Anyone who wants her mate to be a true partner must treat him as an equal-and equally capable-partner. And if that"s not reason enough, bear in mind that a study found that wives who engage in gatekeeping behaviors do five more hours of family work per week than wives who take a more collaborative approach.9
Another common and counterproductive dynamic occurs when women a.s.sign or suggest tasks to their partners. She is delegating, and that"s a step in the right direction. But sharing responsibility should mean sharing responsibility. Each partner needs to be in charge of specific activities or it becomes too easy for one to feel like he"s doing a favor instead of doing his part.
Like many pieces of advice, letting a partner take responsibility and do his share in his own way is easy to say and hard to do. My brother, David, and sister-in-law, Amy, were very aware of this tension when they first became parents. "There were many times when our daughter was more easily consoled by me," Amy said. "It"s really hard to listen to your baby cry while your struggling husband with no b.r.e.a.s.t.s tries desperately and sometimes awkwardly to comfort her. David was insistent that rather than handing the baby to me when she was crying, we allow him to comfort her even if it took longer. It was harder in the short run, but it absolutely paid off when our daughter learned that Daddy could take care of her as well as Mommy."
I truly believe that the single most important career decision that a woman makes is whether she will have a life partner and who that partner is. I don"t know of one woman in a leadership position whose life partner is not fully-and I mean fully-supportive of her career. No exceptions. And contrary to the popular notion that only unmarried women can make it to the top, the majority of the most successful female business leaders have partners. Of the twenty-eight women who have served as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, twenty-six were married, one was divorced, and only one had never married.10 Many of these CEOs said they "could not have succeeded without the support of their husbands, helping with the children, the household ch.o.r.es, and showing a willingness to move."11
Not surprisingly, a lack of spousal support can have the opposite effect on a career. In a 2007 study of well-educated professional women who had left the paid workforce, 60 percent cited their husbands as a critical factor in their decision.12 These women specifically listed their husbands" lack of partic.i.p.ation in child care and other domestic tasks and the expectation that wives should be the ones to cut back on employment as reasons for quitting. No wonder when asked at a conference what men could do to help advance women"s leadership, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter answered, "The laundry."13 Tasks like laundry, food shopping, cleaning, and cooking are mundane and mandatory. Typically, these tasks fall to women.
In January 2012, I received a letter from Ruth Chang, a doctor with two young children who had seen my TEDTalk. She had been offered a new job overseeing seventy-five doctors in five medical clinics. Her first instinct was to say no out of concern that she could not handle the expanded responsibility in addition to taking care of her family. But then she wavered, and in that moment, Dr. Chang wrote me, "I heard your voice saying, "Sit at the table" and I knew I had to accept the promotion. So that evening, I told my husband I was taking the job ... and then handed him the grocery list." Sharing the burden of the mundane can make all the difference.
My career and marriage are inextricably intertwined. During that first year Dave and I were parents, it became clear that balancing two careers and two cities was not adding up to one happy family. We needed to make some changes. But what? I loved my job at Google and he felt enormously loyal to his team in L.A. We struggled through the commuting for another long year of marital less-than-bliss. By then, Dave was ready to leave Yahoo. He limited his job search to the San Francisco area, which was a sacrifice on his part, since more of his professional interests and contacts were in L.A. He eventually became CEO of SurveyMonkey and was able to move the company headquarters from Portland to the Bay Area.
Once we were in the same city, it still took us some time to figure out how to coordinate our work schedules. Even though Dave and I are extraordinarily fortunate and can afford exceptional child care, there are still difficult and painful decisions about how much time our jobs require us to be away from our family and who will pick up the slack. We sit down at the beginning of every week and figure out which one of us will drive our children to school each day. We both try to be home for dinner as many nights as we can. (At dinner, we go around the table and share the best and worst event from our day; I refrain from saying so, but my best is usually being home for dinner in the first place.) If one of us is scheduled to be away, the other almost always arranges to be home. On weekends, I try to focus completely on my kids (although I have been known to sneak off a few e-mails from the bathroom of the local soccer field).
