Can Women Have It All? Read This Interview!

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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.

The article is titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” and was written by Anne-Marie Slaughter. In the following interview, Judy Woodruff talks to Princeton Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter about the topic. Click HERE to view the original article on PBS.ORG.

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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