Unfinished Business

If you are prepared to do whatever it takes to advance in your career, including rarely seeing your children, then you can indeed have a career and a family, too.

Marrying a man or woman who will step up to do what it takes to support your career is essential to fulfilling your professional ambitions and having a family at the same time.

Many of the women who have made it to the top in business have an unequal division of domestic work. Most of the time, these highly successful women have a spouse who carries much more than half the load at home.

One study found that men who requested a twelve-week leave to care for a child or elder were more likely to be downsized because they were seen as more feminine than other men. It's also concluded that care-giving fathers had the highest rate of social mistreatment at work among men, chiefly because they suffered the highest rates of “masculinity harassment.”

When we open our eyes and change our lenses to focus on competition and care rather than women and work, we can see new solutions and new coalitions that can open the door to progress and change.

The conventional wisdom is that care-giving is just that: giving; an activity about others, while competing is about winning: advancing the self. That is a cramped and narrow view. In fact, caring is about exploring and developing the side of yourself that flourishes in connection to other human beings, rather than in competition with them. Caring has its own personal rewards, just as competition does, but of a different kind.

We need to stop thinking of giving and caring personalities as a roadblock to success and start thinking of it as a new, authentic way forward.

Care is the crucible that can help reforge the sisterhood of the early feminist movement. Care can unite women up and down the income scale and across races and ethnicities. It can provide a common metric for the quality of single and married life, and for couples and communities of different kinds.

Real equality for men and women needs men’s movement to sweep away the gender roles that we continue to impose on men even as we struggle to remove them from women.

We need to build a new infrastructure of care for the 21st century, one that meets the demands of our society and our economy.

Whether you’re making a proposal in line with existing company policy or proposing a customized arrangement, make sure you have a specific plan in mind that will make it possible for you to fit the different pieces of your life together.

The next time someone tells you how many hours she worked last week, ask her what interesting books she’s read lately.

When you talk about men who are in the workforce and have children, try describing them as “working fathers” or “working parents."

Change often takes a long time to build, but then can happen very fast, like a torrent of rushing water finally breaking through a dam.