Like all marriages, ours is a work in progress. Dave and I have had our share of b.u.mps on our path to achieving a roughly fifty-fifty split. After a lot of effort and seemingly endless discussion, we are partners not just in what we do, but in who is in charge. Each of us makes sure that things that need to get done do indeed get done. Our division of household ch.o.r.es is actually pretty traditional. Dave pays bills, handles our finances, provides tech support. I schedule the kids" activities, make sure there is food in the fridge, plan the birthday parties. Sometimes I"m bothered by this cla.s.sic gender division of labor. Am I perpetuating stereotypes by falling into these patterns? But I would rather plan a Dora the Explorer party than pay an insurance bill, and since Dave feels the exact opposite, this arrangement works for us. It takes continual communication, honesty, and a lot of forgiveness to maintain a rickety balance. We are never at fifty-fifty at any given moment-perfect equality is hard to define or sustain-but we allow the pendulum to swing back and forth between us.
In the coming years, our balancing act may get harder. Our children are still young and go to sleep early, which gives me plenty of time to work at night and even to watch what Dave considers to be truly bad TV. As the kids get older, we will have to adjust. Many of my friends have told me that teenage children require more time from their parents. Every stage of life has its challenges. Fortunately, I have Dave to figure it out with me. He"s the best partner I could imagine-even though he"s wrong about my TV shows being bad.
Having a true partner like Dave is still far too rare. While we expect women to be nurturing, we don"t have the same expectations of men. My brother, David, once told me about a colleague who bragged about playing soccer the afternoon that his first child was born. To David"s credit, instead of nodding and smiling, he spoke up and explained that he didn"t think that was either cool or impressive. This opinion needs to be voiced loudly and repeatedly on soccer fields, in workplaces, and in homes.
My brother had a wonderful role model in my father, who was an engaged and active parent. Like most men of his generation, my father did very little domestic work, but unlike most men of his generation, he was happy to change diapers and give baths. He was home for dinner every night, since his ophthalmology practice required no travel and involved few emergencies. He coached my brother"s and sister"s sports teams (and would have happily coached mine if I had been the slightest bit coordinated). He helped me with my homework regularly and was my most enthusiastic fan when I partic.i.p.ated in oratory contests.
Studies from around the world have concluded that children benefit greatly from paternal involvement. Research over the last forty years has consistently found that in comparison to children with less-involved fathers, children with involved and loving fathers have higher levels of psychological well-being and better cognitive abilities.14 When fathers provide even just routine child care, children have higher levels of educational and economic achievement and lower delinquency rates.15 Their children even tend to be more empathetic and socially competent.16 These findings hold true for children from all socioeconomic backgrounds, whether or not the mother is highly involved.
We all need to encourage men to lean in to their families. Unfortunately, traditional gender roles are reinforced not just by individuals, but also by employment policies. Most companies in the United States offer more time off for maternity than paternity leave, and men take far fewer extended breaks from work for family reasons.17 Our laws support this double standard. In the United States, only five states provide any income replacement for the care of a new baby (which is a large problem in and of itself). In three of these states, this benefit is only offered to mothers and is characterized as a pregnancy disability benefit. Only two states offer a paid family leave benefit that fathers can use.18 In general, fathers do not take much time off for a new child; a survey of fathers in the corporate sector found that the vast majority took off one week or less when their partners gave birth, hardly enough time to start out as an equal parent.19 I"m proud that even before I arrived, Facebook offered equal time for maternity and paternity leave.
When family friendly benefits like paternity leave or reduced work hours are offered, both male and female employees often worry that if they take advantage of these programs, they will be seen as uncommitted to their jobs. And for good reason. Employees who use these benefits often face steep penalties ranging from substantial pay cuts to lost promotions to marginalization.20 Both men and women can be penalized at work for prioritizing family, but men may pay an even higher price.21 When male employees take a leave of absence or just leave work early to care for a sick child, they can face negative consequences that range from being teased to receiving lower performance ratings to reducing their chance for a raise or promotion.22
Fathers who want to drop out of the workforce entirely and devote themselves to child care can face extremely negative social pressure. Currently, fathers make up less than 4 percent of parents who work full-time inside the home, and many report that it can be very isolating.23 My friend Peter Noone spent several years as a stay-at-home father and found that while people claimed to respect his choice, he did not feel welcomed into the social circles in his neighborhood. As a man at the playground or in the not-so-tactfully-named "Mommy and Me" cla.s.ses, strangers viewed him with a certain amount of distrust. The friendly and easy connections that the women made were not extended to him.24 Time and again, he was reminded that he was outside the norm.
