 My name is Liza Mundy. I'm the director of the work family program here at the New America Foundation. We are looking forward to being an integral part of the conversation around work family issues. I feel as though the conversation has really exploded over the past couple of years with books by obviously by with Ann Marie Slaughter our new president with her article and soon to be a book that was in the Atlantic about having it all. I wrote a book a year or so ago about the increasing number of women who are the breadwinners in their households. Bridget Schulte who's a fellow here has a book coming out about people feeling overwhelmed in their work and professional lives. So it's it's I think a really interesting resurgence of energy and conversation around work family issues and we're certainly hoping to be a part of that. Today we are so fortunate that Deborah Spar has made time for us in her busy book tour schedule. She is as I'm sure you know the president of Barnard College. She was one of the one of the youngest one of the youngest tenured female professors at Harvard Business School and she is the author of a number of books. Her current book is called Wonder Women Sex Power and the Quest for Perfection. It's a terrific book I've I've read it and reread it and I will I will say I was thinking about this the quest for perfection this morning as I was trying to get ready and leave the house in time to make sure I was here early to welcome Deborah and have everything and I came downstairs and the kids were already gone to school and my husband had already gone to try to get some exercise before work and they were breakfast issues scattered around and so I was stealing five or ten minutes from my travel schedule to clean up because I didn't want to be judged by the pet sitter who came to walk our dogs as you know the woman who has the messy breakfast dishes and so I was musing on the the quest for perfection which led me to think about long ago when I was doing it and I was doing a profile of Hillary Clinton and I was interviewing a woman who had known her very well in her in her college years and thereafter and I was talking about all that she had achieved in her early life being a mom and being a lawyer and I was saying you know how did she pull that off and the woman said who loved her I said well you know she was an indifferent housekeeper and and I thought that that's it you know that's why you end up doing those doing those breakfast dishes before the pet sitter comes because you're the one who's going to be judged as the indifferent housekeeper not your husband of course so I think there are a lot of reasons why the quest we know we feel this need for perfection at home as you describe it at home and in work you talk so I think evocatively and and provocatively I think about about feminism and you write that you know that that young women have turned their perfectionism on themselves as opposed to turning it on the world and you say that we privatized feminism and focused on our dreams and our own inevitable frustrations and I think that's a really provocative idea that somehow we've everything that feminism was supposed to achieve and obviously it has achieved a great deal but that we have turned it on ourselves and and asked so much of ourselves in both our work and professional lives and I'm hoping that you would just take a few minutes to talk about your thesis and expand on on this idea well thank you and it's a it's a great pleasure to be here today I'm I've been a fan of new America since it first began not that many years ago and I'm pretty sure I spoke about my last book here when that came out so I'm just delighted that you're here I'm delighted that they're taking on work family issues because as as you mentioned it's just exploded into popular consciousness which is sort of odd because the issues are not new the issues are almost eternal and certainly have been really important for the past 50 years but they haven't been much in the public conversation until quite recently when all of a sudden there you're kind of everywhere so it's great that you all are gonna be playing a role in this so let me I will just talk briefly about sort of where the book came from and what its main themes are and I know that the best part of these these events are always the conversation so I won't speak for too long and then we'll chat and then we'll we'll open it up to any thoughts comments criticisms you might have and I'm delighted to see that we have a wide range of ages in the room because this really is a book that does look at the evolution of the generations of feminism and it's a book that tries to speak sort of to the differences between these generations but also the commonalities so let me just let me just start a briefly by talking a bit about where this book came from as I say a pretty pretty frequently in the book I wasn't raised a feminist I was born in 1963 which turns out to be an interesting year again just in terms of the chronology because I was alive during feminism but I was a kid and so when all of the exciting things were happening and I was kind of six and seven years old and one of the things I argue is that struggles that are occurring when you're a kid are not necessarily struggles that you identify with as you get older some women did I think women my age but I think certainly most of the women I know who did grow up sort of post feminism kind of took all of the advantages that feminism had handed us said thank you very much and kind of moved on with our lives because by the time I became sort of politically or socially conscious which was the late 1970s pretty much all of the Ivy League was open to women so if you were a smart ambitious girl you could go to Princeton you could go to Harvard Columbia was still not open but everywhere else was open I found personally I went to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown that they were hungry to have smart women and if you were a smart woman who was interested in let's say Soviet military thought which is what I was doing at the time you were kind of propelled forward arguably faster than the men because there was a real interest for the first time in getting women in these positions I went to graduate school all of the graduate schools were open women at this time could go to law school all of the doors had been open thanks to feminism but again if you're a kid and you just see the doors open you don't necessarily resonate with the struggle you just you know move on with your life as I did and I never really read feminist theory even though I have a PhD in political science I never studied feminism I didn't really want to put myself in what I saw as box meanwhile and this was something I hadn't really thought about until I started writing this book I again like any kid you know grew up sort of buffeted by the cultural images of the moment and what were the cultural images the images that were out there in magazines in television on radio and movies were of strong powerful working women who were also usually gorgeous and had kids and sex and great clothes and it was this incredibly attractive image and so I talk a lot in the book about this commercial that some of you may remember for a Charlie perfume which was this very alluring commercial it was Shelley hack the model who was clearly a working woman in the commercials because she had pants suits which were very cool in 1973 and she always had a briefcase sort of you know just as as if to demonstrate that she was working and in some of them she has a child and it's clear the child is being tended to but it's not clear by whom or how and then there's men over there and they're spraying her with perfume and it's all you know very sexy and glamorous and you know I was a smart girl growing up but I somehow thought