Anne-Marie Slaughter's Thought Police

Among feminists, Princeton professor and former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter is not a radical. She must count as a mainstream feminist.

Several months ago Slaughter caused a ruckus in the media and the blogosphere when she wrote an article explaining that she was giving up her high-powered job in the State Department because her children were reacting badly to her prolonged absences.

A mother who had been an integral part of her children’s lives was no longer around very much. One child in particular  felt neglected and abandoned and was acting out. 

I accepted Slaughter’s decision to sacrifice her job in order to do what was best for her children, but I questioned her conclusion that women in the future could avoid her dilemma if feminism further infiltrated our culture.

I also wondered how she could have reached such a wrong-headed conclusion.

Perhaps she was just trying to demonstrate that feminism, as a radical ideology, could addle even the best minds.

My prior comments here.

Now Slaughter has followed up with a new article about achieving gender parity in society.

Apparently, she has discovered that some men have been acculturated in feminist values. These men, mostly whiners, it appears, want to stay at home with their children in order to facilitate the goal of workplace gender  parity.

Slaughter describes them thusly:

Others are from young men who want to be able to spend more time with their children and be fully equal parenting partners with their working wives but feel they don't have those options either. Indeed, a number of men have written to bemoan the strong gender stereotyping that they encounter, whereby a guy who wants to take paternity leave, flex-time, defer a promotion because the job up has too much travel, or simply needs to leave at 6 every night to pick up his kid from daycare, is regarded as insufficiently committed to his work or else just "not one of the guys."

Naturally, a feminist like Slaughter would attract men who are whiners and bemoaners.

But note their and Slaughter’s warped reasoning.

These “men” have every right to organize their time as they wish. If they wish to have jobs that allow them more time at home with the children, that is certainly their right. If they wish to sacrifice their careers in order to advance their wives’ careers that is also their right.

But whatever makes them think that they should be rewarded for it? Why do they think that they deserve promotions and bonuses equal to those individuals who work longer and harder and, presumably, more effectively?

Why are they incapable of taking responsibility for their own life choices? If you work less than the next guy, for whatever reason, you will likely not be rewarded as handsomely as he is.

Deal with it.

Worse, yet, what gives these whiners and their feminist enablers the right to control what other people think of their behavior?

Slaughter is so agitated about this imaginary problem that she wants to call in the thought police.

If a man is a member of a work team and if the team needs to stay late to work on a project, should he be rewarded for leaving early to pick up his child from daycare?

If his absence impacts the team’s work negatively, is no one supposed to notice? If the team’s project is rejected, should he not be held to account?

Slaughter may fashion herself a moderate feminist, but she completely ignores the exigencies of the workplace and wants to undermine teamwork and to police thought.

She has no interest in or awareness of the marketplace; she wants to make it look like what her ideology dictates. 

Those who believe that they can lie down with an ideology like feminism and just siphon off the good parts are fooling themselves.

How does Slaughter propose to undermine the workplace and to police thought?

First, she recommends that men file lawsuits over gender discrimination.

Surely, that will help create more jobs and a harmonious work environment.

Think of it… and you should, because Slaughter clearly has not… a man who works less will get promoted, not based on his competence or his good work, but because a court has ordered it.

How well do you think a court-appointed executive will be able to function when his colleagues and subordinates believe that he does not merit his promotion? What do you think this regime will do to morale?

And then, Slaughter proposes another instrument of general indoctrination, what is called a “conversation:”

I am more convinced than ever that the only way to make the kind of change we need to allow workers to build, provide, and care for strong families is to change conditions and cultural mores for men as well as women. But men have to join the conversation—publicly, candidly, and loudly.

When they start talking about a conversation they’re coming after your minds. It’s brainwashing light.

If you imagine that this conversation is going to conclude that men who choose to spend more time home ought to take responsibility or who otherwise sacrifice their ambition for family obligations should accept responsibility for their choices, you are very, very naïve.

Slaughter has no interest in how the marketplace functions or in whether it is effective and efficient. She is hellbent on finding a way to force men to stop competing and to stop striving and to stop being ambitions.

In other words, she wants men to cease behaving like men.

It will never happen. True, the whiners will still be out there and feminism will produce more of them. Other men will still treat them as they merit according to the choices that they have made and for which, if they want to be real men, they should take responsibility.

Feminist Blowback for Anne-Marie Slaughter

As often happens, the furor over Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article has brought her question into sharper focus.

Even the expected feminist blowback is illuminating. Writing for Salon.com professional feminist Rebecca Traister takes vigorous exception to Slaughter’s viewpoint.

In her words:

Here is what is wrong, what has always been wrong, with equating feminist success with “having it all”: It’s a misrepresentation of a revolutionary social movement. The notion that female achievement should be measured by women’s ability to “have it all” recasts a righteous struggle for greater political, economic, social, sexual and political parity as a piggy and acquisitive project.

