BOSS BABIES
Proof not even the privileged can ‘have it all’
WHEN the US Senate last week voted unanimously to change its rules and allow babies onto the Senate floor to accommodate Sen. Tammy Duckworth and her infant daughter, the jokes about the Senate already being full of babies were hard to pass up.
But the rule change also highlighted a serious point, one we like to ignore: Men and women, and therefore mothers and fathers, are different from each other.
Duckworth is in a unique position. She’s unable to really take maternity leave. She’s a senator — she can’t hire a temp.
In The Washington Post last week, Amy Joyce wrote that few mothers could do what Duckworth did and complained that “the United States is the only country other than Papua New Guinea that doesn’t offer paid leave to new parents.”
But paid leave would have done nothing for Duckworth or women of her professional cali- ber. We complain there are few female CEOs, but Duckworth’s case reveals that even for mothers who get the extraordinary option to bring their child to work, there’s a trade-off.
While Duckworth is evidence that some women can find a way to be at the top of their careers while having kids, something else always has to give. Duckworth doesn’t get the hazy newborn phase, snuggling in bed with few other responsibilities. She has to remain at the top of her game and not be affected by the new human in her lap. She’s lucky and arguably in a privileged position — but even she can’t “have it all.”
She’s not the only mother with a high level of professional success to attempt this balance. Marisa Mayer became CEO of Yahoo while pregnant with her first child. She had a nursery installed in her office, which she paid for herself, and brought her baby to work with her.
Is that an option most women would even want? It’s hard enough to focus on work all day and then parenting all night.
In a much-discussed 2012 essay in The Atlantic, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote that she discovered it was “unexpectedly hard . . . to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children,” despite the fact that her husband carried much of the child-rearing burden.
A 2015 Pew survey found that, “Among working mothers, in particular, 41% report that being a parent has made it harder for them to advance in their career; about half that share of working fathers (20%) say the same.”
Feminists seem to want motherhood and fatherhood to look the same — and for professional success for men and women to look identical, too. But Duckworth’s husband isn’t the one bringing the baby to work.
That’s not because men don’t love their kids or want to spend more time with them. A Pew Research poll in 2017 found that men consider being a father central to their identity at the same rate that women consider being a mother to be extremely important to theirs. And approximately the same number of men “say that they would prefer to be home with their children.”
Yet they don’t actually make this choice in anywhere near the numbers that women do. The US Census estimated the number of stay-at-home dads in 2016 to be around 209,000. The previous year they found 5.2 million mothers stayed home with their children.
There’s a reason for that and it’s that mothers and fathers have different impulses after the birth of their children. No onesize-fits-all parental-leave policy implemented by the government will change that.
In places with very generous parental-leave policies such as Denmark and Sweden, women’s careers still take a major hit after having kids. They either don’t return to work at all or cut way back on their hours. Men in these countries are encouraged to take a long paternity leave as well, yet ultimately it’s the women who end up staying with their children.
A better division of labor and an increase in the amount of time fathers spend with their kids would be great. But equality in the roles of mothers and fathers isn’t something achievable.
What the majority of mothers want differs greatly from what the majority of fathers want. As Duckworth showed, no option would work for all mothers, and even the best of choices isn’t perfect.