Can women have it all?
As you can tell by the title of my article, I don’t like this question. In fact, I really hate this question.
I love discussions about the growing entrance of women in the workforce, and I hope we continue to examine the social implications of gender equality in the workplace. I’ve read and loved Sheryll Sandberg’s Lean In. Please, by all means, continue to talk about this stuff.
But please, stop asking if women can “have it all.”
For starters, it’s been played out. It has been asked to death. There are enough TIME Magazine and Atlantic Monthly and Huffington Post articles about it already. The question (and some of the answers to it) have become trite, simplistic, and very unimaginative.
It’s not even a very well written question.
It’s pretty vague if you ask me. Have it all? What does that even mean? Wealth? Prestige? Success in eradicating poverty? A lifetime supply of pepperoni pizza?
Of course, when reporters and unimaginative news anchors ask this question, we get a pretty general idea of what they mean by “having it all.” When they’re asking whether or not women can “have it all,” they’re asking whether women can become ultra-perfect, super humans capable of simultaneously running a multinational corporation, having kids, being president of the PTA without missing a single soccer game, remaining a size 2-6, and rivaling Mary Poppins in likability.
When we say we want women to have it all, we mean HAVE IT ALL. Social pressure pushes us to “go big or go home,” without either allowing us to define success on our own terms, or make mistakes and show our flaws along the way. We either have it all, or have nothing, end of story.
But there’s an even bigger problem with this question.
Because by asking “Can women have it all?”, we assume that the reason women have not dominated the workforce or become Fortune 500 CEO’s is either because they don’t have the ability to do so or because they haven’t tried hard enough. The question implies that we are questioning whether or not women have the capacity to succeed.
That notion can be pretty easily disputed. There’s Mo’ne Davis, who became the first girl to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series. There’s Maryam Mirzakhani, who became the first female mathematician to win one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. There’s Malala Yousafzai, who this year became the youngest winner of a Nobel Prize.
There are the countless impressive and successful women I’ve met in my lifetime who don’t receive nearly enough credit – from my incredibly mathematically talented best friend who took Calculus 3 while still in high school to the several dozen friends who major in mechanical engineering and Biotechnology, English and PLS, and everything in between.
I invite you to remember your fellow female engineers, English majors, pre meds, political science analysts, etc. If you honestly think the women you know on campus, and around the world, aren’t trying hard enough, and don’t pour out sweat, blood, and tears into their work, you really need to take a second look.
What’s really preventing women from rising higher in the workforce ranks are social pressures and structures that we fail to acknowledge. Despite the enormous social strides feminism has given women, we shouldn’t be naïve enough to think that thousands of years of sexism could have been eliminated in 80 years. Despite the considerable debate surrounding the 77 cent statistic, the reality is that women still receive lower salaries than men. Whether this is because they are relegated to lower wage jobs because of their potential to start families or the social pressures they face to find “family friendly” jobs does not really matter.
In the United States, we are currently one of only three nations in the world without mandatory paid maternity leave, and many women are forced to leave the workforce because the cost of childcare is too high. Working mothers are frequently told they aren’t “good” mothers or that they are “heartless” when they decide to continue working after having children. In short, the work force, and society in general, is not kind to working women.
This problem is even further exacerbated with women who identify as either racial minorities or LGBT. Statistics show that women of color earn less than their white peers, and these women contend with both racial and sexual orientation discrimination in addition to gender bias.
Just the fact that we ask women, rather than men, if they can have it all indicates that we have at least a semi-conscious recognition of sexism. We don’t have a problem believeing men can simultaneously run a successful start up and be an excellent parent, but we question a woman’s ability to be a good mother (or even a good person) if they split their attention between work and family, as demonstrated by journalist Matt Lauer’s interview with General Motors CEO Mary Barra.
Rather than ask whether women can “have it all,” we should ask how we can improve social structures so women, as well as men, are able to achieve their potential and have equal standing in the workforce. While certainly not as short or catchy, it does a much better job of acknowledging the inherent social disadvantages that women face, while suggesting that humans have the capacity to improve them.
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