Traister is notably agitated by the notion of having it all. She declares, correctly, that no one can ever have it all. So she concludes that women are being told that feminism wants them to have it all so that when they discover that they can’t they will blame feminism.

Ergo, having-it-all-ism is a patriarchal conspiracy to discredit feminism.

In reality, this notion has been intrinsic to feminist recruiting efforts. Feminism is a cult. It tries to attract followers as any cult does, by promising that if you join it you can have everything that you have always dreamed of. You can be a feminist and be married and have a family and have a great career.

By now even Traister sees that the promise is fraudulent. Feminists are walking away from it because it is no longer luring young women into the feminist cult.

Most of the time, feminism is presented as a form of liberal or progressive politics. Most people, I would venture, see it as mainstream, middle-of-the-road, equally at home on the right and the left.

Who today would dare to say that women do not deserve equal pay for equal work?

On this score I agree with Traister and I give her credit for honesty. Feminism is a “revolutionary social movement,” a form of radical leftist social politics.

Whatever your politics are if you join the feminist cult or if you identify yourself as a feminist you are signing on to do the work of leftist extremists.

Since Traister sees feminism as a righteous struggle against, as it happens, human nature, she is correct to say that it should not be seen in terms of the goodies it can hand out. 

We all know that the verb “to have” might have something to do with possessing something. You can have a car and a home and a husband and children. You can have dinner and you might have a Ming vase on your mantle.

But when you say that you have to do something, the verb “to have” has a meaning that is wildly detached from the idea of possession.

Besides, how warped do you have to be to consider that a husband and children are acquisitions, roughly equivalent to a new pair of shoes?

Yet, Traister is trying to make a larger point here. Allow me to clarify it.

She is saying that feminism does not promise a rose garden or a closet full of shoes. It seeks social justice and the overthrow of capitalism. This implies that those who respond to its siren song are asserting a higher degree of moral virtue than are those who join up because they were promised a house in the suburbs to go along with their careers.

In this context, we can reframe Anne-Marie Slaughter’s question. If a woman is both a feminist and a mother and if she chooses to make certain personal sacrifices to advance the cause, does she also have the right to sacrifice her children to the same cause.

To be more precise, is it Slaughter’s duty as a true-believing feminist to sacrifice her SONS to the cause?

The question involves two different forms of human identity. One is defined by social role; the other by ideological commitment. Any form of identity brings with it duties and obligations. 

Of course, a woman can be a feminist and a mother. She can, with more difficulty, be a feminist and a wife. She can also be a feminist and an executive.

Now, what happens if her duty as a feminist conflicts with her duty as a mother or a wife or an executive?

Situations arise, as Slaughter makes clear, where a woman, like most humans who are not women, have to choose: loyalty to her ideology or loyalty to her children? 

Slaughter recognized that her choice of a career opportunity had hurt her children. She decided that her duty as a mother was more important than her duty to feminism.

That is what most disturbs fanatical feminists like Rebecca Traister. They want to make world cultural history and will allow nothing to get in the way, certainly not their duty to care for a teenage boy.

Explaining her decision, Slaughter quoted Mary Matalin, who once said that she was dispensable as a member of the White House staff she was dispensable, but not as her daughters’ mother.

It was easier for the White House could find someone who could do her job than it would be for her daughters to find a replacement mother.

It is obvious to everyone who is not a true-believing feminist that the role of mother cannot be separated from human biology. As Nancy Chodorow once said, it is a universal fact: “Only women mother.”

The duties and obligations that inhere in the role of mother are consonant with biological realities. When a woman functions as mother to her children her moral behavior is in harmony with nature.

Traister seems to disagree. Like all ideological zealots she is at war with reality, especially with human nature, so she does not accept the need to live in harmony with human biology.

Her solution should make us all cringe. She wants nothing less than to rewire your brain.

In her words:

We are still very much in the midst of reversing eons of gendered injustice, overheated headlines (from the, uh, Atlantic) about contemporary female dominance to the contrary. Brains are still getting rewired, systems are still being reworked to accommodate evolving roles.

I admire Traister for so clearly stating her totalitarian aspirations.

Rewiring the brain is obviously a very contemporary concept. The more traditional term is brainwashing.

Clearly, the culture wars being fought in the media and the schools and in government involve an effort to brainwash the citizenry, beginning with children.

Feminists and other radical leftists are trying to brainwash us all into thinking illogically and irrationally, into favoring ideology over empirical fact, into making us put loyalty to the cause ahead of responsibilities as spouses, parents and citizens.

Your highest loyalty, Traister is saying, should be to the grand cause of global Revolution.

Going Down With Wendy Davis

I among others have suggested that feminists should not make Wendy Davis the poster-woman for their cause.