this is what life looks like when you're an adult and it wasn't just this one silly commercial this was the era when the Brady bunch gave way to Charlie's Angels and Partridge family gave way to Maude you know we the cultural images were all of working women but working women who did do it all seamlessly and effortlessly and that was sort of the world I presumed I would move into and to some extent I did you know I I moved right through college graduate school into the working world I had my first child before I had my first job which turns out actually to be a pretty interesting strategy but we can we can say that we can say that for later and it was really only later in my life that I started to realize that my life as a woman professional life as a woman was developing very differently than my male colleagues and the I start the book with a very uncomfortable scene that all of my male friends who read it in draft form said please do not include but all of my female friends who read it said you got to start with this and it's this very unglamorous scene of my being in the ladies restroom at LaGuardia Airport with a breast pump which is what you have to do if you are a working mother I had just given birth to my second child three weeks ago I didn't get to have maternity leave at Harvard I was I had to do a research project so I was there in the ladies room using a breast pump when I had one of those rare light bulb moments which said to me gee this is what having it all is really about and it's not very glamorous at all and I use it as the anchor story for the book because I think it does convey really in a visceral form what it really means to try to be a working mom these days aside from all the policy issues and questions we can get into and as at a very personal visceral level it's just hard and one of the things I find so interesting is the books only been out a week but already women come up to me from all different kinds of women saying I got to tell you my breast pump story every working mother has a breast pump story and none of them are pretty just not and so I had this sort of odd light bulb moment but then more importantly again as I got older and went through my career I started noticing the women disappearing so most of the women I had gone to college with who are equally as smart and as ambitious were not in the workplace 10 20 years after graduating college virtually all of the women who had started with me at Harvard Business School did not get tenure moved on moved and I'm sure you probably all read the Harvard Business School article that came out in the New York Times this is a big problem it hasn't gotten any better probably most scarily I noticed that my female students at Harvard Business School were dropping out of the workforce and these are women who were super smart super ambitious super competitive every bit as smart as all the men in the room but five ten years after they graduated Harvard Business School they were no longer in the workforce or they had they had really moved to different kinds of positions and then what finally sort of compelled me to realize I needed to write a book along these lines was about the nine millionth time when when I had that phone call that I'm sure most women in this room have experienced when somebody said you know Deb I hate to do this I know you're really busy I know you have 42 things already on your calendar for Saturday but we have this panel committee convention event and we really need a woman and I have one little piece of the book that I call slogans from my tombstone because I'm you know convinced on my gravestone it will say if they really need a woman dot dot dot because that was the role I had fallen into I was the woman in the room I was the woman at the table I was the woman if somebody realizes it's going to look bad if we have only men up there let's get Deb to do it and I had benefited from being that woman in the room and I'm I want to be honest and saying that but it's also a very awkward and unfortunate position to be in all the time to be the woman in the room and what it really made me realize was this was a very big problem that there was only one woman in the room and so I started playing with the book that at the time I was calling confessions of reluctant feminist sort of talking about how I came to realize the virtues and values of feminism way too late in my career and as the book morphed I also moved from Harvard Business School to Barnard College and underwent what I keep referring to as a massive hormonal shift but I really realized and again I would love to talk about this and answer questions or hear your thoughts working in a very male dominated place was fundamentally different from working in a very female dominated place and I don't say that as a normative statement it's not that the female place was better or worse than the male place but it sure was different and working you know surrounded by women as I am now is very different from being surrounded by men and I think one of the things I try to do in the book is to argue that we are now I think at a place in history where women in particular it's harder for men to say this can put these statements out there and say maybe women do lead differently than men maybe women administer or manage differently than men so how can we think about valuing women's leadership styles and making sure that we're working them into formally male dominated organizations and institutions just as much as at Barnard I've actually gone out of my way to hire men because I wanted to make sure that we were getting that diversity of leadership styles and of management styles so let me let me just very quickly review sort of how the book works and it took me a while to come up with the structure of the book but it's one that I've become quite fond of it follows the the arc of a woman's life so it starts with a chapter that that tries to put sort of my life and my generation in historical perspective this generation that sort of came right after feminism and I talk about the great strides women have made but also sadly the fact that women if just look at the statistics right now we've totally plateaued out we are fully 50% of college applicants of college students grad school students with the exception of business school where we're still a little bit low entry-level positions in medicine science law you name it once you get to the top levels of any organization of any sector women hold between 15 and 20% of the leadership positions so I refer to this as the 16% ghetto because the the the statistics 16% actually shows up with alarming frequency and if you think about sort of why that is it's kind of the two the token one or two women and then once those seats are filled sort of people get back to the regular business so I lay that out in the in the opening chapter and then I follow the arc of a woman's life I talk about girls how we raise girls what kinds of expectations sadly I think we are still now imposing on girls and the major argument there this is the argument essentially of all the chapters is that sadly rather than getting rid of the old expectations that feminism really tried to liberate us from we've actually held on to all the old expectations so that girls should be sweet and pretty and sparkly and princesses but we've added to them and they should play soccer and be really smart and start their own NGOs and take care of their younger brothers and be sexy but not too sexy so rather than actually narrowing the range of expectations we've exploded them then I have a chapter on body image where I sure I don't have to convince anyone in this room of that feminism was supposed to make women care less about their looks that hasn't happened I would argue to the contrary that the the physical expectations the bodily expectations