David B. Wilkins spoke with Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America, about her viral 2012 article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” and how to support all families to flourish in the years ahead.
David B. Wilkins: It won’t surprise you that I want to start with what you wrote over a decade ago: your article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” The issues you presented in that piece are still very much front and center, and so I’d love you to reflect on how you’re thinking about these issues now.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: The place to start is the reaction to that article. It was a tsunami, upending my life and changing the kind of work I do. I often think about it in those terms because wherever I go, someone—generally a woman, but not always, because men were definitely affected as well—comes up to me and says, “That article made a big difference in my life.” Personally, of course, this means a lot to me. At the same time, I have to laugh, because as you know, I’ve written 150 scholarly articles, but it doesn’t matter. People refer to the article as if there’s only one!
I never expected to strike such a chord because nothing I said in that piece was new. Women had been writing versions of this article at least once a decade. But it did hit this moment where millennial women were debating with their boomer or Gen X mothers about whether the sacrifices their mothers had made to have a career were worth it. Those mothers were looking at their daughters and wondering why they were often making different choices about career and family.
Today, I think we have made remarkable progress in many ways. In 2012, it was not just that we hadn’t had a woman candidate for president; it really wasn’t thinkable. We were still marveling that Barack Obama had gotten elected. Yet in 2024 we have a woman vice president, and when Kamala Harris ran, she deliberately downplayed her gender. I do not think that she lost because she is a woman, although I do think gender was a factor for many voters. That “both/and” approach to gender, where we still recognize the many barriers that women face but at the same time assume that women can and should compete on equal ground, is the way forward.
You see progress in terms of women advancing—slowly but steadily—just about everywhere. We still have so far to go. Places like law firms, investment banking, Wall Street and finance, and tech are sectors that are still heavily, heavily male. They’re also the best paid and most powerful sectors. But at the same time, if you look at university presidents and politics at the state and national level, you see progress.
The other thing that I would never have predicted that I think is every bit or more important is that care—traditional women’s work—is now a national issue. Care infrastructure, whether it’s paid family leave or elder care or childcare or family tax credits to enable people to afford to take care of one another, those are on the national agenda. They were originally part of Biden’s Build Back Better bill but got knocked out. Childcare is an issue Vance and Walz agreed on in their debate. It is becoming not a “women’s” issue but an economic issue for women and men; in a society in which many families cannot survive without dual incomes and childcare is astronomically expensive, something has to change. On a broader level, we are now understanding that feminism and gender equality are not just about the workplace and removing barriers for women in the workplace. They are equally about making sure that all of us can care for those we love.
Policies need to be put in place that provide a system of elder care and childcare and long-term care that is affordable.
Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO, New America
Wilkins: This all leads to your remarkable role as the head of New America, where you have prioritized this issue of care and its intersection with economics. How are you thinking about these issues of caregiving—both for children and for older persons—as part of the broad set of issues that you’re driving at New America?
Slaughter: New America has a cluster of programs, thinking, and advocacy around what we call family economic security and well-being. We look at these issues more broadly than gender equality and more broadly than care, asking what it takes for families—biological families or chosen families—to flourish. When families are strong and flourishing, that is a big marker of the health and flourishing of a society.
To enable that, we need a whole set of related policies. Every other peer OECD country has these policies. The United States doesn’t even have paid maternity leave, which puts us in the company of Papua New Guinea. Virtually all other countries at least have maternity leave, and most of our OECD peers have a version of parental leave that includes some paternity leave. And it really needs to be paid family leave because care certainly isn’t just about having children. It’s about caring for all family members: a sick spouse, a sibling, or of course your own aging parent. I should also add that families can be chosen and constructed as much as given biologically. Marriage is a commitment between two people to care for each other over a lifetime; parents who adopt children make that same commitment. Many other people can decide to make that commitment to one another. I often think about that when I watch people host Friendsgivings alongside Thanksgivings.
Policies need to be put in place that provide a system of elder care and childcare and long-term care that is affordable. Health care is covered by our insurance, for those of us who have health insurance, but care is essentially still left up to families or paid caregivers who must be hired by families. Yet there is a clear market failure here. The amount that caregivers need to be paid to reflect the value of their work and meet their needs to support their own families is simply too much for the vast majority of families to afford. As with other market failures, we need government support to make care jobs good jobs for caregivers, in terms of both salary and benefits, and to make care accessible and affordable for families who need and want to care for one another.
