In Search of a New Balancing Act

Thirty years
passed between the 1982 publication of Cosmopolitan
editor Helen Gurley Brown’s book Having
It All, whose popularity transformed its title into cultural shorthand and
“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” New America President and CEO Anne-Marie
Slaughter’s 2012 Atlantic cover
story. Those decades have brought scores of changes that have impacted women’s
quest to balance work and family in their lives, and yet, that balancing act is
still not a feasible option for so many Americans—women and men, too.

The truth
is, it’s nearly impossible to define this “all” that so many of us are all
theoretically angling to “have.” And
that framing obscures the deep striations of privilege that make this a
fundamentally different conversation for the various groups in our society. Does
this idea of “having it all,” which dominates magazine covers, even speak to what
working families are striving for, or does it simply hinder many potential
pathways to building coalitions among disparate communities?

“We are not
valuing care,” Slaughter observed at a recent New America event. “If we value
care, we will value care when men do it just as much as when women do it.” She and others
also believe it’s time to retire the phrase “having it all,” which she grew up
thinking “meant that women could have what men had.” Speaking alongside the
Labor Project for Working Families’ Carol Joyner, Barclays Vice Chairman of
Investment Banking Barbara Byrne, Geller Group Senior Partner Maria Simon, and
Breadwinning and Caregiving Director Liza Mundy, Slaughter—whose book, Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work,
Family comes out next month—argued, “that frame is exactly counter to the
conversation we’re trying to have here,” because it papers over cultural and
economic differences.

Let’s start
with the top end of the income scale, where flexibility has been helpful, but
where progress remains incomplete. Byrne and Simon both work in professions—finance
and law—that are known to be recalcitrant when it comes to shifting their
culture or making institutional changes. “I would say flexibility is
essential,” whether in the form of working from home or by job-sharing, noted
Byrne, who negotiated the first paid maternity leave policy at Lehman Brothers
in 1987 and has worked remotely at points in her career when she had young
children. “My view, quite frankly, was that if the guys could be on a golf
course, I could be anywhere,” she said. Pointing to recent developments such as
dynamic working programs and emergency on-site daycare, Byrne also forecasted
more substantial improvements to come, courtesy of the Millennial generation.
“I consider them a gift, because they think differently and they don’t accept
no for an answer,” she said. “In a competitive environment…it’s the only thing
that’s respected.”

She also described
the necessity of building and mentoring teams of colleagues whose mutual
trust—along with advancing technology—enables this flexibility. Simon echoed
Byrne’s emphasis on trust—a guiding principle at her law firm, which has no
physical workplace and whose lawyers and staff are all women with young
children. Their time is still structured around billable hours, but employees
complete their work on a schedule that can be flexibly arranged around family
obligations. The Geller Group’s approach (which was profiled in a recent
article in the New York
Times) is vastly different from the
way most law firms operate, but “we shouldn’t be novel,” Simon opined. “I don’t
try to say that this needs to work for everybody, but I think it has to be an
option for the type of worker who can really capitalize on it. It [working in
law] should not be a one-size-fits-all structure if you don’t need it to be.”

But lower
down the wage scale, when it comes to jobs that physically must be done
on-site, Joyner pointed out that flexibility can be a double-edged sword at
best and nonexistent at worst. Her organization, in partnership with Family
Values At Work, focuses its efforts on issues such as fair scheduling
practices, paid leave and sick day policies, and pregnancy accommodation. In
the last three years alone, she observed, paid sick leave policies have been
expanded to include 10 million more workers, largely as a result of pushes made
by small and medium-sized business owners who—along with her organization’s
coalition partners in 21 states—“see that we’ve got to figure out how to
address caregiving and working in America. It doesn’t have to be either-or and
it shouldn’t just be for people who are middle class or upper middle class and
have jobs where they’re considered essential. It should be for everyone.”

Joyner’s
comments highlighted the degree to which being able to draw a line between
breadwinning and caregiving, or work and life more generally, is for too many
an economic privilege in and of itself—a theme reiterated by Tyra Mariani,
Managing Partner of Opportunity@Work, in her remarks. Young people looking for
first jobs, not to mention caregivers and long-term unemployed folks seeking to
return to the workforce, are struggling “without a way to translate their best
efforts into progress,” she said. “Training and hiring practices”—especially
the requirement of a four-year college degree—are “inadvertently limiting the
collective U.S. talent pipeline” and making the “balancing act” between work
and family “more of a luxury than a dilemma.”

For
communities marginalized by race, class, or gender identity, the work-life
balance question highlights not only the historical lack of inclusion implied
by “having it all” but also the interconnectedness between work-life balance
and other issues—such as labor inequality, lack of access to social services
and reproductive healthcare, and challenges to mental health and wellness—faced
by those communities. “This conversation has [always] been defined in certain
ways—as applying to certain people—and by these ideals of what it used to be
and what it wasn’t ever,” asserted Darby Hickey,
an LGBT activist and staff for DC Council Member David Grosso.

Hickey,
along with Concerned Black Men National Executive Director Leroy Hughes and Executive Director of National Latina Institute for
Reproductive Health Jessica González-Rojas, argued for a more inclusive
and intersectional understanding of integrating work and family. Often,
according to González-Rojas, women who
are deciding whether or not to work often have their children cared for by
women of color and Latinas, many of whom lack access to either workplace
protections or to birth control. “So we have to look at the lack of equality in
wages, and again, the valuing of the work” done by women of color who “provide
care, and love, and nurturing of the children while many of these women who are
privileged” and able to go out to work.

For Hughes, Executive
Director, having the resources to support families and sustain mental wellness is
critical as well. “Because if we don’t deal with
the issues now as far as our families are concerned—whether you’re a person of
color or not—we will have to deal with those implications later,” Hughes
emphasized. Hickey agreed, calling access to services a “huge issue in many communities,
including the LGBT community…[where] everyday existence is a mental health
challenge.”

“So many of our [social policy] structures
are still very much stuck in the past,” observed Brigid Schulte, Washington Post staff writer and author
of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When
No One Has the Time. Across a
diverse exchange of ideas from a variety of discussants, most affirmed what
Joyner described as a broad-based need, “in a strategic, thoughtful way that
affects both culture and policy,” to do more to “create structures for all
workers that afford them a modicum of work-life balance.”

Progress will certainly be messy and
incomplete. “If you look at these organizations, they’re changing in some
ways,” said Byrne, “[while] in some ways it’s [still] 1962.” But, she said, “in
order to change the industry such as the one that I’m in, you need to have
women at the top of the organization who say, ‘we need to do this now. We need
to make these changes and I insist upon it.’ I’m not leaving until we get it
the way it needs to be. I have three daughters and one son and it’s for all of
them you say ‘I have the voice, I have the ability, I can get to effective
change.’”

To
read more, you can click here to
join the ongoing #NewBalancingAct roundtable discussion on Context, New
America’s Medium channel.