that women face are just totally unrealistic you know we've reached a point now where even the most beautiful women in the world who appear at fashion models are photoshopped so literally the women whose images we we see are not they're not real I mean they're actually not real and yet young women and older women are still trying and feel somehow compelled to adhere to these images and I talk in that chapter as you can imagine fair amount about anorexia body images and cosmetic surgery and in the one of the sad things we've fallen into is that the expectations of female beauty are now no longer confined to sort of you know the 18 to 25 year old age you're supposed to look 17 until you're 97 so far as I can tell which comes up later in the book when I get to the chapter on aging then there's a chapter on sex which was very hard to write it's not usually what college presidents write about but was fascinating because again what I'm arguing is there's great news sort of on the sexual arena that women are no longer held to the same kind of sexual expectations they were that is you know to remain a virgin until married women were liberated sexually they had reproductive freedoms that you know have really had massive societal change but if we look at the current generation and I always feel hopelessly middle-aged saying this I think the hookup culture is very damaging for young women because it's actually created another set of expectations that young women somehow feel that part of being young and female means being promiscuous that means having relationships with men you're actually not attracted to and yet somehow these same women fully expect that they will be in love and married by the time they're 35 and I see them wrestling to figure out how you make that shift you know how do you go from having sort of anonymous uncommitted sex to having monogamous sex that is still supposed to remain fabulous throughout your entire life so it's again we've actually ratcheted up the expectations I talked about marriage which in some ways I think is the weakest but the most interesting chapter in the book why why do we still get married why do we still get married with these giant white weddings I mean the white wedding is a celebration of an economic contract in which the woman was given to another family in exchange for a commodity and it was a contract in which she gave up her virginity in exchange for financial protection why are we still doing this and why are same-sex couples embracing the white wedding with such fervor I'm not sure that I fully explain the conundrum but I think it's a conundrum worth putting out there because it really doesn't make much sense and and the what I do sort of speculate on is because marriage has actually gotten harder you know in some ways with with two parents working with new social conventions with living longer staying happily married for a longer period of time is hard and so sort of rather than dealing with the difficulties of marriage and the fact that we know the divorce rate in this country is staggeringly high we sort of fetish eyes the white wedding and don't deal with the messier parts of the actual marriage there's chapter on babies and how our expectations of baby making have actually increased both lies and I in past lives wrote books on the fertility industry fascinating fascinating area both society and the economy and there's a million things to talk about in that industry but one of them is now the expectation that a you can have a baby whenever you want to which I think is quite dangerous for young women because fertility plummets sorry after really after about 28 and declines precipitously after 35 and yet women now believe that they can sort of put their careers so I put their families on hold while they're pursuing their careers and then kind of flick a switch and not only have a baby whenever they want but also have a perfect baby in terms of you know buying sperm buying eggs hiring surrogates not to mention all the things you do to make that child perfect from the moment here she is conceived so we're creating massive expectations around pregnancy and birth that again just didn't exist 50 years ago there's a chapter on marriage sort of family sorry labor distribution in the household what Liza was just mentioning you know why is it that women are still doing the dishes and not outsourcing that why are we feeling guilty when we don't do the dishes and how the heck can we explain this actual ratcheting up of household expectations one of the basic arguments of Betty Friedan's you know crucial work was that women had to be liberated from housework so that they could get on with the real work of the world get pick up any magazine on the stands out there and we are quietly being seduced by images of perfect kitchens perfect bathrooms organic home cooks gluten-free meals what mother here has not you know stayed up way too late on a working night to make the cupcakes for the school bake sale the next day because you're sort of too embarrassed to you know send a box of ringdings instead we've actually ratcheted up the expectations on the home front which makes absolutely no sense given the migration of women into the workforce there is a chapter on the workforce it's not a huge part of my book actually unlike some of the other books and I talk about clearly the issues women are still facing in the workplace lack of childcare and critically I think on the need to bring men into this conversation if the way workplaces and corporations deal with women quote in women's issues is to create women's networks and diversity forums and populate them entirely with women we don't solve the problem we need to bring men into the conversation again I'm happy to say more about this I think this is actually very important part of my argument and then there's a chapter on aging which again was fascinating for me to to write and think about because I am arguing that aging falls harder on women than on men not I'm aging is no fun for any of us but because we still live in a society that really thinks of women and pictures women when they're about twenty two or twenty three it's very hard for professional women to age gracefully in their jobs particularly in some obvious professions news broadcasters anyone who's in the public eye we can you can just see the difference men are allowed to age gracefully or not so gracefully and women really really aren't and then we have the the demographic issues that most women enter middle age or particularly sort of all the older pieces of middle-aged single that they're either widowed or divorced or had never been married and face another whole stream of economic issues which are which ironically and sadly are often compounded by the fact that these are women who were in the workforce for some period of time so when they get divorced and then they dropped out of the workforce when they get divorced they don't get a lot of support from their husbands because the courts perceive them as being capable of earning a living and so they're actually enter you know old age with very few financial resources the book ends at bizarrely perhaps on an optimistic note because I think actually most of the problems that we face now they're not impossible to fix you know you look at the Middle East you look at Syria and you know I think personally I have a tendency to say oh my gosh you know I can't even theorize about how we solve this problem the problems I've just laid out they're actually the actually relatively simple to think about how we solve them there's no magic bullets but part of it I think and this is it goes to the title of the book is changing the expectations that women adhere to and that critically that does not mean giving up it doesn't mean opting out it doesn't mean leaning out it doesn't mean