I've also really enjoyed reading all of the responses to this discussion - thanks everyone! Katherine, I really like Ephron's speech - thank you for sharing it. I agree, it seems more aligned with how "having it all" has been framed throughout this thread. And I share Rumbi and Lizzie's appreciation for the way that Slaughter has sparked a more candid discussion of work/family balance.

Lizzie, the point you made above that "we can only hope to get more workplace flexibility the more we demand it, and we'll only demand more flexibility when we start becoming more open about our obligations at home and in life" really resonates with me.

I was reflecting on the comment in the context of the anecdote I shared about the corporate culture transformation I witnessed at my former job, and I think that the catalyst for the sweeping change I witnessed was really the senior management team's honesty and openness about their own obligations at home. I worked as an analyst for one of these executives, and because his organizational chart included direct reports from all 50 states (he headed the company's force of financial advisors who worked in branches across the country and regional management teams) his job involved significant travel essentially by definition. I recall instances of my former boss's administrative assistant altering his travel schedule or rescheduling standing meetings because he needed to be at home for various personal events and commitments. Other senior members of my team struck a similar balance. I worked frequently with a managing director who left the office in time to attend virtually all of his son's high school hockey games, making up the hours either by arriving at work incredibly early or else working remotely, dialing into conference calls in the car, answering emails whenever necessary. Another senior member of my team senior member of his team decided not to partake in a week-long trip to Texas because his son, a senior in high school, was a member of his school's basketball team and competing in the state playoffs for the first time in his tenure on the squad.

Clearly, it's far easier for a senior executive (male or female) to simply announce that a meeting is being cancelled or rescheduled because he or she has chosen to attend to a personal obligation instead, especially because in many of the aforementioned instances, the executive rescheduling the meeting was the one who arranged it in the first place. However, the senior leadership team's frank, unapologetic approach to these work/life conflicts had symbolic significance for the rest of us who lacked similar control over the scheduling of professional obligations. Their openness on the issue was the key which opened the door for other, more junior, employees to be similarly direct (and feel less guilty, at least in my case) when they had to leave the office a little early, or work from home for a morning, in order to attend to a personal matter. The "face time" norm began to fade when it became apparent that the highest ranks of the company's leadership team rewarded and valued high-quality work-product, not the number of times per week their analysts worked late enough to order dinner to the office or take a town car home on the company's tab.

I thought this editorial, titled "The 'Busy' Trap", provides an interesting corollary to certain parts of this discussion:

If you live in America in the 21st century you’ve probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It’s become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing: “Busy!” “So busy.” “Crazy busy.” It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: “That’s a good problem to have,” or “Better than the opposite.” It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this; it’s something we collectively force one another to do. Notice it isn’t generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It’s almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they’ve taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they’ve “encouraged” their kids to participate in. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

I don't wholly agree with Kreider's 'solution' to the abovementioned problem - idleness as the escape route from the 'busy trap' - nor do I think that the great majority of us even have the option to choose to escape this trap, if it is in fact a trap. Despite these qualifications, however, I appreciate his conclusion:

I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My role is just to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play. My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love.

My main takeaway from Kreider's piece isn't so much that "busyness" is inherently evil, but rather, that I hope that when my life is exceptionally busy, that "busyness" is the byproduct of valuable, meaningful work and a fulfilling personal life, rather than a proxy for excessive face time.

-- CourtneyDoak - 02 Jul 2012

I do think that Slaughter's experience points to another employment-related problem. I would imagine she felt that she had to take this job because if she turned it down once, that would be it. She wouldn't get another chance to do it and her career might suffer in the future because she declined to take advantage of this opportunity. If we valued older workers more in all fields (look at how hard it has been for laid-off older people to find work after being laid off) and if we could give everyone the latitude to ramp up and ramp down their careers according to their needs and desires at different times in their life, then maybe Slaughter would have felt like she could have declined the job this time and the opportunity might present itself again.

I also wanted to share this speech that Nora Ephron gave at Wellesley's commencement in 1986. She also talks about having it all. Her conception is clearly different than Slaughter's and is a little more in line with the one mentioned in this discussion and in class.

Workplaces too can do more in offering more flexible working arrangements. For example, a lot of law firms still follow this ridiculous norm of face time. The more face time (i.e., sitting at your desk hoping some partner sees you seemingly hard at work), the better. Of course, there should be the minimum expectation being visible during normal working hours and the rhythm of the work/business may make it necessary to stay in long hours anyway, but why make it an unspoken rule that associates should be seen just for the sake of being seen? I was impressed to learn from some attorneys not at law firms about the flexibility they had in scheduling more conference calls from home or using instant messenger to connect with other coworkers from home or making presentations to coworkers from home. When family obligations call, these options should be more widely available.

In my view, we can only hope to get more workplace flexibility the more we demand it, and we'll only demand more flexibility when we start becoming more open about our obligations at home and in life. I don't mean we should start talking about our personal struggles to our boss or coworkers down the hall, but more in terms of supporting and adding to the conversation that Slaughter presented and that to a large extent Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook started. Because I don't mind seeing this as a women's issue, I'll just add that I also loved how Slaughter said women "have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal." I don't really want to get into how she stereotypes male behavior and male choices, but I think a lot of us women who have any work experience, be it before coming to law school or an internship, have felt the pressure of needing to be on par with the guys -- on an emotional level, on table talk discussions, whatever. That sentence, for me, was my takeaway because I have done and continue to do this. Her pointing this out has empowered me to change that.

-- LizzieGomez- 29 Jun 2012