A few years ago, this question stirred up furious debate after a poster-woman of feminism, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Director of Policy Planning under Hilary Clinton, said that women could still not have it all. She explained her return to academics from government saying that she found it impossible to have a powerful job and care for her children at the same time.
However, it is a fate that is hard to accept for young women. The question will continue to reverberate as long as work and family claim the first right on women’s focus and commitment.
However, the question is not binary and so cannot have a binary answer. Having it all means different things to different individuals and it is about having what you want without being prevented. Ultimately, everybody gets only what one earns. Therefore, having it all requires one to prioritise, persevere and push back if anything comes in the way.
Having a happy life at home and a fulfilling career is a challenge not only for women but also for men. The process of acquiring power and wealth in one lifetime is extremely demanding and consumes the individual completely. Hence, it is not surprising that many individuals lower career goals to have time for families and many others minimise family bonds to maximise careers.
Still, the odds of having more than what is given can be improved. Much of the blame for the either life or career choice rests on bad work habits of organisations and individuals.
Typically, work is poorly organised, collaborations coordinated badly and actions are hostage to hierarchy. This leads to inordinately long hours getting allocated to avoidable waiting and meetings. The chain of wasteful bureaucracy and behaviour requires everyone to be available all times and prevents predictable division between work and family time.
The excessive demands on time and energies of an individual, force either the woman or the man in the house to focus almost exclusively on the job. Almost invariably, it is the woman who has to compromise the career because of her additional worry of caring for the children. That also creates a prejudice against women that they lack the capacity and the commitment for higher jobs and often organisations invest less in their training and pay them less than men for the same jobs. Where organisation leaders care about time and life of others, it becomes quite easy to have it all, for both men and women.
But the odds of having it all have been improved by technology. Remote working is possible now and men and women can now be with children while still doing their essential work. Remote work option, where permitted by organisation, allows men to stay home enabling women to travel for business without worrying about their children’s well being. Smartphones allow parents to keep in touch with their children constantly and that enables women to take up jobs that require working odd hours or travel frequently.
Yet, the political culture of organisations favours those who spend more than the required time in offices. Typically, bosses see potential in only those who they see in the office after the regular working hours. For women to have it all, they have to force change in this culture and shift perception of employee’s value from presence to performance. Reasonable predictability of work schedule is critical for women to move seamlessly between work and family.
However, in a competitive economy, organisations can easily find people, including women, who are ready to replace anyone demanding control on work schedule. That reality prevents change from a family-averse work culture to a balanced one. Still, as more women acquire economic and social power, they can reset the rules and alter habits.
Successful women like Ms Slaughter need not step down to more convenient jobs; rather, they need to use their power to change the outmoded system so that women can actually have it all.
The writer is director-general of All India Management Association (AIMA)
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