throwing our hands up in frustration it just means moving away from perfection as a goal you rarely rarely hear men asked whether they have it all because nobody has it all why do we feel that women have to have it all and men just kind of you know slump around and do their thing we need to get more comfortable with women saying this is what I do and this is what I do less well of you know if I'm rushing off to work and I've got a couple of kids and a big job I'm gonna leave the dishes alone you know more critically if I'm working a 60 hour a week job I either need to have my in-laws living with me a husband who has a more flexible work schedule or world's best child care or I can't work a 60 hour job and have kids if I want to work a 60 hour a week job and I don't like any of the child care options I may not want to have children and and that's a perfectly legitimate choice as well but life is about choices and the beauty of feminism is that it gave women of my generation a choice I think the struggle we now face both my generation and younger is to say we actually have to make those choices because just because you have all of the options out there doesn't mean that you can grab every single one of them and I think men perhaps because their transition has not been so dramatic in the past 50 years more naturally have been making these trade-offs feeling less guilty when they don't bake the cupcakes for the bake sale the next day and women need to sort of move towards a more easy relationship with their choices so that they can actually return to the idea of liberation which is a word that has fallen out of our vocabulary but the original goal or one of the original goals of feminism was to liberate women to free women and I would argue that sadly rather than feeling liberated many women today feel chained they feel constrained by their choices we need to go back and reclaim that that liberation and critically and I'll end on this point we need to reclaim the collective action goals of feminism feminism was not about allowing women to become perfect it wasn't as one of the original feminist said to me and it's my favorite line she said honey we didn't fight so you could have Botox which is just a brilliant phrase and somehow their struggles that generation struggles for things like affordable child care for equal pay for equal rights for equal access for a for a system that values women on things other than their looks we need to go back and reclaim those struggles and move farther away from this inward focus that I fear has really captured so many women today so let me stop there and we can talk and we can talk and yeah I'll ask questions for a while and then we'll open it up to questions one of the one of the many pleasures for me of reading your book was that it it gave me the chance to think about my own childhood and my own the way that I process feminism I was born in 1960 so I'm a little bit older but I think that you know we were coming at it from about the same at about the same time feminism I I don't remember the first issue of miz I I grew up in far southwestern Virginia not in an intellectual household my parents didn't subscribe really to much except readers digest and I certainly didn't get miz and yet I remember being profoundly affected by feminism at an early age and I can't even figure out why or where the forces were sort of trickling down I remember when I was 11 in the fifth grade three at that point this the school patrol was all male and three of us decided to gender integrate the school patrol and we agitated to be to be to be able to wear the the the orange crossing badge and I remember that we were allowed to hold the doors they let us uh into the school patrol they wouldn't let us out on the street corners but they would let us hold the doors open for the school children um and and so it was a sort of a partial victory and then I remember in junior high school in like the mid 1970s having really ardent debates with boys in my social studies class about women's live as it was called and I and I I I I I felt actually pretty empowered by the teachers and pretty empowered I think our parents were sort of amused by this and they were pretty supportive and I think it's because we had kind of hippie teachers in the 70s and so they they were like they were supportive I never felt silenced in classrooms and for me it wasn't it really wasn't until I got to college in the northeast um going to Princeton and I remember you know women hadn't been there for uh for for 10 years yet um that I really felt like I ran oh this is the patriarchy okay because it was just a really much more high bound much more conformist show social atmosphere women professors weren't getting tenure um and you know for reasons that we didn't understand there were feminists on campus but generally it was a very conservative social environment so to sort of stick your neck out and be a feminist was not really that cool so for me that was when the climate changed and the world started sort of pushing back against my aspirations but it's funny because I look back and I try to figure out why was I so why did I even know about feminism and I think it was like Billy Jean King and Shirley Chisholm and and these just these cultural influences that were sort of trickling in and yes I remember Charlie Perfume as well but it was the sort of random cultural um influence that really had a big impact similarly I can tell you the reason that girls don't want to get married is shows like say yes to the dress which you know which my daughter religiously watches so she's going to have a job but she's also going to have you know a fabulous wedding that she's already thinking about so I just um I so one of the things I wonder I guess because like you I saw friends as we sort of move through the workforce I did see a number of my friends continued to work and and to push themselves professionally um you know and some made the decision at some point not to or have gone back and forth why do you think in your cohort you were one of the few that that did continue sort of working and pushing yourself on all on all friends um it's first of all I really enjoy your your thoughts so thank you you know I'm I'm not entirely sure to be honest I think I think part of it and you may have experienced something similar at at Princeton I was in very male conservative tough places and it was a hard it was just hard for women to get by so I I think particularly at Harvard Business School where the numbers have remained the same it's just a tough place for women to get tenure interestingly all of my friends from graduate school have stayed in the workforce and have been very successful it was sort of my friends from college who who wound up taking more traditional paths um and then the Harvard Business School women have stayed in the workforce they just didn't make it at that at that particular place which which was you know sounds like you know Princeton as well it's just tough tough places but I think you know it's very hard to look back at your life and say you know why you made choices you did I think at some subconscious level I was making choices that made it easier for me I was supposed to go into the foreign service that was that was the game plan and actually did get in and it turned out I was this is always one of the fascinating ironies of my life I completed the security clearance and then the secret service found out I was too young which you would have thought might have been sort of a basic I had gone to college young so I wasn't 22 yet um so I I kind of bided my time until I was old enough to go in and at that point I had fallen in love with the man who's now my husband and and I don't remember actually consciously making the decision but I think I did subconsciously realize that going