Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“An eye-opening call to action from someone who rethought the whole notion of ‘having it all,’ Unfinished Business could change how many of us approach our most important business: living.” — People “Another clarion call from [Anne-Marie] Slaughter . . . Her case for revaluing and better compensating caregiving is compelling. . . . Slaughter skillfully exposes half-truths in the workplace [and] makes it a point in her book to speak beyond the elite.” —Jill Abramson, The Washington Post “Slaughter argues that the current punishing route to professional success—or simply to survival—is stalling gender progress. . . . [Her] important contribution is to use her considerable platform to call for cultural change, itself profoundly necessary. The book’s audience, then, shouldn’t just be worried womankind. It should go right into the hands of (still mostly male) decision-makers.” — Los Angeles Times “Slaughter should be applauded for devising a ‘new vocabulary’ to identify a broad, misclassified social phenomenon. And she is razor-sharp on outlining the cultural shifts necessary to give caregiving its due. . . . By putting these issues on the agenda, Slaughter has already taken an essential first step.” — The Economist “A meaningful correction to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In . . . For Slaughter, it is organizations—not women—that need to change.” — Slate “The mother of a manifesto for working women . . . Anecdotes from [Slaughter’s] own life and others are deftly interwoven with research, making Unfinished Business a compelling and lively read.” — Financial Times “Anne-Marie Slaughter insists that we ask ourselves hard questions. After reading Unfinished Business, I’m confident that you will be left with Anne-Marie’s hope and optimism that we can change our points of view and policies so that both men and women can fully participate in their families and use their full talents on the job.” —Hillary Rodham Clinton “Anne-Marie Slaughter’s gift for illuminating large issues through everyday human stories is what makes this book so necessary for anyone who wants to be both a leader at work and a fully engaged parent at home.” —Arianna Huffington “With breathtaking honesty Anne-Marie Slaughter tackles the challenges of often conflicted working mothers and working fathers and shows how we can craft the lives we want for our families. Her book will spark a national conversation about what we need to do to live saner, more satisfying lives.” —Katie Couric “ Unfinished Business is an important read for women and men alike. Slaughter shows us that when people share equally the responsibility of caring for others, they are healthier, economies prosper, and both women and men are freer to lead the lives they want.” —Melinda Gates Anne-Marie Slaughter is president and CEO of New America. She is the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and the former dean of its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In 2009 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed Slaughter director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department, the first woman to hold that job. A foreign policy analyst, legal and international relations scholar, and public commentator, Slaughter was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School and Harvard Law School and is a former president of the American Society of International Law. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Less Can Be More xa0 During the 2014 Super Bowl, Cadillac ran an ad that was meant to be a celebration of American workaholism. It showed a clean- cut fifty-something white man with blazing blue eyes walking and talking his way through his mansion while extolling the virtues of the American work ethic. “Other countries, they work, they stroll home, they stop by the café, they take August off. Off . Why aren’txa0youxa0 like that? xa0Why xa0aren’t xa0we like that? xa0Because we’re crazy, driven, hardworking believers,” says the guy, who looks like a car- toon version of a one-percenter, to the camera. The moral of the ad: If you just work hard enough, avoiding vacation and “creating your own luck,” anything, including the ownership of a $75,000 car, is possible.xa0The xa0ad drove me crazy. The xa0man was so smug and so com- pletely out of touch with what I consider to be the real values that Americans have traditionally xa0proclaimed and tried to pass down to their children. Yes, Europeans and others often criticize Amer- ican culture for being materialistic, but when Thomas xa0Jefferson described humankind’s “unalienable rights” in the Declaration xa0of Independence, he took English Enlightenment philosopher xa0John Locke’s “life, liberty, and estate” and substituted “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And as the behavioral psychologists tell us, happiness is more likely to be found in the pleasures of human connection xa0and experience—a good meal, a play or movie or sporting event, a bouquet of flowers or a bottle of champagne— than it is in an endless catalogue of possessions. I wasn’t alone in my reaction. One reporter wrote, “You know what really needs attention? xa0What working like crazy and taking no time off really gets us[?]” It gets Americans to the grave earlier, it’s made us more anxious than people in other developed coun- tries, and it’s created xa0a group xa0of people more xa0disengaged from their jobs than in countries with more leisure time. In the end, it was New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin who made the most damning argument xa0against the commercial. As we were talking about it, he pointed out that Cadillac was disparaging the vacation-loving Europeans xa0in an effort to sell luxury cars to a wealthy U.S. audience who prefer German BMWs and Mercedes. Last xa0I xa0checked, xa0Germanxa0 xa0workers xa0get xa0a xa0mandatedxa0 xa0minimum twenty days of vacation every year.xa0 It’s that simple. German xa0workers work at least two weeks a year less than American workers do and yet produce better xa0cars. Perhaps xa0that is because German xa0managers still subscribe to the empirical findings that led Henry Ford to establish an eight-hour workday in 1914. When Ford looked at in-house research, he realized that manual laborers were finished after eight hours of work a day. After he cut hours, errors went down, and productiv- ity, employee satisfaction, and company profits went up. We actually have a growing body of data in support xa0of the proposition that working less means working better. According to much xa0more xa0recent xa0research, xa0people xa0who work principally xa0with their brains rather than their hands have an even shorter amount of real daily productivity than manual laborers. Microsoft em- ployees, for instance, reported xa0that they put in only twenty-eight productive hours in a forty-five-hour workweek—a little less than six hours xa0a day. Futurist xa0Sara Robinson xa0found the same thing: knowledge xa0workers have fewer than xa0eight hours xa0a day of hard mental labor in them before they start making mistakes. This relationship between working better and working less holds particularly true in any job requiring creativity, the well- spring of innovation. Experts on creativity emphasize the value of nonlinear xa0thinking xa0and cultivated randomness, xa0from long walks to looking at your environment in ways you never have before. Making time for play, as well as designated xa0downtime, xa0has also been found to boost creativity. Experts suggest we should change the rhythm xa0of our workdays to include periods in which we are simply letting our minds run wherever they want to go. Without play, we might never be able to make the unexpected connections that are the essence of insight. Read more