Do feminists really want to be identified with a mother who abandoned her children in order to go to Harvard Law School and then gave up custody because it wasn’t a good time for her?

Apparently, they do. Even the thoroughly estimable and often praised (on this blog) Kirsten Powers is rushing to defend Davis.

Her argument goes something like this: you would never accuse a male who left his children with their mother in order to go to law school or to serve in the military with child abandonment.

Let’s not call it a real argument. It sounds like it comes from a high school student who is learning how to play the double standard game.

Why do so many otherwise intelligent people torment themselves over the fact that men and women are different and that, to some extent, regardless of the culture, customs and habits affirm the difference.

Apparently, it’s just too much for some people to grasp.

The next thing you know they will want to ban “mother” and “father.” The new formulation will be gender-neutered parental person.

For the edification of Powers and others similarly tormented, it is true that males are normally not excoriated for abandoning their children when they go to war, but, then again, how many males do you know who are mothers?

Besides, if men are never said to be abandoning their children when they go to war, perhaps that means that everyone— except a few recalcitrant feminists— understands that they are not abandoning their children. They are protecting and providing for them.

After all, Naomi Schaeffer Riley’s column, quoted in a post yesterday, speaks for mothers who think less of a woman who abandons her children.

And Powers could also have read up on the work of Anne-Marie Slaughter, formerly head of policy planning in the State Department who chose to resign her post because her children, one of whom was a teenager, could not cope with her absence.

And, let’s not forget Sarah Palin. For all of her considerable political talents, Palin could not run an effective campaign for the vice-presidency and eventually could not do a good job as governor of Alaska because she was the mother of small children, one of whom was a baby with Down syndrome.

Obviously, Palin should have known this before accept her party’s nomination. And John McCain should have known it, too.

Obviously, mother and father are two distinct roles. A father might be a good caregiver, but he will never make a good mother. You do not have to have read too much Darwin to understand that a mother’s nurturance is of fundamental importance for a young child.

When a child loses a mother, human communities have universally replaced her with a substitute mother. As psychoanalyst and feminist Nancy Chodorow once explained: “Only women mother.”

Powers should put her high dudgeon in a lockbox. Her argument would be more persuasive if she did not indulge in intemperate rants, like this:

For crying out loud, she didn’t leave her children on the side of the road.  She left them to live with their father. It’s fair to criticize Davis for her misleading bio that implied she had been a single mother during law school. Instead, a misogynistic mob is determined to punish her for her parenting choices.

The fact that Davis did not leave her children on the side of the road is not a great recommendation for her moral character. She did leave them with a man who was father to one of them and step-father to the other. Apparently, Powers does not care that one of the Davis children had been abandoned by both father and mother.

Naturally, Powers calls out those who are criticizing Davis as misogynist. When reason fails, you can always fall back on name calling.

Who is Powers calling misogynistic? Why, mothers, of course. That was why I quoted Naomi Schaeffer Riley and why Riley quoted Anne-Marie Slaughter. If Wendy Davis turns off mothers, her political career, as Riley says, is over. Why would we not respect the views of mothers? They, more than anyone else, know how important it is to nurture a young child.

And they, more than anyone else will hold Davis in contempt because she abandoned and gave up custody of her children.

Here is the way Powers sees it:

But Davis never has said exactly why she made this decision, except to say that, “It’s not a good time for me right now.”  It’s reasonable to assume she made the best decision she could for her children. Which is probably why, in the end, both of Davis’s daughters are supporting her candidacy.

You do not need to know why she made the decision. She stated explicitly that her decision was not about her children it was about “me.” True enough, she did not lose custody of her children. She relinquished custody voluntarily. Perhaps she knew that if she didn’t the court would have taken them away from her. After all, she had abandoned them to go to law school.

What kind of mother believes that her children will be better off not being raised by her? Even by Powers’ reasoning— such as it is— Davis’s heroism consists in declaring that the best thing for her daughters was not to be brought up by her.

The fact that the girls are now supporting their mothers’ candidacy means nothing. There is no such thing as politicians children who do not support their parents.

Yesterday, I suggested that it would be a bad idea for feminism to jump aboard the Good Ship Wendy Davis. That ship is sinking fast. If Kirsten Powers is indicative, the efforts to bail it out are becoming increasingly desperate.

My advice: take your losses and move on already.

Work-Life Balance: Why Can't Women Have It All?

In an Atlantic article that will be much read and much discussed Anne-Marie Slaughter sets out to correct the lies that feminists have been telling young women.

Sort of.

By that I mean that she is of two minds about the problem of work-life balance.

Can women have it all? Slaughter says that, as of today, they cannot. A woman cannot have a high-powered career and raise her children as she would wish.