into the foreign service was going to be really hard if I wanted to have a marriage and a family and I gave up on that dream and I didn't consider it as a sacrifice at the time but you know I was all of 23 when I kind of said you know I'm not going to follow that path I'm going to stay in academia which does turn out to be one of the easier not that it's easy but it it is an easier path to have a family because you have flexibility yeah that's interesting what you said about the foreign service because one of the things I reflected I was at the Washington Post for a number of years and one of the things that was really hard for women and remains hard for women is to be a foreign correspondent is to be a foreign correspondent and have a family so I watched any number of male colleagues who were foreign correspondents their wife would be the trailing spouse they would have you know they would go for two years here three years here and their children and their wife would follow and then they would come back and that was a path to newsroom advancement and it was something that just wasn't available to women and I think you know I think um one of the one of the sort of ironies of the newspaper crisis and the closure of foreign bureaus is that's become less a route to advancement um in newsrooms now because it's just not any it it's not something that anybody is doing quite as much as they were um and I think that I think that the foreign service and the CIA and places that require you I think they're getting better about the trailing spouse thing but living in Washington in particular I'm sure a lot of people you know people who were in the foreign service so they were in the CIA and they have moved there and it's always that's always been a very hard route for women to um to have not even have it all but just have a family and a job and I think this is a jumping to a different question but when when people raise the question about what corporations or organizations do to make it easier for women these are actually the nitty gritty kind of issues that are not talked about enough but you know if foreign travel is a is a real problem for women you know maybe we need to think about different paths towards success in an organization that doesn't involve you have to spend two years out of the country which you know for GE or IBM that was always part of the part of the game right right yeah I interviewed a group of young of young engineers who actually were interviewing with a an oil company that does require a movement and they actually like to have married couples um and they require these couples to to decided a pretty early age who's going to be the leading spouse and who's going to be the trailing spouse professionally which I um I've always wanted to report that out how they do that exactly because that's that doesn't like a good thing that would be an interesting set of negotiations to have um so you argument that women have plateaued I mean I'm not convinced that women have plateaued I mean when you look at the statistics maybe not permanently at the moment yeah okay but when you look at the statistics I mean you're in academia you know this better than I do women are actually pretty close to 60 percent of college and university students so in in in academia at least um as undergraduates and in the community colleges getting associates degrees women outnumber men so uh women are you know by far a majority of valedictorians in high school so academically women are actually out achieving men and and it's still the case that a woman who graduates from college on average doesn't earn as much as a man with a college degree but eventually the sheer numbers of college educated women I think are going to propel women I mean women are going to have to enter into relationships and in fact in which they are the better educated spouse and and it may happen in cases that that therefore the couple does go forward with with the woman's career the one that is privileged in and and and I and I I guess looking at the fact that you know you're writing this book Cheryl Sandberg's writing this book Amrie is writing that you know how do you have these women who are in really top positions writing yes about how hard it is but but the women are there and and and so I guess I feel a little bit more optimistic um about the plateau part yeah and I'm not pessimistic about it but I think it's important to note that the numbers really haven't budged for 20 years and we're way beyond the point now where you could just blame the pipeline because women have been 50 percent of college students since you and I went to college so so we should have already had one or two generations of women reaching to the top and that's where we're seeing the fall out and I think the reasons for the fall out are much more subtle now it's not that there's not enough women coming out of the top schools they're there as you say they outnumber men it's not that women don't want these jobs it's not that they don't have role models because we we have had the other than US president we kind of have had the first generation of pioneers across the sectors so why are women dropping out before they reach the top and I think this is where we get these subtle problems they're dropping out because they've had the second kid and it's too hard they're dropping out because they're they're just feeling frustrated and crazy and they don't need to work you know there's enough family income this is I really think what you see a lot of in law and finance a lot of couples where both both partners are in finance as those jobs escalate it's 80 hours a week there's just not enough hours in the day part of this and this is this is something I've actually just really stumbled upon as I've been giving these talks a lot of women in the top jobs have stay-at-home spouses yeah their husbands stay at home or their wives stay at home and nobody talks about that I did a big dinner at an investment bank last week there were 30 women there all incredibly accomplished somebody pulled me over afterwards and said if you went around that room every single woman has a stay-at-home spouse I actually read a book about that but not enough people I think there's still that little taboo that women are kind of embarrassed to admit that their husbands stay home we got we have to change that part of the conversation so I think these things are fixable we just have to get over a lot of these the subtle issues in addition to the policy pieces that particularly when you're talking at lower socioeconomic levels the lack of affordable daycare right is is just a carrot is huge yes yes and I think as you point out in your book it's not it's I mean it's true that the plateau has occurred and persisted in in industries like law and finance but there are other fields like medicine where women really have may breakthroughs and in some cases come to dominate certain medical specialties so structurally there must be something about medicine that is different and you talk about that in the book you talk about the fact that I mean in finance if if a man and woman get married it could happen that his salary is just so large that at a certain point she says you know what it's just not worth it for me to be working women are always you know am I making enough to pay the child care is it just is it sort of justifiable and so if he's working 100 hours and making tons of money then she's more likely to drop out in medicine that's not so likely to happen right well and I think I think that this comparison is fascinating because I think women do stay in medicine in much higher numbers part of the reason I think is nobody goes into medicine by accident right you know it's not you love it you're passionate about it you're paying an absurd amount of money right for so many years women