Karen Kornbluh: Helping Us All "Have It All"

Work Wednesday

As soon as I started reading and blogging Anne-Marie Slaughter's much-discussed Atlantic Monthly piece on working moms, Why Women Still Can't Have It All, I thought about Karen Kornbluh. Actually, I thought about Ambassador Karen Kornbluh.

For those of you who missed The New York Times' recent profile about her, Ambassador Kornbluh (or Karen as most people call her), has served as the United States' chief diplomat to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)for the past three years. At the OECD, she's made gender issues - along with work on the Internet economy and corruption - an important part of the organization's economic and social development agenda. (Karen will be stepping down from her position later this month to return to Washington, D.C. and her family, but the OECD's Gender Initiative will continue.)

Apart from her Ambassadorship, Karen is well-known in Washington as a technology policy expert, an innovative thinker on work/family issues and a passionate advocate for better policies for working families. She's held important policy positions at the Federal Communications Commission and the Treasury Deparment, and served as Policy Director for then-Senator Barack Obama from 2005-2008 where she wrote his 2008 Party Platform - the one that included ideas like health care reform. Outside of government, Karen founded the Work and Family Program at the New America Foundation, where she argued for reforming institutions to better meet the needs of two-income “juggler families,” a term that she coined in her own Atlantic Monthly piece, The  Parent Trap, published nearly a decade before Anne-Marie Slaughter's article.

And Karen is also a mom who has struggled with work/family issues herself. That's why I thought that I'd really like to know what Karen thought about Slaughter's article and other work/family issues. I'm grateful that she not only agreed to chat with me, but to allow me to share her thoughts with you. Here goes: 

CurrentMom [CM]: So, everyone's talking about the Anne-Marie Slaughter Atlantic Monthly article on working moms and having, or perhaps, not having it all. You've been thinking and writing about work/family issues for more than a decade, and penned your own article for the Atlantic Monthly in 2003 about two-income families, what you termed “juggler families.” As an about-to-be former high-ranking State Department official yourself, what do you think of the article and the debate that’s ensued?

 

Karen Kornbluh [KK]: I love Anne-Marie’s article. It caused this “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment – the educated class admitting in public what is so true but usually only talked about in private: It’s hard to get an A in parenting when you’re balancing your career and your family. I was so impressed that she opened up and put her power and prestige on the line to show that a lot of our assumptions are outdated.  Her eloquence and honesty have forced a real conversation about these issues.

 

CM: I liked that she took on outdated assumptions too, and thought she nicely showed those assumptions at work by explaining that in Washington, if a person steps down from a powerful government job to “spend more time my family,” it’s assumed that they’ve somehow failed.  What assumptions resonated with you?

 

KK:  I think the main outdated assumption is what Joan Williams [Founding Director of the Center for WorkLife Law and author of the prize-winning book, Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Oxford, 2000)] calls the “ideal worker” norm.  The assumption that the ideal worker has no other responsibilities. That you can measure loyalty by the number of hours you spend in the office.

 

I also liked the idea that Anne-Marie took on the idea that most average women can do it all.  

 

CM: Her “superwoman” discussion?

 

KK: Yes. And that she named names. That’s helpful. There have always been exceptional woman who can do it all. I don’t think it gives the rest of us an excuse but it does take some pressure off women to think that they can do everything.

CM:  The one thing I worry about Slaughter’s piece, though, is whether the topline takeaway for younger women will simply be you can’t have it all so you shouldn’t try. What do you think about that?

 

KK: It is a danger and I do worry about that, too. But I think Anne-Marie’s already said that she shouldn’t have used the phrase “having it all” because that might be discouraging. I know she was actually trying to write to raise awareness for young women, not to discourage them, but to make them more realistic about their choices. Women should see how successful she is - after all she still has a great job at Princeton, kids and a husband with a job. Her example is ultimately encouraging.

 

I also happen to think that the conversation that Sheryl Sandberg [FacebookCOO] started last year was so refreshing and expanding. She was implying that we have agency, that we can change the world. Instead of asking government, our employers, husbands and bosses, Sheryl seemed to be saying that we’re 50% of the graduates, 50% of the workforce, and that we should just do it. Get to be the boss and go home at 5:30. Sandberg is COO of this enormous company and is hosting dinners for other women and speaking out about work/family issues. Ten years ago, someone in Sheryl's position wouldn’t have been talking about these issues -  they would have been seen as women’s issues and “diminishing.”

 

Also, a lot of us were thinking about Nora Ephron (who died earlier this month).  And her attitude had a lot of agency, too. But in a different context.  Sheryl is saying, let’s change the world. We’re 50 percent, let’s just do it. Nora Ephron was saying, I know it’s hard and that there are all these issues, but what are you going to do?  I think all three of these perspectives are helpful in raising awareness.

 

CM: And of course there also was Tina Fey and her Confessions of a Juggler last year.  She’s an entertainerand she raised these issues in a very funny way, kind of like Nora Ephron, for people who aren’t necessarily thinking about work/family issues all the time.

 

KK: As a woman, I’m really grateful for all these views. One thing I’ll say is that when we wrote our Atlantic article back in 2003, we were mostly writing a about a broad swath of women – lower class, middle class, contingent and part-time workers – while Anne-Marie’s article is about more educated, privileged women. Ours was less sexy, perhaps, but also just a different perspective. We were trying to say in response to the “culture war” about whether mothers should work, that most most mothers have to work. This is not a lifestyle issue but an economic issue about families struggling to get more hours to stay afloat financially.