Some women do it, Slaughter recognizes, but they are, as she sees it, super-women. For most women the goal merely promotes feelings of inadequacy, even feelings of having betrayed the feminist cause.

Unrealistic expectations do not help you to conduct our life. Mix them with impossible demands and you are on the road to misery.

The Atlantic summarizes her basic idea:

It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed.

Slaughter herself had held a high-level policy job in the State Department. Her teenage sons lived in Princeton, NJ with their father.

Her husband had stepped in as the primary caregiver. Yet, one of her sons was feeling abandoned and he let his feelings be known.

One day Slaughter was attending an important diplomatic function. She was distracted, however, by the situation at home:

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.

Slaughter’s situation was ideal. Her husband was not only supportive; he was a tenured professor. Thus, he was not worrying about job security, was not competing for a promotion, and could control his schedule.

Previously, Slaughter had been an academic herself. With a flexible schedule she easily mixed her job and motherhood. Once she joined the State Department all that changed. She got to experience the life in the real world:

In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.

Some women can do it; most women can’t.

So far, so good.

Yet, Slaughter holds fast to her feminist creed. She wants to see gender parity throughout the labor market, with an equal number of women and men at every level of every organization.

The American economy has many problems today. Every American should want the economy to improve, to provide more jobs and opportunity for every citizen. Under the administration that Slaughter proudly served the economy has not been doing well at all.

Of course, you cannot grow the economy if you are distracting yourself chasing a pipedream of gender equality.

Achieving feminist goals would require government bureaucrats, lawyers and judges to take over the labor market. How well do you think that new regulations and new lawsuits will advance the goal of economic growth and prosperity? Slaughter does not recommend such a takeover, but it is, by my lights, the inevitable outcome of any effort to achieve her feminist goal.

I will not run through Slaughter’s ideas about how the workplace should adapt to feminist ideology, because, after all, the workplace has already made many of those adaptations and the schools have already introduced gender-neutering education.

How’s that working out for economic growth and employment?

Of course,  you cannot telecommute to a cocktail party. When the cocktail party is an integral part of your workday, as happened in the case Slaughter described, technology is not going to solve the problem.

Telecommuting works for some people, but it also undermines office camaraderie and the different kinds of bonding rituals that co-workers typically undergo.

Conference calls are nice, but people need face time. Most emotion is communicated through facial gestures. And no one gives managerial responsibilities to someone who does not put in a considerable amount of face time. You are not going to trust someone you never see face-to-face. You are not going to promote someone who refuses to look you in the eye on a daily basis.

People compete for promotions. They compete by working harder and longer, even by sacrificing aspects of their personal lives. Do you want to say that some people should not be allowed to work longer hours because others have childcare responsibilities? How would you enforce that?

Slaughter recognizes, more clearly than most that her dreams of feminist utopia must crash into reality. They fail because mothers and fathers are not interchangeable.

Slaughter writes:

Still, 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.

Of course, this is heresy to feminists, and Slaughter compensates by offering  a myriad of ways for women to maintain their face time with their children while still pursuing high-powered careers.

Still, she is quite right to underscore the differences between mothers and fathers. And she is correct to describe the difference in terms that are reflexive and innate, not the product of socialization.

More importantly, Slaughter identifies the set of cultural values that have produced these problems.

She says:

You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce.

Slaughter adheres to these values. I consider them to be the problem.

In my view it's a rank distortion to say that life is or should be about getting what you want, when you want, with whom you want and from whom you want.

We owe this misleading idea to the therapy culture.

Life is a negotiation. It’s a negotiation between what you are good at and what the market will pay for. If you want to do what you are good at, fine. If what you are good at is not exactly what you want to do, adjust your expectations.

Life is a negotiation between the biological imperative to reproduce and the available supply of potential mates.

Life is a negotiation between your duties to your family and your duties to your job.

One thing that it’s not about is getting what you want no matter what.

The notion that we ought to reconstruct the marketplace in order to ensure that feminists can continue to tilt at windmills is serious mistake.

As for the larger question: why can't women have it all? The answer is simple: because no one can.


[All discussions of Slaughter are referring to Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg. I posted my thoughts on Sandberg previously. Link here. ]

A Mother's Voice

In a different world everyone would be cheering the success of Kellyanne Conway. After all, she was the first woman to run an American presidential campaign… and her candidate won.

In our world, however, feminists aligned themselves with Hillary Clinton and considered her loss to be a loss for women. They have treated Conway as someone who was consorting with the enemy.  Or devil.

Not entirely without reason. One must say that many of Donald Trump’s remarks and attitudes about women were insulting and degrading.

Many feminists conflate what is good for feminism with what is good for women. Yet, feminism is an ideology. It is a system of beliefs. It seeks to attract adherents and to advance a political agenda. The agenda is invariably to the left-of-center. At times, it is radically to the left. Promoting what is best for women is not necessarily the same as forming a vanguard to attack male power and to overthrow the patriarchy.

