Last month it was the cover story in the Atlantic: an explanation of “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Last week came a response from the business pages: “Oh, But You Can.”
Anne-Marie Slaughter, who quit her high-ranking job at the State Department to return to teaching at Princeton University and spend more time with her family, wrote the magazine cover story. Then Marissa Mayer rocked the male-dominated world of technology when she was named chief executive officer of Yahoo — and announced she was pregnant.
The headlines about Mayer are deserved. No one can remember another woman about to deliver a child getting the top job anywhere. Only 4 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are female, and most of those became so after their child-bearing years were over.
But now that we’re done cheering, let’s have a quiet moment to think about who’s more right about the state of women in the workplace: the professor or the CEO? Slaughter congratulated Mayer on her triumph with the cautionary note that not everyone should try this at home. Mayer, she said, proves her point: The only woman who can have it all is “superhuman, rich, and in charge.”
Look at Mayer’s statement about coming back to work. “My maternity leave will be a few weeks long and I’ll work through it,” she told Fortune. Thanks a lot for that. True, Mayer actually doesn’t need time off in the sense the rest of us do. As the boss, she’s the queen of flextime. The meeting starts when she says it starts — and will as long as she’s there.
And would Yahoo be giving the job to a pregnant woman if it weren’t already in a what-the-heck state of mind? After all, this is a company whose stock has lost half its value in the past four years and has scrolled through CEOs like so many instant messages. Mayer’s selection doesn’t mean Exxon Mobil or IBM will be picking a pregnant CEO anytime soon.
There’s also a sense that this choice is proof of the “glass cliff” theory, which says a woman only gets a job when the odds are stacked against her success.
Slaughter writes about how, once upon a time, she smiled a “faintly superior smile” when another woman told her she would be taking some time off. Slaughter had been part of the chorus “making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life.” Then she got a job outside academia, working long hours on someone else’s schedule. She quit.
The howls were as loud at this admission as the cheers were long for Mayer. But Slaughter is the one who has the workplace right. It’s a difficult place for working parents of both sexes, although we wouldn’t be having this debate if Yahoo’s new CEO were an expectant father.
This difficulty is not due to a failure of ambition, brains or effort, or of legislation (that said, better maternity leave, flextime and child care would help). There’s no legislation that will put more than 24 hours in a day or get you home for dinner and bedtime. If you have a child with problems — and who doesn’t at some point? — it’s even harder.
Marissa Mayer, meet Anne-Marie Slaughter. You have a lot to talk about.