and men who become doctors want to be doctors I know a lot of women who go into either business school or law school kind of because they graduated from a top college they know they should go to graduate school and they go to law or business school and 10 years afterwards when they if they don't really have the passion for what they're doing and they've wound up marrying somebody who makes the kind of salary you get in those fields it's just easier for them to opt out and the other thing about medicine which I think is so important and is so useful women have also made choices about which subfields to go into and so you're seeing a lot of women increasingly in fields like anesthesiology emergency room medicine where you have um hours that you can control right interestingly women are going out of ob gyn because that's actually the hardest one to control your hours they're going into practices where you'll say we'll have 10 people in the practice rather than five will make less money but we're not on call as often I think medicine really offers a very interesting a template right of choices and they're not giving up choices but they're choices right right and veterinary medicine as well right become dominated by women because of part of structural changes in the field that allow you to control your hours so the parts of your book that are personal for example when you write about your own struggles with anorexia in in high school was that was it hard for you to write about that and talk about it or it was it was really hard so I do I talk about anorexia I talk about this horrible breast pumping incident a little bit you know TMI and I've never written anything along those lines but what what what compelled me to write this way is the washington the wall street journal had this thing a couple of years ago where they asked college presidents to write one of their own admissions essays which is a very clever thing and you had to agree to write the essay before they gave you the question the question I got was please describe an average day and how you find solace in your routine which is just like a horrible question to ask anyone and what I did being you know knowing something about the college admissions process I turned the essay on its head and I wrote this piece about just a horrible day I was having and my husband was stuck in Buffalo in a snowstorm and three kids had to go to three different places and my son dropped his cell phone and drove over it with the car and then the cat brought in a half dead chipmunk and I had to deal with this chipmunk rather than writing the speech on stem cell technology I was supposed to be writing so I wrote this for the for the paper and I got the biggest response I've ever gotten to anything I've ever written and people would come up to me at conferences and say you're the dead chipmunk lady right and I realized I had hit a chord that by writing and I had written this quickly and in sort of a you know a rage that people felt like I was describing their lives and so I it took me a while to write this book to get comfortable with the personal stories but at least thus far the response has been really good because I'm having a lot of women of all ages come to me and said you were describing my life or let me tell you about my breast pump story or my divorce I think it's somehow because I am you know I am a successful person being able to show some of the you know the dirt under the under the whatever um somehow validates these tough choices that we're all making yeah I think the breast pump story is becoming obligatory because yeah Samberg has a breast pump story in her book as well so um yes well and it is you know if the breast pump moment is the moment I think at a very physical level women realize that my life has just become complicated and painful right right in a way that my husband's it's just not going to it's never going to not in that sense yes although as you say in your book and as we know as we keep saying I mean men are feeling more work-family conflict than than women are at this point so the conversation I think is beginning for men as well and and maybe that's going to be where some of the well if we want to get past the plateau that's where the conversation is going to have to become are you getting much reaction from men are you I am I mean this is a largely female room when I spoke at politics and pros last night there were a lot of men in the room I spoke at one of the investment banks last week and the room was a third male I think and this is where I may be perhaps overly optimistic I think men want to solve this problem you know we're not dealing anymore with the generation of nasty men who don't want to let women in the office or want want to harass them still some of that but we're dealing with men who've who've watched their wives struggle who have daughters who have daughters who they fundamentally want to succeed right and and they're running corporations or organizations where they're problem solvers and they can't solve this problem so I think what what needs to happen is women need to allow men into the conversation and men need to actually listen and hear some of this stuff you know it's the travel it's the breast pumping it's the you know I need two hours a week to go by socks for my kids you know it's figuring out how we just try and build different patterns of work and I don't think it's impossible I think you know we're pretty close we just got to get over a bunch of these hurdles right so then let's talk about harvard business school and the and the jody canter article the new york times because it sounds like there was this this effort to change the culture there which really sounds like one of the last bastions of of of patriarchy and just high octane high testosterone I'm trying to think of a sort of a polite word to to use I'm coming up short but it just it sounds like such a pressure cook here what what your take on the you all might have read the piece of the new york times about how you know a dean charged in and decided to change things and to make sure that women were more included in the conversations at harvard business school and that professors were coached and assessed differently your take is that in fact there wasn't a lot of changer I don't know I think they're I think they're really trying so I think the new dean of HBS is committed he's an indian man you know so he's diverse himself in different ways he empowered two women who I've known forever both are awesome one is is was the first openly lesbian professor at the school the other is a Korean mom of two so they're all kind of the outsiders and they're really trying to change the culture in the place I give them a million kudos and they're doing things that are easy to make fun of like teaching women how to raise their hand in the classroom but they're really powerful because having sat there for nearly 20 years women don't raise their hand the right way in the classroom they put it up tentatively they pull it back they sneak it up they catch your eye if you're the professor you can't call on them because they're not sticking their hand up so I think they're trying I think you know the article has raised a huge ruckus it's raised a ruckus on the outside it's raised rucks on the inside the students are mad at each other the faculty are mad at each other right now but I but I give them kudos for trying and and I give HBS kudos for allowing Jodi to spend as much time as she did and really to put all the dirty laundry out there so I you know I think I think this is actually a productive moment even though everybody's feeling kind of miserable right now right right and and to me at reading it I'm with with fascination it was to me also a sign that when you do get a female president at a university even though it