If a woman is applying for a job or working for a promotion, she should be judged as men are judged: in terms of job performance and company loyalty.  But if she is trying to advance a feminist agenda, or any other  ideological agenda, she will be seen as less than loyal to the company.

The more feminists protest the more companies will tend to question whether female employees are more loyal to their company or more loyal to feminism. No one talks about this openly, but it is not helping women to succeed in the business world.

Feminist cheer when a woman strikes out against the patriarchy by attacking her boss for sexual harassment, even to the point of damaging his career. Yet, other staff members will see her as disruptive, someone whose loyalty is to something other than the company. This feels totally unjust, because it is unjust. But, business does not run according to the laws of justice.

Moreover, if women are believed to pose a threat to male executives they will, as happens in Washington, D. C., be excluded from private meetings, trips and projects. One might consider this to be unjust. It is unjust. And yet, if women see themselves as feminists first and employees second, they will be perceived as not working for the best interests of the company, but for their cause.

I am not saying that women should not call out sexual harassment in the workplace. I am simply pointing that such actions exact a price. They make all women into potential threats, thus to be kept at a distance. As for whether the attacks on male sexual harassment has diminished the incidence of male sexual harassment, I would venture that it has simply made it more subtle and perhaps even insidious.

No one mentions women who engage in sexual harassment, but they certainly do. And, a man or a woman can be an appallingly bad manager without engaging in anything resembling sexual harassment.

In any event, Kellyanne Conway has achieved an extraordinary success. Does her success enhance the reputation of women political consultants? Of course, it does. Does it advance the feminist cause? Apparently, not.

Strangely enough, a woman whose achievements are inalienably her own ran a winning campaign against a woman who achieved very little and was largely riding her husband’s name. The nation’s feminists have risen up to shower Conway with contempt for having undermined their cause.

One needs to ask oneself whether they are concerned with what is best for their cause or what is best for women? Feminists will tell you that the two are identical, but try telling that to Kellyanne Conway.

Anyway, Conway was recently in the news because she declined to take a job in the Trump White House. Her reason: she has small children and she wanted to be more hands-on, more present in the home until they had grown up. She was not saying that she would stop working. She was saying that a White House job would have consumed her, to the point where she would have neglected her children.

A mother’s role, she seemed to be saying, was inalienable. She did not want her children to be brought up by nannies and she did not want them to feel that she had abandoned them. For the record, her husband is a partner in  a law firm.

Feminists were appalled. They believe that all women should have the freedom to choose, but only if they choose what feminists want them to choose. Acting as though mother and father are not interchangeable roles is unacceptable. It’s heresy. If you think otherwise you will be banished from the Feminist Paradise.

One recalls that Anne-Marie Slaughter, card-carrying feminist, chose to give up her job as director of policy planning in Hillary Clinton’s state department because her fourteen year old son had been suspended from school, had taken up with the wrong kind of people and had been arrested by the police.

Faced with a difficult moral decision she decided to place her duty to her child above her duty to Hillary Clinton. She added that women cannot have it all and that anyone who says so is lying to young women. For the record, Slaughter’s husband was the lead parent in their marriage. He was a professor, which gave him more time to spend at home.

Many feminists were seriously torqued because they thought that Slaughter had betrayed the cause. By their lights, what is good for feminism must always trump what is good for your family. If that means sacrificing the well-being of your child for the cause, so be it.

Other feminists gave Slaughter a pass because she sprinkled her articles with calls for more government sponsored day care and the like. The notion that her teenaged son would not have had problems if he had had access to better daycare facilities was so risible that most feminists took it to be true.

Anyway, Kellyanne Conway recently provoked the feminist furies by explaining that a mother’s presence in the home is essential. She was saying exactly the same thing that Anne-Marie Slaughter was saying:

She caused an uproar by saying this:

I do politely mention to them the question isn’t would you take the job, the male sitting across from me who’s going to take a big job in the White House. The question is would you want your wife to . . . Would you want the mother of your children to? You really see their entire visage change. It’s like, oh, no, they wouldn’t want their wife to take that job.

Husbands and wives; mothers and fathers. Who knew that the two were not just a couple of social constructs designed to oppress women?

Suzanne Monyak responded on Slate:

The problem with Conway’s comments is not that she values her family or spending time with her young children. It’s that she seems to believe that it is the onus of the woman in a family to sacrifice her career opportunities so that her husband may have his. Even more troubling, Conway implies that no good mother should take on such a job—an attitude that feels ripped out of Mad Men.

Monyak is suitably confused. No one said anything about a woman sacrificing a career opportunity to allow her husband to have his. The question involved the difference between mothers and fathers, point that seems completely retrograde to Monyak.

