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The following article was originally published in the Atlantic
magazine. The article discussed balancing a career and motherhood and drew
nearly a million views online and sparked a tremendous debate about the role of
women in the work force.
Anne-Marie
Slaughter, to you first. What do you mean by having it all?
ANNE-MARIE
SLAUGHTER, Princeton
University: I mean that women should be able to have the same choices as men.
I
think I regret that that's the way the issue has always been formulated when I
was coming of age. I think, today, it sounds very entitled because there are so
many Americans who have very, very little. But really what it means is that
women should be able to have the same choices about being able to have a family
and being able to have a career that men do.
JUDY
WOODRUFF: And you write
that for the longest time you believed that that was the case, but now you
don't. Why not?
ANNE-MARIE
SLAUGHTER: Well, no, I
still do believe that women can have it all.
But I now understand that my ability to have it all, which I have always been
able to have, was a function of how flexible my job is as a tenured professor.
I have had a lot of flexibility about when I work. I work incredibly hard. I
certainly put in the same kinds of hours that anybody else does at a very high
level. But I have flexibility.
And
the minute I got myself into a job that is the kind of job that the vast, vast
majority of working women have, where I was on somebody else's schedule and
really had a boss, a boss I adore, Hillary Clinton, but I realized I couldn't
make it work with my family.
And
that's when I really decided that it's time to have another round of
conversation and make another round of changes that will allow both women,
working mothers and fully engaged fathers to have better choices.
JUDY
WOODRUFF: And just
quickly, what are one or two of those changes that you think must be made?
ANNE-MARIE
SLAUGHTER: Well, the
simplest changes are around allowing more flexibility in the workplace,
allowing women to be able to, say, work one day from home, and again working
fathers as well. I mean, given technology, that's really quite possible.
Changes
that, for instance, value the results out rather than hours in, and changes that
say, you know, working until midnight, being in the office -- this isn't about
working, but the culture of face time in the office and the culture of what I
call time macho, you know, the person who is there until midnight in the office
must be the person who is working the hardest, those are culture changes that
we can make if we just think about them differently.
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