Believe me, I recognize the cultural and anatomical challenges and respect the sacrifices women make in order to balance family and a career, or family with no career, or career with no family. But constructing this entire conversation around the premise that men are exempt from this balancing act minimizes the role of fatherhood, discounts our stake in romantic relationships and blinds us all from this greater truth: No one who needs to work has it all…
Instead of this fruitless debate about having it all, men and women should focus on what make us happy. Instead of comparing our lives with people we don’t know who are making sacrifices we don’t see, we should try to find the right balance between home and work life. It’s a very personal choice.
There is no way to physically always be there for your children and always be at the office and always be present for your significant other and then take care of yourself. The laws of physics necessitate that somebody or some thing is going to get the short end of the stick.
That’s why it’s more important for women to define their own sense of priorities instead of adhering to someone else’s. At the end of the day, they are the ones who have to live with the choices they make. Same for men.
If you recognize the cultural challenges, though, that uniquely impact women in the workplace, then you should understand why restructuring this conversation about whether women “can have it all”—which is ultimately a question about whether women can even aspire to successful careers and leadership positions at all if they have children—to be about how men make hard choices too and women just need to set their own priorities is bullshit.
One of the big reasons why this question is everywhere right now is because of Yahoo CEO Marisa Mayer. Mayer was brought on as CEO of a failing company while she was pregnant, and then she had a baby, took an infamous 2 weeks of maternity leave, built an almost equally infamous nursery on site just for her kid so she could be a mom and be a CEO at the same time, and every single professional decision she has made since has been endlessly scrutinized by the public for the degree to which her motherhood did or did not impact that decision and whether it should have impacted her decision more or less. And in the end, if Mayer fails—something that wouldn’t be very surprising, considering the state of the company she inherited—you can guarantee the string of failures of male leadership before her and the professional challenges she faced will be a mere footnote in the discussions about how being a mother to a small child impacted her ability to do her job and make good decisions and lead her company and inevitably led to her failure.
Male CEOs have children while being CEOs all the time. It almost never makes headlines. After all, you barely heard anything about either of Google CEO Larry Page’s 2 children. Wikipedia doesn’t even know he has a second child, and that’s probably because finding an article that discusses his kids is hard to do, because if a male CEO has kids, it doesn’t impact his ability to do a good job, at least according to the court of public opinion, which matters for reasons other than just “sticks and stones” when you’re the leader of a publicly traded company. Meanwhile, Mayer’s pregnancy made Yahoo’s decision to make her CEO a topic of raging controversy. FOR MONTHS. Her maternity leave made headlines. FOR MONTHS. Pictures of her with her son in a Halloween costume at the office are everywhere accompanying critical discussions about her kids’ daytime care situation, which went on FOR MONTHS. Every decision she’s made, including her recent choice to suspend Yahoo’s work from home policy, can not be discussed by the media and the general public without everyone mentioning the fact that she is a mother.
So while Mayer’s male counterparts do totally normal things like get married and make babies, and it is absolutely never questioned or treated as something that would impact their decisions or their commitment to their job or their ability to work a gazillion hours a week, a woman does it, and it sparks public debate and outrage. FOR MONTHS.
The point of this is not to say, “Oh poor pitiful Marisa Mayer. Everyone has been so unfair to this rich and powerful lady.” The point is to highlight the fact that women’s and men’s choices regarding work-life balance and even whether to start a family if they care about their career are not equal. And when the real question behind “can women have it all?” is not whether work-life balance is possible, which does impact both men and women, but instead is about whether a woman can have a child and do her job at the most basic level, these discussions are not the same. Supplanting the much-needed conversation about how women are treated differently in the workplace, especially if they have children, and are routinely and systemically denied job opportunities, promotions, and equal pay, with whether men have work-life balance is just another example of patriarchal forces at work (i.e. male perspectives and experiences are more highly valued and made the center of our culture.) More importantly, it gaslights women by insisting that their inability to succeed in the workplace is more about how they set priorities and compare themselves with other people than it is about endemic institutional sexism.