to get their young child into high-quality childcare so both parents could work full-time at demanding careers without any discernible penalty, someone pays the income penalty. Parents pay less than they earn to the carers of their children: early childhood care is still an overwhelmingly female occupation, and still a comparatively poorly-paid one. Based on this policy solution, solving ‘income penalties’ for one group of parents, means shifting the financial penalties of parenthood on to someone else.
I also wondered about measures of success based solely on income. If I take my own example, measured solely on income, I have lost very little  by staying at home for over a year. My income has risen as it would’ve whether I was actually doing my job or not. Despite the lost earnings over a few months, the threat to my career is fairly negligible. I appreciate that that is far from the case for every mother, even ones in similar positions to me. But it does make me wonder about the narrow definitions of success: income level (high and continually rising), career trajectory (aim for the top and keep going till you get there) and conspicuous consumption (buy as much as you can for as much as you can). Without being naive about power and how it is exercised, isn’t this buying in to extremely narrow patriarchal definitions of success? 
I think this is true, but, at the same time, women do earn less than men (even if they don’t have children), and there are fewer women in power. Patriarchal definitions of success might be narrow, but they are still powerful and pervasive. It is still depressingly common to hear of women who are fired, demoted or otherwise pushed out of their careers by getting pregnant or having children. In Emily Monosson’s edited collection Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out (2008), a graduate scientist describes being fired for getting pregnant .... in 2006. She has successfully taken action against her institution, but warns others that sex discrimination based on motherhood is still a real and present danger, even in apparently liberal academic institutions. 
Other essays in Monosson’s fascinating collection detail the lives and choices of women scientists who are trying to balance careers and motherhood. Covering a period from the 1970s - where women scientists were still a relative rarity - to the 2000s - where young women make up around a third of science graduates, the book describes varying routes to success. Some of these involve the traditional route, with high levels of support from partners, extended family and quality child-carers (all, I note, to make the impact on the institution rather than the families negligible). Others involve paths less taken that were not in any way planned or expected.  
One could argue that the authors of the essays are at pains to champion their own choices and inevitable compromises, but I think there is more to it than that. After having children, priorities change, and passions can become more focussed: while all of the women in this book are scientists - in the broadest definition of the term - many have turned their passion for science into policy, teaching, advocacy, and research that can be conducted outside the laboratory. They do so partly in the hope of making the world a better place, partly because there is better flexibility in public service, teaching and non-laboratory-based work, and partly because they want to role-model female career success for their children (especially their daughters). 
Inspiring as these stories are, they also got me thinking. These women are highly-educated and ambitious, yet most have made sacrifices to start families and maintain a career. With one or two exceptions in the thirty-four stories on offer, their partners did not sacrifice to the same level. Is it then the case - however much we might not want to admit it - that it isn't possible to have your cake and eat it too?
Anne-Marie Slaughter, professor of politics and international relations at Princeton University, is no longer so sure that it is possible, at least not without serious societal change. Imbibing the second-wave feminist mantra that women can have it all, Slaughter was able to balance her academic career and family to some extent. Until she took up a powerful position in Washington DC at as the first female director of policy planning at the State Department, that is.  After two years of relentlessly long hours, and continual travel, she gave up her role, returned to her teaching job at Princeton, and wrote a provocative article, published in July 2012 in the Atlantic: ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have it All’.
Slaughter frankly says:
Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.
Slaughter believes that It is time for women in leadership positions to recognise that ‘although we are still blazing trails and breaking ceilings, many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination’.
She then identifies a series of ‘half-truths’ women tell themselves about having it all, all of which try to address structural problems at the individual level:
  • ‘It’s possible, if you’re just committed enough’: and if you can’t balance career and family, and let the former slide to focus on the latter, you are ‘letting the side down’.
  • ‘It’s possible, if you marry the right person’: sure having a supportive partner is great, and a woman’s career can flourish if her partner is effectively the ‘stay-at-home mum’. It’s more unusual, but it is still essentially the same breadwinner-homemaker model.
  • ‘It’s possible, if you sequence it right’: have babies young, then try to get ahead (um, then you’ll be at least a decade behind everyone else, and be battling ageism as well as sexism) or progress your career first, then have babies (fine, but then you might experience physiological problems you hadn’t anticipated or risk being marginalised during a crucial career advancement period). Bottom-line? There is no right time.
To be clear, after dealing with these ‘half-truths’, she does not then go on to say women can’t have it all, so why bother trying? Instead, she offers some hard-won insight on what cultural changes need to be made to enable women - or more particularly, women of her demographic (i.e. ‘highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place’) - to be successful at home and at work. These include: changing the culture of ‘face-time’; revaluing family values; redefining the arc of a successful career; rediscovering the pursuit of happiness; and enlisting men. 
As a teacher, she sees a role for herself in creating future generations who will be able to have it all:

I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. My husband agrees, but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more. 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.
After reading about the women scientists, and about Slaughter’s experiences, I sat looking at my own piece of cake. I opted to stay at home with my baby for nearly eighteen months, during which time my job was held open for me. I was only paid for a fraction of that time, but I have still received incremental increases in my rate of pay. I had the option to determine when and how I would return to work: full-time, transitioning from part-time to full-time, or part-time. For now, I have chosen to return part-time, and have a job-share partner, who also has a young child. It may not seem like a high-powered return to work, but, for now, it is working for me and my family. The time out has made me really think a lot more - and in concrete and practical ways - about what I (and we) want our lives and priorities to be. I want a successful career - and I have a few ideas up my sleeve about how that might unfold in the next three decades - but I also want a successful family too.
So rather than having my cake and eating it too, I think I’ll have a small piece for now, and save the rest for later.