As for her point, it does happen that women sacrifice career opportunities for their husband’s. Such has never been Conway’s case, but other women have faced similar choices. Different women and different men will make different choices, but a man who sacrifices his career advancement in favor of his wife’s—think of Slaughter’s husband, Andrew Moravcsik who proudly claimed to have done so—might discover that his decision is not exactly doing wonders for his sons. It's a question of being a good role model.

The Slaughter-Moravcsik debate never really addressed this issue, but having a man as lead parent causes problems that no one cares to address.

As for the non-interchangeability of parental roles, a recent study has shown how important it is for infants, babies and other children to hear their mothers’ voices. Yes, that would be a mother’s voice, not a father’s voice. The biology is clear and unambiguous. It was not socially constructed.

Aeon has the story:

It is no surprise that a child prefers its mother’s voice to those of strangers. Beginning in the womb, a foetus’s developing auditory pathways sense the sounds and vibrations of its mother. Soon after birth, a child can identify its mother’s voice and will work to hear her voice better over unfamiliar female voices. A 2014 study of preterm infants showed that playing a recording of the mother’s voice when babies sucked on a pacifier was enough to improve development of oral feeding skills and shorten their hospital stay. A mother’s voice can soothe a child in stressful situations, reducing levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, and increasing levels of oxytocin, the social bonding hormone. Scientists have even traced the power of a mother’s voice to infants’ brains: a mother’s voice activates the anterior prefrontal cortex and the left posterior temporal region more strongly than an unfamiliar voice, priming the infant for the specialised task of speech processing.

Let’s see, when a baby hears his mother’s voice it stimulates cognitive and brain development. You might feel that this shows that God is sexist, but the truth is the truth and biology does exist. These facts are not social constructs.

Does it still matter when children grow older? Apparently, it does:

While it makes intuitive sense that a mother’s voice has special power over infants and toddlers, what happens as children grow up? Daniel Abrams, a neurobiologist at Stanford University School of Medicine, and his team of researchers set out to answer this question using functional MRI (fMRI), a neuroimaging technique that measures brain activity by detecting metabolic changes in blood flow. The researchers examined 24 children between the ages of seven and 12, who had normal IQs, had no development disorders, and were raised by their biological mothers. While in the MRI machine, these children listened to recordings of nonsense words spoken by their mothers or by other women. The researchers specifically chose nonsense words so as not to trigger brain circuits related to semantics. Regardless, the children were able to accurately identify their mother’s voice more than 97 per cent of the time in less than one second.

The researchers wanted to know what happened in a child’s brain when they heard their mothers’ voices:

A mother’s voice activated a wide range of brain structures including the amygdala, which regulates emotion, the nucleus accumbens and medial prefrontal cortex, which are part of a major reward circuit, and the fusiform face area, which processes visual face information. 

And also:

The team found that the more neural connection between these ‘voice-selective’ brain regions and those related to mood, reward and face processing, the more social communication abilities a child had. In other words, the neural fingerprint of a mother’s voice within a child’s brain can predict that child’s ability to communicate in the social realm.

So, it makes sense to believe that Slaughter’s sons, aged 10 and 14 suffered from her absence. It might not serve an ideology that systematically ignores  scientific evidence that would not affirm its dogmas, but it matters to children. A mother like Slaughter or Conway has to decided which is more important, advancing the feminist cause  or being the best mother one can be… especially when you see that being an absent mother harms your children. Sometimes you cannot do both at the same time.

Disrespecting Women's Free Choices

It is a truth universally acknowledged that women are underrepresented in corporate executive ranks. The reason, Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino explains, is that women do not want to occupy those lofty positions. They are unwilling to make the trade-offs that the positions require.

Many researchers consider this to be evidence of a crime, of sexist discrimination. They are persuaded that having more women in more positions of executive authority makes a company more profitable. And yet, they rarely consider the simple fact that women who do not want to rise up the corporate hierarchy have a right to their preference, that they are free to choose how they spend their time and energy. And that perhaps we should respect them for as much.

The researchers imagine that people are wired to seek personal happiness-- individual self-actualization-- and that women who want to spend more time with their children are compromising their happiness. Researchers never seem to consider that women are often happy to spend extra time with their children, that men are not adequate substitute mothers, and that mothers are happy to fulfill their moral duty to care for and to raise their children. 

Apparently, these studies assume that exercising corporate power and earning gobs of money are the only real measure of happiness. They systematically disrespect women’s life choices because they are laboring under an ideological imperative that claims that career success is the sine qua non of human and especially female happiness.

These studies never ask whether or not children will suffer when their mothers abandon them. When Anne-Marie Slaughter famously quit her job as head of policy planning in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, she explained that her absences from home had harmed her children. Her older son, cared for by his father, had been suspended from school, had started hanging around with the wrong crowd and had been picked up by police. 