was a male dean who she empowered to do drew up and fast empowered to bring about the changes it really does matter and it really does change the culture and the conversation and it's not that the female students at at Harvard Business School are disempowered themselves but but I guess one of the things that that I've noticed in this conversation is when shell samberg writes a book or emory writes a book or you you write a book and and there's always this niggling well these are the these are the elite women and they're ignoring the the situation of other women you know who aren't elite and and that and so every woman who writes a book has to say I understand that I'm not writing about all women and and I'm sorry and and and yet when men write books about leadership about leading corporations or whatever they don't say you know I'm sorry I know that all men don't live this life and I'm just talking about my life and I'm sorry about that they never feel like they have to say that and and yes I mean as a journalist you know we should capture everybody's life experience and we have to be out there we have to become more collective you know but but actually the struggles that women have as leaders of corporations or university presidents they matter because when women get in power I truly believe when you have more women on the armed service committee than they pay more attention to sexual harassment in the military so I feel like women are constantly made to apologize for the fact that they're writing about their experiences and they're not capturing every woman in the world's experience in their book and I I just feel like I I I wish that women didn't feel like they had to apologize quite so much even as we should be writing books about everybody's experience everybody's experience doesn't have to be captured in every article and every book that's a great point it's a great point it's my little rant yeah no you're right I actually hadn't quite thought you know Jack Welch doesn't write a book saying you know I'm not I'm not talking for the shop worker right you know right just doesn't have that compunction it's a great point although maybe he should be maybe he should be but we apologize for more yes yes so I guess the last question that I'll ask is again about okay so we talked about Harvard Business School and now you're the the the young women who are under your care in tutelage at Barnard I am very I'm very interested in this generation of women and the fact that they are more educated than the men and they're in their general cohort and so they do have this opportunity to enter into relationships in which they're more educated and and and the and the guy is saying you know what this is great you I'll follow you to California I'll I'll privilege your job if you want to be in the Foreign Service I'll follow you and yet women seem determined or the women at Harvard Business School to marry some guy who's right at their level or a little bit above you know a little bit more educated they're making so they keep putting themselves in these situations where they are going to have these you know these really difficult personal conversations with their husband or their partner about whose career gets put first and so what are you seeing in in this generation of young women in terms of of their ideas about partnering aside from saying yes to the dress and wanting right right so for you know so we have the whole fetishization of the wedding that remains and here's where um this it'll be fascinating if you all start doing some of the the sort of demographic work on this the aggregate statistics don't tell you all that much because where you're really seeing the greatest education gap between men and women is among poor populations and among populations of color right so it's at the community college level where you're seeing way higher numbers of women and there's another whole set of issues that I'm sorry we're not talking about right now but you know what's the problem of poorly educated men of color in this country that's another and so that actually gets confounded in the statistics but if you look at the world where I hang out which is the elite you know the elite Ivy League world I think there you are very much seeing women and it is still the you know the whether it's cultural or biological or who knows what you know they want to marry guys who are more or less like them and we do we do still have I think this deeply embedded view that I want my husband to be a little bit more successful than me or you know I'm not really comfortable yet being the primary breadwinner and that's something I think we just have to kind of get over but you don't you don't see a lot of conversation about that but it just to go back for a moment you know the work that I know we both did on the fertility fertility industry if you look at the characteristics that parents would be parents look for when they're buying eggs and sperm bizarrely you see these same preferences so sperm cells are really driven by both height which is the one attribute of physicality that matters for men and sat scores right whereas for women it's looks right so even height too but yeah yeah but more height is much more which makes no sense genetically that the brains are going to come from the man and then that the looks the looks yeah even when when people are making these almost subconscious levels about how they purchase a sperm and eggs you can see these um these preferences built in right and people are much less fixated on the looks of this yeah exactly which makes no sense but it's just there right so let me open it up to questions now and I think we have we have someone with a microphone it's all just like you choose who to give the microphone to oh empowered one way I'm actually the breadwinner in my family my husband been doing for 20 years just a comment is if your husband is comfortable with it you're very comfortable with it but what I was wondering and I haven't read the book yet is um how do you talk about raising boys and girls because I actually am one of four sisters I have two brothers too all four of us and you know we're I'm I'm SFS 77 um so I'm older than you are and my sisters too my sisters are older than I am one is younger all four of us have worked all of our lives there are god had knows how many kids I think they're like 12 kids among all of us but we've all worked and one of the reasons I think is that my dad was incredibly supportive of us and not like you're go to school and you know go to college is you can do anything you want to and that's all I heard growing up in fact my joke was that uh you know it's hard to be a boy in my family it was much more supportive in some ways to be a girl and my mother was the same way but that I sort of expected but bottom line is I think it had something to do with the way he was raised and my husband's the same way he's one of two boys and I can't figure it out his mom was a stay at home mom but he's incredibly supportive of what I do and you know and our whole approach and then the last thing is this is a lot of fun for me because I'm in a very male dominated field I do radio frequency stuff all day long and this is just so much fun for me so thank you well it's it's thank you for your for your for the for the story and uh I think and I haven't written about this but it's clearly something in the area that we need to look at what's happening in the household and what role models are either just naturally occurring in the household or emphasized you know I know for myself that my my husband grew up poor he was an immigrant family his mother worked in a sweatshop and so there was no highfalutin talk about you know women should go to work you know they were that his mother worked put food on the table and so when we get got married it was