While the recent article by Ann-Marie Slaughter in the Atlantic Monthly “ Why Women Still Can’t Have it All”, makes several inarguable points regarding what women need in order to be successful – more role models in high-powered positions and institutions that support working mothers – the narrative she chooses to illustrate her points may do more to stymie those goals than to promote them. If readers extrapolate her story as a manifesto for all working women, as exposure on such a public platform inevitably leads to, we may end up back where we started; promoting the idea that deep down women feel better giving up powerful positions at work in order to spend more time at home. When in fact, the issue may not be what women give up for positions of power, but rather what positions of power, by their very nature, require us to give up regardless of gender.
The antiquated rhetoric of “having it all” disregards the basis of every economic relationship; the idea of tradeoffs. All of us are dealing with the constrained optimization that is life, attempting to maximize our utility based on parameters like career, kids, relationships, etc., doing our best to allocate the resource of time. Due to the scarcity of this resource, therefore, none of us can “have it all”, and those who claim to are most likely lying.
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