Gender-specific expectations remain self-fulfilling. The belief that mothers are more committed to family than to work penalizes women because employers a.s.sume they won"t live up to expectations of professional dedication. The reverse is true for men, who are expected to put their careers first. We judge men primarily by their professional success and send them a clear message that personal achievements are insufficient for them to be valued or feel fulfilled. This mind-set leads to a grown man bragging on the soccer field that he left his postpartum wife and newborn at the hospital to go kick a ball.
Making gender matters even worse, men"s success is viewed not just in absolute terms, but often in comparison to their wives". The image of a happy couple still includes a husband who is more professionally successful than the wife. If the reverse occurs, it"s perceived as threatening to the marriage. People frequently pull me aside to ask sympathetically, "How is Dave? Is he okay with, you know, all your [whispering] success?" Dave is far more self-confident than I am, and given his own professional success, these comments are easy for him to brush off. More and more men will have to do the same, since almost 30 percent of U.S. working wives now outearn their husbands.25 As that number continues to grow, I hope the whispering stops.
Dave and I can laugh off concerns about his supposedly fragile ego, but for many women, this is no laughing matter. Women face enough barriers to professional success. If they also have to worry that they will upset their husbands by succeeding, how can we hope to live in an equal world?
When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys s.e.xy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated, and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is s.e.xier. (If you don"t believe me, check out a fabulous little book called p.o.r.n for Women. One page shows a man cleaning a kitchen while insisting, "I like to get to these things before I have to be asked." Another man gets out of bed in the middle of the night, wondering, "Is that the baby? I"ll get her.")26
Kristina Salen, the leader of Fidelity"s media and internet investment group, told me that when she was dating, she wanted to see how much a boyfriend would support her career, so she devised a test. She would break a date at the last minute claiming there was a professional conflict and see how the guy would react. If he understood and simply rescheduled, she would go out with him again. When Kristina wanted to take a relationship to the next level, she gave him another test. While working in emerging markets in the late 1990s, she would invite the guy to visit her for the weekend ... in So Paulo. It was a great way to find out if he was willing to fit his schedule around hers. The trials paid off. She found her Mr. Right and they have been happily married for fourteen years. Not only is her husband, Daniel, completely supportive of her career, he"s also the primary caregiver for their two children.
Even after finding the right guy-or gal-no one comes fully formed. I learned from my mother to be careful about role definition in the beginning of a relationship. Even though my mother did most of the household work, my father always vacuumed the floor after dinner. She never had to persuade him to do this ch.o.r.e; it was simply his job from day one. At the start of a romance, it"s tempting for a woman to show a more cla.s.sic "girlfriendy" side by volunteering to cook meals and take care of errands. And, suddenly, we"re back in 1955. If a relationship begins in an unequal place, it is likely to get more unbalanced when and if children are added to the equation. Instead, use the beginning of a relationship to establish the division of labor, just as Nora Ephron"s dialogue in When Harry Met Sally reminds us:
HARRY: You take someone to the airport, it"s clearly the beginning of the relationship. That"s why I have never taken anyone to the airport at the beginning of a relationship.
SALLY: Why?
HARRY: Because eventually things move on and you don"t take someone to the airport and I never wanted anyone to say to me, "How come you never take me to the airport anymore?"
If you want a fifty-fifty partnership, establish that pattern at the outset. A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg and his partner, now wife, Priscilla Chan, made a donation to improve the Newark, New Jersey, public school system and needed someone to run their foundation. I recommended Jen Holleran, who had deep knowledge and experience in school reform. She also had fourteen-month-old twins and had cut her hours by two-thirds since their birth. Her husband, Andy, is a child psychiatrist who was involved with raising the kids when he was home. But once Jen had reduced her workload, she ended up being responsible for all of the household work, including running errands, paying bills, cooking, and scheduling. When the offer came from Mark and Priscilla, Jen wasn"t sure she was ready to upset the current order by committing to a full-time job with frequent travel. I urged her to set up the relationship dynamic she wanted sooner rather than later. Jen remembers my suggesting, "If you want an equal partnership, you should start now."
