Analysis Of Anne-Marie Slaughter's Women Still Can T Have It All

Although Anne-Marie Slaughter’s struggle may fail to the average American woman in some aspects, she still questions whether contemporary women can find true work-life balance.

In Anne-Marie Slaughter’s essay “Women Still Can’t Have It All” which was first published by The Atlantic, the author addresses the difficulties of balancing family life and a government job with the State Department in Washington DC. She, like many women today, finds it difficult to stay active in the workplace as well as parent her two children, who stay with their father, who became a stay at home parent to compensate for Slaughter’s sparse time at home. Slaughter relates becoming “increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career

were shifting under my feet.” (Slaughter, 2012) This is a feeling many women know well after being told no career is out of reach and later being forced to face the realities of the modern American workplace. The current generation of women has grown up to become disillusioned with this ideology of doing everything and still keeping up, and Slaughter attests that during a conference “almost all [women] assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises”. (Slaughter, 2012) These compromises are often expected of women, but hardly anyone would expect men to make the same tough choices in the exact same situation. As this next author would attest, Slaughter and upper-class women like her are not the only voices who should be heard in this conversation.
In the article “Rethinking Work-Life Balance for Women of Color” by Kimberley Seals Allers, the writer relates similar difficulties balancing work and home life among women with radically different backgrounds to Slaughter’s, confirming that this question of how to balance work and home spans across classes and hits already disadvantaged subsets of the American population even harder.

What little progress that has been made in white collar environments has not trickled down to other industries, and women of color are often expected to juggle their work and home responsibilities in a way that is almost laughable when viewed objectively. Women of color have been in the workforce far longer than white women, and have historically professionally taken over responsibilities such as childcare, cooking, and housekeeping that would otherwise be delegated to a higher-class white woman. (Allers, 2018) Despite being in the workforce longer, women of color have not benefitted from the same benefits that have improved the work-life balance of white and upper-class women over the past few decades, and a cultural norm of sacrificing family time purely to keep food on the table has emerged to fill the gap, especially in Hispanic and African-American communities. This development continues to be taken advantage of by workplaces to this day, and pay remains too low to take any time off for parenting and still pay bills and keep food on the table. Many women cannot even ask for time off in

the first place, for fear of losing their job due to a complete lack of job security in lower income brackets. (Allers, 2018)
Sherry E.

Sullivan and Lisa A. Mainiero’s essay “The changing nature of gender roles, alpha/beta careers and work-life issues” from Career Development International presents similar findings: women are more likely than men to face roadblocks in their careers after starting a family. One woman in this study, identified simply as Gina, attests that after starting a promising and allegedly enjoyable career in marketing and discovering she was pregnant “it was a clear decision for me to prioritize my kids and become a stay at home mom”. (Sullivan & Mainiero, 2007) This is yet another example of women making compromises that would never be expected of their male counterparts, and in this case putting a career on hold to make more time for responsibilities at home. The work of Sullivan and Mainiero establishes that Gina is no fluke. 39 of the 44 women in their study, in several different fields, experienced promising early careers that were paused or slowed as soon as the woman in question started a family, as compared to 27 of the 35 men in their study with the opposite results. (Sullivan & Mainiero, 2007) This is indicative of a statistical flaw in the American workplace that reliably places women at a

disadvantage.
In conclusion, the points raised by Anne-Marie Slaughter hold weight and fall perfectly in line with the findings of other writers and academics. Women have almost inevitably faced with unmatched challenges when attempting to reconcile work and home life, and although America is in a better place now than it was in in the 1950s, American businesses in a wide variety of industries have a long way to go.