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. 

review: shattered

British TV journalist and producer Rebecca Asher seems to be borrowing my shtick: the pithy one-word title and the harried-looking 1950s-style housewife on the cover seem eerily reminiscent of my first few blog-posts. I am not making accusations of plagiarism, however, more pointing out that something's going on. The more books I read for this blog and my own general interest in matters maternal, the more I am convinced that we are in a moment that needs to be seized.

Asher’s target in Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality (2012) are the structural inequities between mothers and fathers. The disproportionate sharing of early parenting between women and men, in particular, supported by laws, workplace policies and cultural norms, ensure that women’s gains in the workplace over the past few decades are being eroded on the home-front. Modern mothers are not so much knocking on the glass ceiling as being kneecapped by the Winnie-the-Pooh safety-gate.  


Given the lack of balance in parental leave - in the UK, men have access to two weeks’ paid parental leave, women six months’; patchy take-up of flexible working arrangements - women ask for them, men don’t; and the general lag in equal pay - women still routinely earn less then men even for the same positions - mothers, no matter how successful in their pre-child careers, are still overwhelmingly the primary care-givers of their children. And they literally pay for it in lost earnings and lost career advancement: given that women are tending to have children later they can miss out on the crucial career decade in a person’s mid-thirties to mid-forties. Quoting the British figures, Asher states: ‘women may plan to return to the workforce when their children get older but for every year they are out of work their future earning capacity falls by 4 per cent.’ (111)

But it doesn’t have to be this way. 

Asher looks to alternative models in Sweden and Norway, Iceland, Germany and the United States (hmm - believe it or not she does find some positives in the only OECD country that has no paid parental leave whatsoever) to draw up a wish-list for contemporary Britain. A key one is ring-fenced paid parental leave (at 80% of earnings and capped for the highest earners) that only fathers can take. Several of the Nordic countries have variations of this. The mother might take the first six-nine months of paid leave, and then the father has to take the next few months, otherwise the family loses the right to that extra leave altogether. This has the effect of creating public early childhood spaces - parks, playgrounds and early learning centres - that are much more populated by men. Asher argues that this early parenting experience is crucial for fathers: what they perceive as ‘natural’ in women, is the result of learning to get over your fears and spend day after day looking after a helpless baby who is totally dependent on you for its care.  

Asher doesn’t forget about non-nuclear families either: mothers and fathers who don’t live together could access the leave arrangements, or the ‘fathers’ leave could be transferred to a nominated relative or other carer (say, a grandparent or a same-sex partner).  Where the US provides some leadership is in its gender neutrality in the paltry leave it does offer: leave is not inequitably distributed between men and women, both have access to the pitiful amount available.

Lest you think this all sounds like unattainable nirvana especially in light of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), Asher has pre-empted some of her critics. For those exclusively breast-feeding, she argues, the first six months would be ‘ring-fenced’ for the mother, then the father would come in. For those who argue that countries simply can’t afford it - as New Zealand’s current government seems to have done - Asher asks whether the lost economic contribution of working women is worth it. Far harder to shift, of course, are cultural norms about who should do the child-rearing. One positive aspect of more men being out of work, or working reduced hours due to the GFC, is that more men are taking a hands-on role in raising their young children.

I enjoyed the policy-focussed aspects of Asher’s book very much: there are clearly working models out there where early childhood care is much more evenly distributed and we should be looking at them. In the New Zealand context, sharing and supporting early childhood care so it is not the sole responsibility of one parent all the time could do wonders for the more alarming of our social statistics.

Where I was less convinced was partly on the attitudinal level. The first part of Asher’s books takes aim at maternity services and how they are currently women-centred. This has the effect, she argues, of marginalising men and making them feel like they are not really part of the birth process. While I took her point about fathers needing to be more involved from the get-go and that paternal health is important in conception and pregnancy too, I couldn’t help feeling that the men she quoted to support her arguments just didn’t like not being the centre of attention for once. Call me a crazy - or conservative, if you like - but till men start actually physically having babies, then keeping childbirth women-centred seems to me to be appropriate and right. Do we really want a return to the days when men called all the shots?  For me, being ‘women-centred’ means that women expect that their partners will be in the room with them (if they want them to be there, that is) rather than smoking outside, and attending classes and preparing for the birth with them too. Perhaps, Asher’s arguments here are more an indictment of the stretched resources of the British health system rather than a philosophical problem with women-centred services per se.

Her comments about systemic impediments to more equally-shared parenting meaning that fathers just weren’t as involved, also made me wonder if the New Zealand experience is a little different. In resorting to anecdote here - and the systemic figures may tell a different story - I am aware of a number of  couples where the father is either the primary care-giver or has alternated periods of leave with the mother, or where fathers have felt comfortable asking for flexible working arrangements - days working at home, or early finishes to do the school-run, for example - to at least assist more actively with day-to-day childcare.

To be honest, I’m not sure what the right answer to all this is. I agreed with what a lot of Asher said, but I also found myself mentally saying ‘yes, but ....’ a lot too.  Which brings me back to my starting point: I am more and more convinced that motherhood should be one of the central issues of contemporary feminism. This is not to downgrade in any way feminist concern with violence, pay equity and reproductive rights. But how can we have pay equity if it’s only practically achievable for women who don’t have children?  How can we access reproductive rights and the right to control our fertility, if we don’t talk about the flipside, the desire of many women to have children (and, let’s not forget, reproductive justice doesn’t mean the same thing for all groups of women)? How can we deal with violence if we don’t also examine familial supports for women and children as well (bearing in mind that a large proportion of physical and sexual abuse takes place in the home)?

Clearly, I’m not the only one asking these questions at the moment. The real question, though, is how best to answer them.