-
So my moment of truth
-
did not come all at once.
-
In 2010, I had the chance to be considered
-
for promotion from my job
-
as director of policy planning
-
at the U.S. State Department.
-
This was my moment to lean in,
-
to push myself forward
-
for what are really only a handful
-
of the very top foreign policy jobs,
-
and I had just finished a big, 18-month project
-
for Secretary Clinton, successfully,
-
and I knew I could handle a bigger job.
-
The woman I thought I was
-
would have said yes.
-
But I had been commuting for two years
-
between Washington and Princeton, New Jersey,
-
where my husband and my two teenage sons lived,
-
and it was not going well.
-
I tried on the idea of eking out another two years
-
in Washington, or maybe uprooting my sons
-
from their school and my husband from his work
-
and asking them to join me.
-
But deep down, I knew
-
that the right decision was to go home,
-
even if I didn't fully recognize the woman
-
who was making that choice.
-
That was a decision based on love
-
and responsibility.
-
I couldn't keep watching my oldest son
-
make bad choices
-
without being able to be there for him
-
when and if he needed me.
-
But the real change came more gradually.
-
Over the next year,
-
while my family was righting itself,
-
I started to realize
-
that even if I could go back into government,
-
I didn't want to.
-
I didn't want to miss the last five years
-
that my sons were at home.
-
I finally allowed myself to accept
-
what was really most important to me,
-
not what I was conditioned to want
-
or maybe what I conditioned myself to want,
-
and that decision led to a reassessment
-
of the feminist narrative that I grew up with
-
and have always championed.
-
I am still completely committed
-
to the cause of male-female equality,
-
but let's think about what that equality really means,
-
and how best to achieve it.
-
I always accepted the idea
-
that the most respected and powerful people
-
in our society are men at the top of their careers,
-
so that the measure of male-female equality
-
ought to be how many women are in those positions:
-
prime ministers, presidents, CEOs,
-
directors, managers, Nobel laureates, leaders.
-
I still think we should do everything we possibly can
-
to achieve that goal.
-
But that's only half of real equality,
-
and I now think we're never going to get there
-
unless we recognize the other half.
-
I suggest that real equality,
-
full equality,
-
does not just mean valuing women
-
on male terms.
-
It means creating a much wider range
-
of equally respected choices
-
for women and for men.
-
And to get there, we have to change our workplaces,
-
our policies and our culture.
-
In the workplace,
-
real equality means valuing family
-
just as much as work,
-
and understanding that the two reinforce each other.
-
As a leader and as a manager,
-
I have always acted on the mantra,
-
if family comes first,
-
work does not come second --
-
life comes together.
-
If you work for me, and you have a family issue,
-
I expect you to attend to it,
-
and I am confident,
-
and my confidence has always been borne out,
-
that the work will get done, and done better.
-
Workers who have a reason to get home
-
to care for their children or their family members
-
are more focused, more efficient,
-
more results-focused.
-
And breadwinners who are also caregivers
-
have a much wider range
-
of experiences and contacts.
-
Think about a lawyer who spends part of his time
-
at school events for his kids
-
talking to other parents.
-
He's much more likely to bring in
-
new clients for his firm
-
than a lawyer who never leaves his office.
-
And caregiving itself
-
develops patience --
-
a lot of patience --
-
and empathy, creativity, resilience, adaptability.
-
Those are all attributes that are ever more important
-
in a high-speed, horizontal,
-
networked global economy.
-
The best companies actually know this.
-
The companies that win awards
-
for workplace flexibility in the United States
-
include some of our most successful corporations,
-
and a 2008 national study
-
on the changing workforce
-
showed that employees
-
in flexible and effective workplaces
-
are more engaged with their work,
-
they're more satisfied and more loyal,
-
they have lower levels of stress
-
and higher levels of mental health.
-
And a 2012 study of employers
-
showed that deep, flexible practices
-
actually lowered operating costs
-
and increased adaptability
-
in a global service economy.
-
So you may think
-
that the privileging of work over family
-
is only an American problem.
-
Sadly, though, the obsession with work
-
is no longer a uniquely American disease.
-
Twenty years ago,
-
when my family first started going to Italy,
-
we used to luxuriate in the culture of siesta.
-
Siesta is not just about avoiding the heat of the day.
-
It's actually just as much
-
about embracing the warmth of a family lunch.
-
Now, when we go, fewer and fewer businesses
-
close for siesta,
-
reflecting the advance of global corporations
-
and 24-hour competition.
-
So making a place for those we love
-
is actually a global imperative.
-
In policy terms,
-
real equality means recognizing
-
that the work that women have traditionally done
-
is just as important
-
as the work that men have traditionally done,
-
no matter who does it.
-
Think about it: breadwinning and caregiving
-
are equally necessary for human survival.
-
At least if we get beyond a barter economy,
-
somebody has to earn an income
-
and someone else has to convert that income
-
to care and sustenance for loved ones.
-
Now most of you, when you hear me
-
talk about breadwinning and caregiving,
-
instinctively translate those categories
-
into men's work and women's work.
-
And we don't typically challenge
-
why men's work is advantaged.
-
But consider a same sex couple
-
like my friends Sarah and Emily.
-
They're psychiatrists.
-
They got married five years ago,
-
and now they have two-year old twins.
-
They love being mothers,
-
but they also love their work,
-
and they're really good at what they do.
-
So how are they going to divide up
-
breadwinning and caregiving responsibilities?
-
Should one of them stop working
-
or reduce hours to be home?
