Last Friday, Princeton’s president Shirley Tilghman and Woodrow Wilson School professor Anne-Marie Slaughter spoke at an event “Conversation on Women and Leadership.” During the talk they mainly focused on analyzing why it’s so difficult for women to balance family and career, and what steps the society should take to change it.
Professor Slaughter thinks that the government definitely has a role in helping women score higher in the workplace. For the more elite, high-power women, the solution would be to provide high-quality on-site daycare. For those who can’t afford to use such services, there is a radical need for increased flexibility. Slaughter notes that the current workplace culture is proximity-based – you have to be there and spend long hours in front of the desk for your boss and colleagues to appreciate your efforts. Slaughter suggests that we should embrace a results-only performance evaluation system where the only evaluation criterion is how much work one gets done, no matter what time and where the job is done. This will give women much greater flexibility in scheduling their shifts and attending to their children’s needs. Slaughter also recommends that governments across the country implement paid maternal leave, like most countries around the world already have.
But besides government and corporate policies, both Slaughter and Tilghman recognize the psychological pressure women push on themselves. President Tilghman stresses on the importance of “training yourself to be guilt-free.” “Don’t beat yourself up,” she said, “because you only have 24 hours a day to do two things you care deeply about.” Slaughter lightheartedly said that her not being a perfect mom actually gives her husband more space to be an incredible dad.
This comment of Slaughter’s in fact raises the question of reframing the traditional gender stereotype. In Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, a controversial article published in The Atlantic Monthly a year ago, Slaughter argues that workplace is set up for breadwinners, not caregivers. And traditionally women are expected to be the primary caregiver of the children. She proved this by saying that women with jobs often refer to themselves as “working mom,” whereas people almost never use the phrase “working dad.” In the talk last Friday, Slaughter explains that the main point of her article is that because women are expected to be the primary caregiver of the children and invest significant time and efforts in child-raising, they stand a lower chance of having both career and family than men. However, she suggests that it might be time to rethink the gender roles, and she deliberately comments that “only when we expand the range of choices for men can we help expand the range of choices for women.”
The event was hosted by Princeton Women’s Mentorship Program and was well received among female students. Stephanie Rigizadeh ’15 remarked, “I thought that it was so empowering to share this experience with my friends and to be able to continue the conversation with them over meals. The event certainly provided me with the confidence to continue persevering, to “dare to try” in both my academics and extra-curricular activities on campus, and to develop such great mentorship friendships with other female leaders. “