What the women’s movement needs now: Men.
Working out how to juggle the two ‘isn’t just a women’s issue, it’s a family issue’
Igot married a year ago. The weather marked an auspicious start to our life together — the sky the clearest blue, the leaves in the northern Ontario forests golden and red.
Fast forward 365 days and we’re still making plans — about buying a home, about starting a family. But they remain loosely sketched, partly because I’m worried about how I’ll manage that life once we dive in.
I’m privileged enough to be torn about where my priorities lie. If you asked me straight up, I would say family and the people in my life come first. “Working to live” is a mantra of my millennial generation, one that questions the value of being chained to a desk and seeks real meaning in whatever it is that drops money in our bank account bi-weekly.
But I am also ambitious in my career. I spend a lot of hours and mental energy on work, making sure I do a damn good job and keep doing even better.
My mom likes to recall how when she married my dad in the late 1970s, people asked if she was going to quit her job. “Uh, why would I?” she’d respond, surprising the questioner who might not have noticed the swelling first wave of feminism raging at the time, led fearlessly by activist Gloria Steinem.
Today, the movement’s grande dame is 81. Her new book out this fall about her lifetime of activism on the road sketches out the shape of her commitment — how she learned to bridge the personal and political, how she worked to turn feminism into a movement that attacked inequality at its roots, something my fellow fourth-wave feminists are attacking perhaps more fiercely through social media-led campaigns and hashtag activism.
It is a life’s work, and one not yet done, if we are to believe a fall publishing calendar that includes not just Steinem’s reflections, but two books that bring these slow-moving discussions about equality into the now.
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business, a manifesto built from her 2012 viral Atlantic magazine article Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, insists we need to get our priorities straight and change as a society on this issue, the way we have by embracing same-sex marriage and changing smoking from ubiquity into one of the biggest health taboos.
The 5 6 - ye a r - o l d, who stepped away from her job in Hillary Clinton’s U.S. State Department to be more present at home, is talking to women when she says this. But she’s also talking to men.
Kirstine Stewart, the 47-yearold vice-president of media at Twitter and former head of the CBC’s English broadcast services, says in Our Turn there’s never been a better time to be a woman on the leadership track — the digital realm is rapidly dismantling the old boys’ way of doing business and requires a leader with traditionally feminine traits: good people skills, emotional intelligence, willingness to collaborate and high personal standards for success.
That’s three generations of feminists engineering a new vision for equality long after equality should have already been achieved. (There are those who argue that women have surpassed men, which has created a new inequality, but that’s another debate entirely.)
With the rise of female breadwinners, we’re seeing far more families in which dad is the stay-home parent. But as the Up for Debate event on women’s issues in the federal election revealed, the political will to really and truly address violence against women, income inequality (women in Canada still make 75 cents to every dollar earned by a man) and leadership opportunities (women fill only 12 per cent of corporate board positions) just isn’t there.
We’re better off than our American counterparts in the family policies department, sure. But behind that smugness, we’re still a nation with too many clock-watchers and bosses who don’t tend to see people who take time for their families as leadership material. More than 80,000 women left Canada’s labour force in 2014 — dropping us down to the lowest proportion of working women in this country since 2002.
I don’t want that to be me. And perhaps that’s why I’m scared to kick-start what everyone says will be the best years of my life, but also perhaps some of the most complicated and frustrating. We all know work-life balance — and I’m talking about the kind of life that includes kids — is a foolish pursuit. So which side of the see-saw am I OK with tipping lower?
These books identify our expectations, and the way we talk and think about these issues as the problem that keeps us at a stalemate. I think they’re onto something.
In Our Turn, Stewart says we must shed the “Superwoman” expectations we have of ourselves as women. It was madness to spend hours on that airplane to Cannes knitting a bear costume for her daughter’s first Halloween:Theonlypersonwho “needed” it to be homemade in the first place was Stewart.
Now that we’re in an environment in which women are naturally inclined to be leaders, she argues, it does not mean we have to be leaders on the home front, too. We should have the freedom and flexibility to choose our priorities without guilt — and those can shift from time to time.
“What’s giving me hope now,” she writes, “is that the world is in transition, and we are not alone ... (t)he work-life juggle isn’t a woman’s issue, it’s a family issue — no matter the make-up of the family.”
Slaughter’s bold proposal is that we start valuing the work of caring for one another the same way we value the push for the corner office.
“If we really valued care, we would not regard time out for caregiving — for your children, parents, spouse, sibling or any other member of your extended or constructed family — as a black hole on a resumé,” she writes.
Both Slaughter and Stewart contend there is a missing player in these work-family debates in 2015 — men.
While women used to be the ones filing suits against employers for inflexible working arrangements, men are increasingly lawyering up, The New York Times reports. A recent European study of 4,662 high-earning male breadwinners found 58 per cent would happily take a pay cut if it meant they had more time to spend with their families.
But as Slaughter’s husband, Andrew Moravcsik, wrote in an essay published in the October issue of The Atlantic, “(T)he very idea of men as lead parents still makes many people uncomfortable at a deep and often subconscious level.
“Nothing quiets a dinnerparty conversation more quickly than a chance mention of the fact that my wife outearns me.”
I’d hasten to bet he isn’t just referring to conversations with men. It’s women who keep men on the outskirts, Slaughter contends — continuing to use language such as men “stepping up” as lead parent and who consider their husband to be “helping out” at home.
“Women need to step off our new self-created pedestals,” she writes.
“If we can let go of the mountain of assumptions, biases, expectations, double standards and doubts that so many of us carry around, then a new world of possibilities awaits. We may lose our status as superwoman, but we have everything to gain.”
I like what she’s saying, but it’s a tall order — I know as well as anyone how hard it can be to manage my own expectations, drop my shoulders and let it go. But maybe if we can successfully manage our personal expectations, we can spend more energy raising the expectations of our workplaces.
If Stewart’s argument holds true, maybe companies will begin to better square their bottom line with a contingent of employees who are engaged and happy to be doing what they’re doing. First, we start talking and thinking about work and life concerns through the lens of not just women and men, but the global economy. Those babies we’re raising are human capital, after all.
That sounds more like the kind of world Steinem envisioned. And it sounds like a life I might feel a little less wary of diving into.
Women need to step off our new, self-created pedestals