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?