Slaughter did what a good mother should do. She decided that her and her husband’s experiment in role reversal parenting had not worked. So she made a free choice and moved back home. Naturally, feminists rejected her for as much. They blamed it on the patriarchy. But, they never showed respect for Slaughter’s free choice. 

When it comes to freedom to choose, feminists often accept only one free choice. Any time a woman chooses to live her life in a way that does not promote feminist ideology, the ideologues trash her.

In her Scientific American article, Gino describes the gender disparity that exists in American corporations:

There is a striking gender gap in leadership positions across our society. Women represent 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, only 15 percent of executive officers at those companies, less than 20 percent of full professors in the natural sciences, and only 6 percent of partners in venture capital firms. Scholars of the gap suggest that some of the explanation relates to how people perceive and react to women – the gender-based discrimination we so often read about in the news, which is perpetuated by both men and women. Compared to men, research shows, women are perceived as less competent and lacking in leadership potential. They receive fewer job offers and lower starting salaries, and are more likely to encounter challenges to, and skepticism of, their ideas and abilities.

As for the possibility that there is something about being a woman that makes it more difficult to be a good manager, the professor does not consider the point. And, as for the Darwinian theory that a more powerful woman will be less attractive to men while a more powerful man will be more attractive to women, apparently this does not enter into anyone’s thinking. Anyone, that is, except for the women themselves.

For many women, being a manager is simply not satisfying and it is not worth the tradeoff.

Gino continues:

... women feel less happy than men when they occupy managerial positions, and expect to make more tradeoffs between life and work in high level positions. This points to a different way of understanding the problem and potentially solving it.

Naturally, she assumes, based on no real evidence, that women do not end up with the career that they want. It might be that they end up with the life that they want, but that does not seem to matter. She adds that companies with more women in executive roles are more profitable, message that apparently has not reached the immensely profitable companies in Silicon Valley. One repeats, yet again, that the company that was more aggressive in hiring and promoting women was Yahoo! How did that work out.

Thus, without knowing what kinds of companies are being referenced, I would be skeptical of these observations. If they are true, the marketplace will easily correct the situation. Companies that want to be more profitable will hire more women and companies that refuse to do so will fall by the wayside.

In Gino’s words:

Women may not end up with access to the type of career they want. As for firms, a recent paper based on data from nearly 22,000 firms globally found that going from having no women in corporate leadership (i.e., the CEO, the board, and other C-suite positions) to a 30 percent female share is associated with a 15 percent increase in profitability. Such benefits are due, at least in part, to the diversity in thinking and perspective that women and men bring to the table. As the researchers found, a single female CEO doesn’t perform better than her male counterpart when controlling for gender in the rest of the firm, but a higher rate of gender diversity throughout the organization does have an impact. There is a very good business case, then, for organizations interested in increasing gender diversity. But how can they get there, knowing that there are many reasons that may hold women back?

But, what if the women who occupy these high executive positions find themselves not having the lives that they want to have, not being able to spend time with their children when they want to do so? High executive positions are very demanding and very time consuming. When you reach the pinnacle of corporate success your time is no longer your own. Do we know whether these executive women are married or unmarried, have or do not have children?  Life has trade-offs and people ought to be respected for the trade-offs they make.

Gino remarks:

This is a question addressed in a recent paper by Brockmann and colleagues. In fact, the paper compellingly demonstrates that for women in positions of leadership, the level of happiness and life satisfaction is lower than that of their male counterparts.

She adds:

Top level positions in organizations come with many benefits, from higher pay to more influence, prestige and power. But they also require a larger time commitment. For women, that time commitment is often viewed as the need to make tradeoffs between family and work activities. Promotions to top positions in an organization, in fact, often involve sacrificing free time for money. And women realize that’s the case.

Again, why the subtle but persistent disrespect for the choices that women freely make:

he reason is that they see the position generating not only positive outcomes (such as money and prestige) as much as men do, but also negative ones (such as tradeoffs they’ll need to make and time constraints). That’s where men and women differ: in how much they predict these negative outcomes will affect their lives. The tradeoffs and constraints women predict they’ll experience when reaching high-level positions are related to the fact that, as we find in our work, women have a higher number of life goals as compared to men.

Researchers happily blame it on unsupportive men. This means that men should abandon their career goals in favor of their wives, regardless of the effect this will have on couple dynamics. We recall, yet again, that Anne-Marie Slaughter’s husband, Andrew Moravcsik did exactly that… and that it did not work out very well. One notes that such role reversal marriages require an ideological commitment that most people do not have and do not want to have. Being loyal to your ideas and being loyal to your children are not the same thing.

