Anne-Marie SlaughterRezensionen

3.5, but I'm rounding up because I did enjoy this book. It is a title I would recommend to friends struggling with career planning and work-life balance, and it gave me a lot to think about when it comes to planning my career on my own terms. Slaughter's policy recommendations were excellent, and I appreciated her inclusion of men in the conversation; permitting and encouraging male participation in caregiving is absolutely a feminist issue (I think she could have been clearer about this in her discussion, in fact - we probably don't need a "men's movement"; third-wave feminism is for men too).

Unfinished Business is a discussion of how to adapt the U.S. workplace to the modern family and modern realities of caregiving. As our population ages, it's a conversation that feels urgent. Slaughter's thesis - that we need to value caregiving as a society - is a response both to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and to criticisms of Slaughter's own article "Why Women Still Can't Have it All." Both works got a lot of flack for putting the burden of career success on women and not on the institutions that deny them equal opportunity.

Now, I have followed a lot of feminist criticism, and it is pretty rare that the writer of a "women's issues" article turns around and says, "Hey, you're right, I was downplaying the role of institutional sexism." I really admire Slaughter's willingness to evaluate her beliefs. She debunks a lot of sloppy thinking about gender, caregiving, and the workplace and advocates for a society where people who engage in caregiving aren't penalized for having families and lives.

However, the book is weak when it tries to address the experiences of people outside of Slaughter's small and privileged upper-middle class world. Slaughter knows she's privileged and part of her motivation in writing this book is to include workers who can't "lean in" in her narrative. However, she still relies on anecdotes and ideas from the white-collar corporate world. I am an educated white woman myself, but I've spent my working life for small businesses and local government, so I had a hard time relating to the workplaces she describes. Maternity leave? Flexible schedules? As a part-time worker, I currently don't even have paid sick leave, and even when I was unionized, there was no way in heck I could work from home. I worry that the changes Slaughter imagines will remain perks for the elite and in demand. We are already seeing this in tech companies that woo their developers with great benefits and offer almost nothing to hourly employees.

The focus on childcare also made for a strange read. I don't have children and wanted to see my experiences acknowledged in this book, but all I got was a page acknowledging that, yep, the single and/or childfree might want lives outside work too. I feel pretty strongly that I am part of a growing demographic, and the system is broken for us too, if not as profoundly.

Not everything I hoped for, but still a good book about an important topic.

Author was often speaking to the interconnectedness of social networks and political nation states, but my brain kept drifting to bibliometrics and impact factors. Maybe they are all good models in network theory.

I used audible.com, and it was a bit like listening to a book read by Siri. Ugh.

Loved this book for calling out real life problems and the probable solutions in the most candid manner. My initial thought was this is just another book on feminism , was pleasantly surprised to see that it was much more than that.
It is a book on what our notions on equality are and what it should really be. The author has managed to give a fresh perspective of feminism that includes men as opposed to doing it all on our own. A workplace that values work and family equally sounds utopian but doesn’t seem that impractical. Much to learn from this book and definitely worth a read by everybody who has ever had to ponder on the big question of work-life balance (or fit, as this book suggests)!

This book taught me that I'm not supposed to say "Stay at Home Dad" but instead say "Full time Parent". I also learned that I am both a role model and looked down on by other guys because my wife works full time while I watch the kids. It did recognize though that women are encouraged to be anything they want but that men are not encouraged to take up what is seen as traditionally women's roles (parenting, nursing, teaching). Mostly though this book is geared towards working women.

Most annoying thing I learned though is that the author wrote an article for The Atlantic. I know this because it is mentioned every other page.

The idea at the core of this book is not the inequality of women and men in the workplace, but the unequal value American society places on competition (ambition, putting oneself first, breadwinning) and care (providing care for children, aging parents, other family members or friends). Both types of work are equally necessary, but work that generates income is more respected and has more prestige; care work - paid or unpaid - is significantly undervalued and under-appreciated, in no small part because it has traditionally been women's work.

In order to create a more equal, caring society - one that truly does value human capital (the children are our future!) - we must see both competition and care as equally valuable. Individual employers can help by creating more flexible policies for both men and women, and evaluating workers on their output, not simply the number of hours they spend at the office. The government can help by strengthening our (weak, compared to most other countries) social safety net with paid parental leave and high-quality daycare and preschool.

If only we could put all these ideas into effect - change people's thinking and update our public policy - immediately (Or ideally, several decades ago). Change is happening, but too slowly.

Quotes

...employers are assuming that it is impossible to be both a committed caregiver and a good worker. But why should that be? The least we can do is force employers to justify that assumption. (91)

If we truly valued caregiving - thought that it was not only necessary but important and valuable and hard - we would make every effort to accommodate and support it and judge workers based not on our assumptions but on their results. (92)

Most of the pervasive gender inequalities in our society - for both men and women - cannot be fixed unless men have the same range of choices with respect to mixing caregiving and breadwinning that women do. (127)

Real equality for men and women needs a men's movement to sweep away the gender roles that we continue to impose on men even as we struggle to remove them from women. (128)

Every generation assumes that the way it does things is the way things are. (166)

Mama Unabridged blog: http://mamaunabridged.com/about/ (168)

...talk can change the way we think, which can then change the way we act...we can...[make] our language reflect the change we'd like to see. (186) [e.g. "full-time parent" instead of "stay-at-home mom/dad"]

We can take our founding credo - "All men are created equal" - and understand it to mean that men and women are equal and that the work that was once divided between men and women - earning income and providing care - is equally necessary and equally valuable. (246)

How we organize our lives so that family and work can both thrive.
Amazon:A powerful, persuasive, thought-provoking vision for how to finish the long struggle for equality between men and women, work and family

When Anne-Marie Slaughter accepted her dream job as the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department in 2009, she was confident she could juggle the demands of her position in Washington, D.C., with the responsibilities of her family life in suburban New Jersey. Her husband and two young sons encouraged her to pursue the job; she had a tremendously supportive boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and she had been moving up on a high-profile career track since law school. But then life intervened. Parenting needs caused her to make a decision to leave the State Department and return to an academic career that gave her more time for her family.

The reactions to her choice to leave Washington because of her kids led her to question the feminist narrative she grew up with. Her subsequent article for The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” created a firestorm, sparked intense national debate, and became one of the most-read pieces in the magazine’s history.

Since that time, Anne-Marie Slaughter has pushed forward, breaking free of her long-standing assumptions about work, life, and family. Though many solutions have been proposed for how women can continue to break the glass ceiling or rise above the “motherhood penalty,” women at the top and the bottom of the income scale are further and further apart.½

Slaughter's Atlantic essay went viral when she wrote about why she was leaving a federal appointment to return to academia and her family. Now head of a non-profit organization, she reflects on life since the article and why focusing more employers' attention on care can help create more loyal and productive employees. Additionally, she reflects on how to improve perceptions of non-traditional male roles. An important, nuanced read about an important issue, with particular focus on college-educated strands of employment. Highly recommended. Review copy received from the publisher via NetGalley.com. (137)½