-
Or should they both change their practices
-
so they can have much more flexible schedules?
-
And what criteria should they use
-
to make that decision?
-
Is it who makes the most money
-
or who is most committed to her career?
-
Or who has the most flexible boss?
-
The same-sex perspective helps us see
-
that juggling work and family
-
are not women's problems,
-
they're family problems.
-
And Sarah and Emily are the lucky ones,
-
because they have a choice
-
about how much they want to work.
-
Millions of men and women
-
have to be both breadwinners and caregivers
-
just to earn the income they need,
-
and many of those workers are scrambling.
-
They're patching together care arrangements
-
that are inadequate
-
and often actually unsafe.
-
If breadwinning and caregiving are really equal,
-
then why shouldn't a government
-
invest as much in an infrastructure of care
-
as the foundation of a healthy society
-
as it invests in physical infrastructure
-
as the backbone of a successful economy?
-
The governments that get it,
-
no surprises here,
-
the governments that get it,
-
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands,
-
provide universal child care,
-
support for caregivers at home,
-
school and early childhood education,
-
protections for pregnant women,
-
and care for the elderly and the disabled.
-
Those governments invest in that infrastructure
-
the same way they invest in roads and bridges
-
and tunnels and trains.
-
Those societies also show you
-
that breadwinning and caregiving
-
reinforce each other.
-
They routinely rank among the top 15 countries
-
of the most globally competitive economies,
-
but at the same time,
-
they rank very high on the OECD Better Life Index.
-
In fact, they rank higher than other governments,
-
like my own, the U.S., or Switzerland,
-
that have higher average levels of income
-
but lower rankings on work-life balance.
-
So changing our workplaces
-
and building infrastructures of care
-
would make a big difference,
-
but we're not going to get equally valued choices
-
unless we change our culture,
-
and the kind of cultural change required
-
means re-socializing men.
-
(Applause)
-
Increasingly in developed countries,
-
women are socialized to believe that our place
-
is no longer only in the home,
-
but men are actually still where they always were.
-
Men are still socialized to believe
-
that they have to be breadwinners,
-
that to derive their self-worth
-
from how high they can climb over other men
-
on a career ladder.
-
The feminist revolution still has a long way to go.
-
It's certainly not complete.
-
But 60 years after
-
"The Feminine
Mystique" was published,
-
many women actually have
-
more choices than men do.
-
We can decide to be a breadwinner,
-
a caregiver, or any combination of the two.
-
When a man, on the other hand,
-
decides to be a caregiver,
-
he puts his manhood on the line.
-
His friends may praise his decision,
-
but underneath, they're scratching their heads.
-
Isn't the measure of a man
-
his willingness to compete with other men
-
for power and prestige?
-
And as many women hold that view as men do.
-
We know that lots of women
-
still judge the attractiveness of a man
-
based in large part on how successful he is
-
in his career.
-
A woman can drop out of the work force
-
and still be an attractive partner.
-
For a man, that's a risky proposition.
-
So as parents and partners,
-
we should be socializing our sons
-
and our husbands
-
to be whatever they want to be,
-
either caregivers or breadwinners.
-
We should be socializing them to make caregiving
-
cool for guys.
-
(Applause)
-
I can almost hear lots of you thinking, "No way."
-
But in fact, the change is
actually already happening.
-
At least in the United States,
-
lots of men take pride in cooking,
-
and frankly obsess over stoves.
-
They are in the birthing rooms.
-
They take paternity leave when they can.
-
They can walk a baby or soothe a toddler
-
just as well as their wives can,
-
and they are increasingly
-
doing much more of the housework.
-
Indeed, there are male college students now
-
who are starting to say,
-
"I want to be a stay-at-home dad."
-
That was completely unthinkable
-
50 or even 30 years ago.
-
And in Norway, where men have
-
an automatic three month's paternity leave,
-
but they lose it if they decide not to take it,
-
a high government official told me
-
that companies are starting to look
-
at prospective male employees
-
and raise an eyebrow if they didn't in fact
-
take their leave when they had kids.
-
That means that it's starting to seem
-
like a character defect
-
not to want to be a fully engaged father.
-
So I was raised
-
to believe that championing women's rights
-
meant doing everything we could
-
to get women to the top.
-
And I still hope that I live long enough
-
to see men and women equally represented
-
at all levels of the work force.
-
But I've come to believe that we have to value family
-
every bit as much as we value work,
-
and that we should entertain the idea
-
that doing right by those we love
-
will make all of us better at everything we do.
-
Thirty years ago, Carol Gilligan,
-
wonderful psychologist, studied adolescent girls
-
and identified an ethic of care,
-
an element of human nature every bit as important
-
as the ethic of justice.
-
It turns out that "you don't care"
-
is just as much a part of who we are
-
as "that's not fair."
-
Bill Gates agrees.
-
He argues that the two great forces of human nature
-
are self-interest and caring for others.
-
Let's bring them both together.
-
Let's make the feminist revolution
-
a humanist revolution.
-
As whole human beings,
-
we will be better caregivers and breadwinners.
-
You may think that can't happen,
-
but I grew up in a society
-
where my mother put out small vases
-
of cigarettes for dinner parties,
-
where blacks and whites used separate bathrooms,
-
and where everybody claimed to be heterosexual.
-
Today, not so much.
-
The revolution for human equality
-
can happen.
-
It is happening.
-
It will happen.
-
How far and how fast is up to us.
-
Thank you.
-
(Applause)