Jen and Andy discussed the opportunity and decided she should take the job because of the impact she could have. And who would pick up the slack? Andy would. He rearranged his work so he could be home with the boys each morning and night, and even more when Jen travels. He now pays all the bills and squeezes in grocery runs as much as she does. He cooks and cleans more, knows the details of the schedule, and is happy to be the number one, in-demand parent for half the week. A year and a half into this new arrangement, Andy told me that he loves his time alone with their boys and the increased role that he has in their lives. Jen loves her job and is glad that she and her husband now have a more equal marriage. "My time is now as valuable as his," she told me. "As a result, we are happier."
Research supports Jen"s observation that equality between partners leads to happier relationships. When husbands do more housework, wives are less depressed, marital conflicts decrease, and satisfaction rises.27 When women work outside the home and share breadwinning duties, couples are more likely to stay together. In fact, the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework.28 For men, partic.i.p.ating in child rearing fosters the development of patience, empathy, and adaptability, characteristics that benefit all of their relationships.29 For women, earning money increases their decision-making ability in the home, protects them in case of divorce, and can be important security in later years, as women often outlive their husbands.30 Also-and many might find this the most motivating factor-couples who share domestic responsibilities have more s.e.x.31 It may be counterintuitive, but the best way for a man to make a pa.s.s at his wife might be to do the dishes.
I also feel strongly that when a mother stays at home, her time during the day should still be considered real work-because it is. Raising children is at least as stressful and demanding as a paying job. It is unfair that mothers are frequently expected to work long into the night while fathers who work outside the home get the chance to relax from their day jobs. When the father is home, he should take on half the child care and housework. Also, most employed fathers interact with other grown-ups all day, while mothers at home are often starved for adult conversation by evening. I know a woman who gave up a career as a lawyer to be a stay-at-home mom and always insisted that when her husband, a TV writer, got home from work, he asked her, "How was your day?" before he launched into an account of his own.
True partnership in our homes does more than just benefit couples today; it also sets the stage for the next generation. The workplace has evolved more than the home in part because we enter it as adults, so each generation experiences a new dynamic. But the homes we create tend to be more rooted in our childhoods. My generation grew up watching our mothers do the child care and housework while our fathers earned the wages. It"s too easy for us to get stuck in these patterns. It is no surprise that married and cohabitating men whose mothers were employed while they were growing up do more housework as adults than other men.32 The sooner we break the cycle, the faster we will reach greater equality.
One of the reasons Dave is a true partner is because he grew up in a home where his father set an extraordinary example. Sadly, Dave"s father, Mel, pa.s.sed away before I had a chance to meet him, but he clearly was a man way ahead of his time. Mel"s mother worked side by side with her husband running the family"s small grocery store, so Mel grew up accepting women as equals, which was unusual in those days. As a single man, he became interested in the women"s movement and read Betty Friedan"s The Feminine Mystique. He was the one who introduced his wife (and Dave"s mother), Paula, to this feminist wake-up call in the 1960s. He encouraged Paula to set up and lead PACER, a national nonprofit to help children with disabilities. A law professor, Mel often taught cla.s.ses at night. Since he wanted the family to have at least one meal together each day, he decided it would be breakfast and prepared the meal himself, complete with fresh-squeezed orange juice.
A more equal division of labor between parents will model better behavior for the next generation. I have heard so many women say that they wished their partners helped more with child care, but since it"s only a few more years until their kids are off to school, it"s not worth the battle to change the dynamic. In my opinion, it is always worth the battle to change an undesirable dynamic. I also worry that these women will face the same dynamic when it comes time to care for aging parents. Women provide more than twice as much care not only for their own parents, but for their in-laws as well.33 This is an additional burden that needs to be shared. And children need to see it being shared so that their generation will follow that example.
In 2012, Gloria Steinem sat down in her home for an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Gloria reiterated that progress for women in the home has trailed progress in the workplace, explaining, "Now we know that women can do what men can do, but we don"t know that men can do what women can do."34 I believe they can and we should give them more chances to prove it.
This revolution will happen one family at a time. The good news is that men in younger generations appear more eager to be real partners than men in previous generations. A survey that asked partic.i.p.ants to rate the importance of various job characteristics found that men in their forties most frequently selected "work which challenges me" as very important, while men in their twenties and thirties most frequently selected having a job with a schedule that "allows me to spend time with my family."35 If these trends hold as this group ages, it could signal a promising shift.