We need to assume that all human beings have a connected side.
Anne-Marie Slaughter
You also need a whole suite of workplace policies that enable you to take time off when your loved one needs it. And it’s broader than just paid time off. Workers also need the option of taking unpaid time off—moving to part-time work—and then being able to come back when they are ready. In Great Britain workers have the right to work part-time. One of the things we say at New America is everyone is likely to be a caregiver at some point in their lives—male, female, young, old. Today, 40 percent of unpaid caregivers for aging parents are men. Forty percent. That is because as women have left home and gone into the workplace, that work is becoming more evenly divided. I can tell you in my marriage, I’m responsible for my parents and my husband is responsible for his.
In addition to implementing policies, we also need to change the social norms around the idea that everyone’s going to be a caregiver. This is all of us at the deepest level. CEOs and managers need to think about this. We have got to stop thinking about professional people as only career- or achievement-oriented. We need to assume that all human beings have a connected side, have a need for belonging and for being able to care for others and to be cared for. A healthy society and a healthy workplace makes room for that side of who we are. That can be as simple as a corporate retreat—connecting people in the workplace. But it also has to make room for that need for connection and belonging outside the workplace. People find that connection and belonging, if they’re fortunate, in their biological family, but many of us have constructed groups of friends and family to satisfy that need.
Wilkins: This issue of The Practice comes out of a new ABA report on the Legal Careers of Parents and Child Caregivers that was written with wonderful meaning and purpose. But I bet you’ve seen a lot of reports. The challenge often is taking a report that tells us a lot of what we know, and maybe a few things we didn’t, and translating that into action. How do you think about making change happen?
Slaughter: People have to dare to be different. With AI right now, we are in a moment of profound disruption. Leaders must seize that moment and invite their employees to think with them about how work could be structured completely differently. The most obvious example in legal practice is to imagine alternatives to billable hours, which is a 20th-century invention. What if we stopped measuring our product in terms of the time we put in but rather the product that comes out of it?
I’ll give you an example. At New America, we’re 150 people. This is not a large firm. My mantra is that family comes first. I still expect you to be entirely professional if you have a family crisis. You can’t just leave. You need to figure out who’s going to cover your work and how it is going to get done. I’ve managed that way for years, in academia, government, and now a nonprofit organization, and never been disappointed. People are both devoted to the place and their teammates.
You’re going to need managing partners, CEOs, and presidents to say, “Look, we’re going to experiment.” Maybe it’s a six-hour workday to really give people more time. Maybe it is letting people have, as I know some places do, two weeks on and one week off. There are any number of different ways we can work. I recommend my colleague Brigid Schulte’s new book called Over Work where she actually looks around the world to explore other ways of working. It’s not all positive; the Japanese have a word for “death through overwork,” which we hope none of us ever get to. But how do we really rethink how we work and how we value work in relation to other things?
We have to dare to make the change, and that means some of those changes won’t work and you’re going to have to pull back and figure out something else.
Anne-Marie Slaughter
The other thing I would say here is this is a particularly scary thing for client-facing businesses. For client-facing organizations, they may need to do creative things, like creating a team so someone’s always on—consulting firms have experimented there and have made some real progress—but also conditioning client expectations. You may not get the same person whenever you need them.
I had an experience with this approach when I had my first child. My obstetrician was part of a team practice, so she wasn’t able to guarantee that she’d be the one in the delivery room when I went into labor. I would have preferred that she was there, but I also recognized that she had to have a life. In that context, however, where you need trust between the people involved, it might have been better if I had been seen by some other members of her practice over the course of my pregnancy. There are lots of ways to do this. We have to dare to make the change, and that means some of those changes won’t work and you’re going to have to pull back and figure out something else. You have to try. If you succeed, you’ll get better talent and retain the talent you have.
Wilkins: I’ve been saying a lot that this moment around AI and technology and all this disruption is both the scariest and most important time for exactly the reasons you say that everything is in some ways up for grabs.
You have such a broad range of experiences from around the world. What are some examples of how other countries are making progress on these issues?