We have all these entitlement policies that are supposed to provide support, but they don’t account for the shift from dads working and mom at home, to two parents working, or one parent doing contingent or part-time work. The classic example, of course, is health care. It’s interesting that the Anne-Marie Slaughter article came out at the same time as [the Supreme Court’s] health care [decision]. What we said in 2003, is that the most important thing you could do for working families is health care reform. This is expecially important for women who take time off to have kids or work part-time. Good thing that I don’t have to say that we’ve made no progress on this although child care, leave and workplace flexibility are still important goals.

 

CM: Switching tracks, in your job as U.S. Ambassador to the OECD, you’ve had the chance to focus on global gender issues and look at how other countries – especially the other 33 developed countries in the OECD – deal with women – and moms- in the workplace. What have you learned? Are there lessons for the U.S.?

 

KK: Before we started the Gender Initiative, the OECD experts put together a pack of data that contained some of the best information on women’s economic position, data that hadn’t been pulled together before. The slide that popped out at me was the one showing the poverty gap between men and women in all OECD countries, in all stages of their lives. Women are poorer at every age than men, and the gap gets wider as they get older.

 

CM: Across all the OECD countries? [The OECD countries include almost of Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and Chile.] Why is that?

 

KK: It’s because women live longer, have kids, often don’t work, don’t have pensions. That was upsetting and an eye opener.

It was also interesting to see who were our allies in pushing for a gender initiative. Iceland was one. They had been through this economic crisis with the banks and had a general sense that if more women were running things it wouldn’t have happened. So, my Iceland colleague popped up and said, “We’re supporting the gender initiative.” South Koreans also see gender equality as an economic development issue. They see how difficult it is for women to work and how it affects their economy.  It was also interesting to be thinking about this during the whole debate in Europe about the quotas for women on corporate boards. As they look at Norway and debate whether it’s a success or not a success.  So what we tried to do, when Secretary Clinton chaired the OECD’s 50^thMinisterial Meeting, was to get the OECD, the United Nations, the World Bank, and the IFC [International Finance Corporation] to develop indicators on how women are doing in different settings, including in the developing world, to be able to understand and compare what works.

 

CM: The OECD has a very different kind of lens. Is there any kind of conclusion that you can draw from the data that’s been pulled together so far?

 

KK: There’s a leaky pipeline in developed world. Women do well in school but don’t take science and math. They go into companies but segregate into different jobs than men. They work part-time and don’t get into management. Then they don’t wind up on boards. If they start a company, it’s hard for them get loans, and it’s usually in the service sector, where they’ve worked before. Although they get an education and you see them at the beginning, they fall out somewhere later on the pipeline. So that’s why you don’t see them.

 

We’re living at this time of huge change as you know from the work you do every day. We’ve moved from farm to factory to an economy built around fiber. This new information age should provide all sorts of ways for women - and men - to work more flexibly, creatively, and take more risks, but it’s still hard to do, and there’s still more work/life balance policies that families need.

 

CM: Turning from policy to the personal, I was surprised to read in the The New York Timesprofile that you quit your job while pregnant with your second child because you “just couldn’t do it any more.” How did you make the shift back into the workplace and to your current job as Ambassador to the OECD? What advice do you have for other women?

 

KK: [Laughs.] Oh gosh, I don’t know if I have any sage advice. Women always think they get lucky in their careers and men always think they’ve earned their success.

 

What I decided to do is reinvent my career for a little while and went from Treasury to a think tank. I tried to write and start a project on work/family issues. They had a fellowship for technology policy, and I had expertise in that, so I worked on that for a while and then transitioned to work/family issues. It was the right time. I was willing to trade security and a certain type of ambition at that point for a more flexible job. And then it turned out to be great.

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, talks about how some of the things that look risky are safe, and some of the things that seems safe are risky. It seemed crazy to leave my Treasury job, but I was leveraging the assets that I had, knowledge of telecomm, and making that into something fruitful. Some of my friends who left government went into the private sector and financially rewarding careers. I had decided that what I wanted to do was policy rather than finance. I’m hard pressed to use my own career as an example for anyone, butwhat  you really have to do is narrow your focus, decide what asset you’re going to build, and what can stand you in good stead later wherever you are in your life.

CM: That does sound like sage advice!

 

KK:  I want to go back and say one thing about the Anne-Marie Slaughter article. There are a huge number of kids in poverty, being raised by single moms or low income families. And that’s how I would like to extend  the conversation. As educated women, our vulnerabilities - that Anne-Marie wrote about - should give us an insight into how breathtakingly difficult it is for women without many skills or advantages. Health care is huge. Child care, early education, pay equity, flexible work – these are really important to those moms and their families.

 

CM:  And, of course, paid sick days, too. Well, this is a great way to end because I have a feeling we’ll all be hearing more from you on these issues. Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview with CurrentMom.

 

KK: Thanks! You got me in a talkative mood!

Photo of Karen Kornbluh speaking at the OECD's International Women's Day event by OECD via flickr.com.

 

Comments

[Jamie]

Love this piece, Stacy! I agree that Slaughter talked about things that aren't popular and Kornbluh is living some of Slaughter's wisdom. At times you pour it on with work and at other times you accept flexibilty instead of prestige or pay over sexiness. But that's how life is - it ebbs and flows and for the most part is really sweet. I can honestly say my life is really good because I have healthy, engaged, sweet children, a loving wife, and a fulfilling career, and of which may drive me nuts at any time, but overall are awesome.

[Katherine]

What an inspiring interview. I always find it so interesting to hear from accomplished women like Kornbluh about their career paths -- not always the careful plan we dreamed about in kindergarten. Plus, a very welcome reminder of the work-life struggles that the majority of mothers in America face, amid this discussion of the privileged few. Thanks, Stacy.