Wonderful, sensitive men of all ages are out there. And the more women value kindness and support in their boyfriends, the more men will demonstrate it. Kristina Salen, my friend who devised the tests to screen her dates, told me that her son insists that when he grows up, he wants to take care of his children "like Daddy does." She and her husband were thrilled to hear this. More boys need that role model and that choice. As more women lean in to their careers, more men need to lean in to their families. We need to encourage men to be more ambitious in their homes.
We need more men to sit at the table ... the kitchen table.
9
The Myth of Doing It All
HAVING IT ALL." Perhaps the greatest trap ever set for women was the coining of this phrase. Bandied about in speeches, headlines, and articles, these three little words are intended to be aspirational but instead make all of us feel like we have fallen short. I have never met a woman, or man, who has stated emphatically, "Yes, I have it all." Because no matter what any of us has-and how grateful we are for what we have-no one has it all.
Nor can we. The very concept of having it all flies in the face of the basic laws of economics and common sense. As Sharon Poczter, professor of economics at Cornell, explains, "The antiquated rhetoric of "having it all" disregards the basis of every economic relationship: the idea of trade-offs. All of us are dealing with the constrained optimization that is life, attempting to maximize our utility based on parameters like career, kids, relationships, etc., doing our best to allocate the resource of time. Due to the scarcity of this resource, therefore, none of us can "have it all," and those who claim to are most likely lying."1
"Having it all" is best regarded as a myth. And like many myths, it can deliver a helpful cautionary message. Think of Icarus, who soared to great heights with his man-made wings. His father warned him not to fly too near the sun, but Icarus ignored the advice. He soared even higher, his wings melted, and he crashed to earth. Pursuing both a professional and personal life is a n.o.ble and attainable goal, up to a point. Women should learn from Icarus to aim for the sky, but keep in mind that we all have real limits.
Instead of pondering the question "Can we have it all?," we should be asking the more practical question "Can we do it all?" And again, the answer is no. Each of us makes choices constantly between work and family, exercising and relaxing, making time for others and taking time for ourselves. Being a parent means making adjustments, compromises, and sacrifices every day. For most people, sacrifices and hardships are not a choice, but a necessity. About 65 percent of married-couple families with children in the United States have two parents in the workforce, with almost all relying on both incomes to support their household.2 Being a single working parent can be even more difficult. About 30 percent of families with children are led by a single parent, with 85 percent of those led by a woman.3
Mothers who work outside the home are constantly reminded of these challenges. Tina Fey noted that when she was promoting the movie Date Night with Steve Carell, a father of two and star of his own sitcom, reporters would grill Fey on how she balances her life, but never posed that question to her male costar. As she wrote in Bossypants, "What is the rudest question you can ask a woman? "How old are you?" "What do you weigh?" "When you and your twin sister are alone with Mr. Hefner, do you have to pretend to be lesbians?" No, the worst question is "How do you juggle it all?" ... People constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. "You"re f.u.c.king it all up, aren"t you?" their eyes say."4
Fey nails it. Employed mothers and fathers both struggle with multiple responsibilities, but mothers also have to endure the rude questions and accusatory looks that remind us that we"re shortchanging both our jobs and our children. As if we needed reminding. Like me, most of the women I know do a great job worrying that we don"t measure up. We compare our efforts at work to those of our colleagues, usually men, who typically have far fewer responsibilities at home. Then we compare our efforts at home to those of mothers who dedicate themselves solely to their families. Outside observers reminding us that we must be struggling-and failing-is just bitter icing on an already soggy cake.
Trying to do it all and expecting that it all can be done exactly right is a recipe for disappointment. Perfection is the enemy. Gloria Steinem said it best: "You can"t do it all. No one can have two full-time jobs, have perfect children and cook three meals and be multi-o.r.g.a.s.mic "til dawn ... Superwoman is the adversary of the women"s movement."5
Dr. Laurie Glimcher, dean of Weill Cornell Medical College, said the key for her in pursuing her career while raising children was learning where to focus her attention. "I had to decide what mattered and what didn"t and I learned to be a perfectionist in only the things that mattered." In her case, she concluded that scientific data had to be perfect, but reviews and other mundane administrative tasks could be considered good enough at 95 percent. Dr. Glimcher also said she made it a priority to get home at a reasonable hour, adding that when she got there, she refused to worry about whether "the linens were folded or the closets were tidy. You can"t be obsessive about these things that don"t matter."6