In Gino’s words:

Research has found that women often do not get the support they may need at home, when caring for house-related activities (e.g., doing laundry or making dinner) or when caring for children. It is possible, then, that women may worry their partner won’t step up and take over some of the domestic duties – and that such worry is larger for them than for men.

Naturally, Gino wants to rectify the situation and feels it is desirable to do so. She wants to create conditions that will induce women into making decisions that might not be in the best interests of their children:

Women may consciously decide not to climb the organizational ladder even when they are well qualified. Organizations and leaders can influence this decision, though. As suggested by the work of Brockmann and colleagues, they can do so by structuring and compensating managerial work differently. Building in more breathing space for leadership positions, and allowing for flexible career paths, are the types of solutions that could lead both men and women to reach high levels positions in organization and experience the happiness that can come with them.

Again, the question remains: how much do we respect women when they make choices that they feel to be the best for them and their children. And, if women are more engaged and more consumed by the work as executives what will happen to their children?

Gender Parity in the Workforce

Should we have gender parity in the workplace?

Anne-Marie Slaughter raised the issue last week in The Atlantic. Writing in The Economist’s Democracy in America blog M. S. agrees with her but doesn’t know quite why.

Be that as it may, the blogger summarizes Slaughter’s recommendations cogently:

In order to give women a fair shot at gaining 50-50 parity in the ranks of societal leadership, Ms Slaughter says, we need to reform the workplace. That means making working hours coincide with school hours, appreciating the discipline of employees who raise kids as much as we appreciate the discipline of employees who run marathons, and scrapping the "culture of face time" that demands that employees spend huge amounts of generally pointless overtime at the office in a sort of potlatch to demonstrate their willingness to destroy their own lives in homage to the organisation.

Slaughter and the blogger find it to be a reasonable idea, but neither have an opinion  about how many rules and regulations would be required and who would enforce them.

But, why do they both believe that working extra hours is superficial and superfluous? Ergonomic studies have suggested that a little extra time at the office yields disproportionately large productivity gains.

The blogger introduces a more important issue: women in many advanced industrial societies are not reproducing at what is called the replacement rate.

He explains it:

If you've got an economic system where the rules and incentives are profoundly interfering with society's ability to produce and raise kids, you're going to encounter massive problems. This, to a great extent, is what's going on in Japan and in southern Europe, where birth rates have dropped way below the replacement level because sexist societies have failed to make it easy for women to have both careers and children. In a post-industrial society where women are educated, if you really force that choice, you'll end up with a lot of women who choose the career, and birth rates of 1.2 to 1.4 children per woman. Long-term GDP growth flatlines, pension schemes become unaffordable, and a lot of things start to go wrong. North America and northern Europe have been much more progressive on this front, and we have much less scary population outlooks. France has the most generous, comprehensive child-care scheme in the euro zone; it also has the highest birth rate.

The low birth rate in countries like Spain and Greece is making their pension systems unaffordable and is driving them to the edge of insolvency.

But are economic incentives really the problem? The blogger does not want to pay women to have children and does not want women to have to choose between career and children.

In his words:

We don't want a society in which we pay women a huge amount to convince them to have children, despite the accompanying sacrifice of any chance at a career. We want a society in which having kids is a normal, natural, rewarding part of life for women and men, and can be integrated with having a career just as playing sports or involvement in local charities and churches can.

Different cultures have different policies about motherhood. Sometimes they are rational; sometimes they are not. In China, where feeding the people is a challenge, women are forbidden to have more than one child. In other cultures women are encouraged to have many children, regardless of whether or not they can afford it.

When overpopulation is a problem people will have fewer children. When a culture believes that there is strength in numbers women will be pushed to have more children.

Also, in some cultures women choose to have fewer children because men cannot earn a sufficient income to support them and their children. Given the choice many women would be happy to spend more time at home with their children. If the economy does not provide good jobs for men then women will not be able to have more children and to care for them. 

The question is pertinent, but complicated.

Finally, the blogger supports Slaughter’s position for no real reason:

For the moment, though, I can't get any further than saying I agree with Ms Slaughter that we should work on our attitudes and reform our workplaces to make it possible for women and men to spend lots of time raising a family and still get to the top of their professions, because doing so makes our country a more splendid place to live.

As soon as competition enters the picture this dreamy wish becomes just that.

When two men are competing for a promotion and one can work longer and harder than the other because his wife is a full time parent, he will have an appreciable advantage.

Surely, there are exceptions to the rule, but when a father and mother share parenting equally the most common result will be that neither will be getting to the top of their professions. Who knows how they will react to being passed over for promotions in favor of their more industrious colleagues. 

To create the world that Slaughter and the blogger yearn for you would have to ban free market competition.

Even if you rewire everyone's brain and convince every American company to sacrifice its profitability to a utopian fantasy, you would merely be making America less competitive in the international marketplace.