Of Work & Wet Diapers

Anne-Marie Slaughter had an important position at the State Department, working under Secretary Clinton. She has now achieved national fame, not by anything that she did on the job, but by explaining in an article in The Atlantic why she quit and what it says about contemporary American society.

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations' annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled.

But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

I have considerable sympathy for Ms. Slaughter. My first child was born when I was working on my dissertation back at Claremont Graduate School. My wife largely supported us with a full time factory job and a commute of more than an hour a day. For the first four years of my daughter's life, I was her primary care giver. The problem was how to do that job and keep writing about Machiavelli.

Here's how we solved it. My daughter and I went to bed every evening at 7pm. I would rise at 3am and go to the library to do my part time job (backing up the enormous computer hard drives). There I did my writing. Around 8am, I would drive to San Bernardino to teach American Government. I would get home shortly before my wife had to leave for work. It was a crazy schedule, but it worked well enough to get us by until I accepted the appointment at Northern. During the first few years at NSU, my wife stayed at home with my daughter and her baby brother.

I think it's true that I and my significant other pretty much split the child-rearing duties. I am sure that I have changed more diapers than my entire male line going back to the great ancestor of all the Blanchards and the chimpanzees.

Slaughter observes that despite the improvement in opportunities for women in the workforce, women still have a much harder time pursuing full careers than men do. There are a lot of reasons why this is the case, but this is surely the most important one:

The proposition that women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately) assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case.

Here I step onto treacherous ground, mined with stereotypes. From years of conversations and observations, however, I've come to believe that men and women respond quite differently when problems at home force them to recognize that their absence is hurting a child, or at least that their presence would likely help. I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.

The obvious question is why this dimorphism exists and how to change it if we want to level the professional playing field. Ms. Slaughter clearly things that change is order.

The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a "new gender gap"—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.

Slaughter suggests a number of social changes that might produce "a society that works for everyone."

The most provocative is that women who want careers and children might want to have the children earlier rather than, as usually happens, later.

A child born when his mother is 25 will finish high school when his mother is 43, an age at which, with full-time immersion in a career, she still has plenty of time and energy for advancement.

Another is that we should stop rewarding people who devote all their time to their jobs at the expense of those who make time for their families. She tells the story of an Orthodox Jew, whose time taken out for religious observations was respected by his colleagues. We should offer the same respect to mothers and fathers who show a similar concern for time with their children. She proposes that we stop thinking of a professional career as a single arc and start thinking of it as something that can be broken down into steps. Her proposals are thoughtful and serious and deserve reading. I can't really disagree with any of them.

I am doubtful on a couple of points. Slaughter seems to assume that the full time devotion to a career that is common at the highest levels of business and government is a result of culture and that we can cultivate different values and behaviors. This may be so, but I think it more likely that it is a result of the mechanics of competition. Yes, it might sometimes be true that people are more efficient at their work if they take more time out for other things. Still, where competition is severe, I suspect the prize will always soak up most of the competitor's time and attention.

I am also doubtful that the dimorphism that Slaughter talks about will be easy to change, even with a woman in the White House. Some social facts are largely the result of other social facts and for that reason are susceptible to rapid change. Consider birth outside of wedlock. This varies dramatically between different nations and between different populations within a nation. It varies dramatically in the same populations over time. That is because marriage is an artificial institution maintained by social pressure. When the later changes (and it can change rapidly) so does the former.

Other social facts are heavily influenced by biology and biology changes much more slowly than culture. Human males invest a lot more in their offspring than do most animals. How much they invest varies with cultures. However, there is no known human culture in which men routinely take as much let alone more responsibility for child care than women. This is a very robust social fact and it is buttressed by robust evolutionary theory. As Aristotle observed, women always know who their children are. Men have to guess. That is the kind of thing that has evolutionary consequences.

The sexual dimorphism in parental attachment and investment is marginal. Men can certainly love their children and society can certainly expect them to be responsible for them. Women can certainly compete and win across a wide range of fields and we should want them to have the opportunity to do so. That dimorphism is nonetheless real and it will be robust in samples as large as American society. It will also show up in the lives of such persons as Ms. Slaughter.

None of this means that we shouldn't try to make it easier for women to pursue careers. Her recommendations are worth considering. We might have to face the fact, however, that the foundations of this problem are very deep and that they may be stubbornly resistant to change.

Comments

[Donald Pay]

Parents rear children longer than we used to, because the skills they need now are different. Adolescence used to be a time when children became adults in the eyes of society. In natural human societies, most girls were married around sixteen, had kids of their own and were not the responsibility of parents. Males were expected to become self-sufficient at that age, and begin establishing themselves so that they would be attractive to a mate. Now we have kids through college years, which can last till 25-26. If they go to college or tech schools, most young adults will have student debt and not be able to establish a solid financial footing to have a family until after 30.

Also, let's don't discount what males traditionally did for raising boys, and which they now also do for girls. In natural human societies males had a huge roll in rearing young males from the age of 8-9 until they were proficient in various skills necessary to be proficient in hunter or protecting the clan. Even as a boy in the 1950s I recall many of the dads out showing sons how to fish or fix cars. Dads usually teach both boys and girls how to drive, change a tire, mow the lawn, etc.

[TexasDude]

We have made a conscious decision for one parent to be at home and living off of one salary. We can't just go buy stuff. We don't use credit cards. We live off of what I earn.