Slaughter: They come in several categories. One is the number of countries that are so much better at things like paid family leave. I think the ideal is one parent takes six months and then the other parent takes six months. Longer than six months has many parents chafing for work, and there is a limit to how long you can be out before it becomes a problem. In Romania, you get three years and that’s a disaster. One of the things that we’ve noticed is that even though Europe has far better leave policies, the United States has a higher rate of women corporate leaders, businesses, and law firms. Part of the reason may well be that women have no choice but to come back to work soon enough that they don’t get replaced. There has to be a happy medium.
When I look around the world, I see other countries pushing harder toward economies and societies where they value time and human connection as well as money.
Anne-Marie Slaughter
There are definitely many countries that are simply more family oriented. In Scandinavia the day ends at 4 p.m. and people go pick up their children, go home, and have dinner. And they start earlier the next day. That works much, much better. The French have a national childcare system that is very good. I don’t think the United States is going to do that anytime soon, but we certainly can develop our own mixed public-private-family system.
When I look around the world, I see other countries pushing harder toward economies and societies where they value time and human connection as well as money. In New Zealand and Britain, and under the Biden administration here, there are experiments on how to move toward a well-being economy. This means an economy where you measure many more indicators than simply GDP and unemployment. If we’re talking about a human economy that recognizes the need of all people to both have a job and succeed in various ways, including providing for their families, then we need to shake the economy at its foundations and ask who is the economy serving and are we flourishing?
The United States is growing faster than most any other country, certainly in the industrialized world, and we have an epidemic of loneliness, isolation, and deaths of despair. That’s not an economy that works. It’s not going to be enough just to pass some family-friendly policies. You really need to dig into who’s the economy for, what are we measuring, and how do we know when we’re succeeding.
Lock arms with your peers who have care obligations; do not approach the authorities in your workplace with the assumption that this is a women’s issue.
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Wilkins: I hope our next president is talking to you about these critical issues. But I want to end with this because, as you know, I teach at a law school. You’ve taught students for many years. We do try to teach them how to change the world, but they also have to live in the world that they find. I wonder, do you have some words of advice for students like mine? My students want to build lives that are sustainable in every way. But they’re also scared and it’s challenging, and they look at you and they say, Yes, but she’s already way up there and I’m just at the beginning.
Slaughter: The first thing I would say is to adopt a mindset of “both/and.” Think about care issues and gender issues more broadly in terms of “how do women come together and recognize that care is still largely regarded as ‘women’s work’” and “how do we move the conversation forward so it increasingly becomes a human issue?” I often advise young women that when you’re in a workplace, make sure you’re talking about parental leave, not maternity or paternity leave. Lock arms with your peers who have care obligations; do not approach the authorities in your workplace with the assumption that this is a women’s issue.
At the same time, more women are still experiencing these issues than men, without any question, and that will be true for the foreseeable future. So make sure you’ve got a really great women’s network and make sure that you are connected to other women in the firm. But again, also make sure you are connected to other parents. I have found many senior male partners with daughters to be very attentive to these issues because they suddenly see them through a different lens. Overall, take a combined human/economic position, a view that says “Look, we want this to be a workplace where we want to stay, and this is what it’s going to take.”
I do think the uncertainty that all of our students are experiencing is valid. What are law firms even going to look like with digital technology, with AI, and with new economic models? What’s the world going to look like with these terrifying global threats? This is also a time to think, How can I experiment? If I were designing a practice I want, what does that look like?
In your 20s, and certainly until your mid-30s, remember, you can take risks. You can take more risks than you think. I thought I was going to a big law firm partner until I realized after two big-firm summer jobs that I really didn’t like corporate practice. I pulled back, hung out at Harvard Law School doing a variety of jobs and trying to figure out what I was going to do. It was a hard, uncertain time, but the world did not come to an end. Remember why you wanted to be a lawyer or why you wanted to gain the skills of thinking like a lawyer, and then see if you can’t create a way to work the way you want.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is the CEO of the think and action tank New America. She has been a professor at Harvard Law School and a professor and dean at Princeton University. In 2009 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appointed her as the first woman director of policy planning in the U.S. State Department. She was the recipient of the 2024 Center on the Legal Profession Global Leadership Award.
David B. Wilkins is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