just he never questioned the fact that that I would work now clearly you know we don't want to demand that every kid grows up in a poor immigrant household but how do we transmit that those values and one of the nicest parts of my experience at Barnard thus far has been realizing that my truly my biggest supporters both sort of emotionally and financially are the dads of my current students because they want their girls to succeed and uh and and they really they support the college they support me because they are determined that their girls are going to make it that's really nice economists have shown that when women got property rights in the 19th century it was because fathers wanted their daughters to have some financial empowerment in marriage it wasn't necessarily that husbands wanted wives to have financial empowerment it was fathers fathers and I I've seen male colleagues who of the fathers of daughters become much more feminist feminized feminized much more conscious uh I feel like as as fathers and there was someone and I'm gonna get this wrong but there was a study that just came out like two weeks ago that when men have you know when when the wives give birth to girls they become more empathetic yep right yeah right I I saw that as well yeah which I remembered it better but something along those lines hi thank you um I oh I graduated from Michigan business school about 10 years ago and I went in I was trying to figure it out you know um I got in I was around 26 and so I was pretty average at that point but one of the big pushes at Michigan and I know other top business schools was to push that age down for women because what they were seeing is women were dropping out of the workforce because they went to business school and then they got pregnant and then they and then that was it so to speak right so I'm wondering I always had very mixed feelings about that because of women raising their hands in the classroom and things like that and part of the reason I felt like my myself and a lot of my female cohort did as well as they did was because they had been in the workforce so I'm just wondering what your perspective is on that they were used to being surrounded by men I guess so to speak right and then a totally separate question I have a couple of friends who are now in their late 30s early 40s having babies on their own like they've kind of given up on men right at least for the time being um and are having babies on their own and I'm just wondering if you saw any research like if you thought about that when you're writing your book so totally separate question I just asked you to clarify did you say at the University of Michigan Business School they they want women to be younger now so when I when I graduated 10 years ago yeah 2003 um they had they and other there's a forte foundation that looks at women in business schools across the across the country and they're talking about and they have I believe done it started to um have women apply encourage women to apply earlier at a younger age because what they were seeing is when they were graduating from business school they were going right into family life so to speak and not returning to the workforce at a higher rate so one of the solutions that they were considering was moving the entrance age down that's interesting yeah yeah and I think not just Michigan no it's not just Michigan and it's it's confounded a little bit by I don't know if this was true at Michigan but I know it's true elsewhere the um the internet economy which was also occurring at that time that um once once students or kids that started working at internet companies they wouldn't come back to business school so there was a concern to grab I think both populations younger but I think you know this issue of women um you know going to business school getting married and then never coming back to the workforce you know is a real one and I you know I think it's part of the the whole broader conversation of how can we validate these women's choice to go to business school and then you know make sure that they have some kind of support or other options or you know that can deal with all of these these broader uh these broader uh issues that we've been talking about but it's particularly it's particularly pronounced in business schools because if you marry a guy from business school and you get the the dual incomes in these very high-pressured careers um it's a problem and I think this is also you know it's a very personal issue but the question of when to have babies and how to have babies um is is part of the conversation and I would never tell people when is the right time to to start a family but when when young women come to me and ask I do say you know don't put it off just because you think you should put it off to get your career under control I think a lot of the reason that women are having you know are becoming single mothers by choice is they you know they built their careers they may have said no to other relationships they may have focused on their professional lives and it's you know it's the old cartoon oops I forgot to have a kid um and it's hard and I give these women great credit I know lots of people who are single moms by choice whether through um fertility treatments or adoption but it's hard you know it is hard and I and I think they feel the double whammy of being mothers without a partner particularly if they've built their careers they've moved away from their families they don't have their own mothers nearby and I've actually seen a lot of single moms by choice actually then moving back to their hometowns because you know you do need more than one person to raise a child uh thank you our fascinating discussion uh it's relevant to my question to say that I was in the foreign service and I was uh posted to Norway at the time that Gruhar and Bruntland was the prime minister and when talking about a leadership style you got a absolute profile of what women leadership style meant when you were in Norway 50 percent of the parliament uh was uh was uh female but I wanted to ask a broader sort of cultural question I'm not sure Gruhar and Bruntland worked a 60 hour week yeah I mean you have a culture in America of workaholism which simply does not exist in Europe and it's not only the six weeks august vacation but it's also uh how um how long you work at during the week so for women they could have quite high level jobs in Norway and still get home and go out on the um cross country ski tracks with their kids after school nice yeah and maternity leave for men too yeah for a year the work family conversations always come down to Scandinavia that's right yeah I think like one of the challenges that the new america foundation is to find an american solution to this problem because we're never going to be Scandinavian we're never I mean we can take cues uh from the Scandinavian countries um but you know we're gonna have to find an american solution there's a paper the authors just sent it to me so I don't think it's out published yet it's an economics paper by three Norwegian economists and it's a really good paper because their their closing argument is the reason why Norway is succeeding along these lines is exactly what you said they don't work as many hours um as americans do and they said that's the single most important factor in terms of trying to achieve some kind of work-life balance having said that though what they also found was that the um the pay gap between men and women in Norway has shrunk to almost nothing but there is still a premium that men get when they become fathers statistically speaking and a loss that women experience when they become mothers so having children for women even in Norway means that they're going to make less money whereas for men they make more money so even in Norway they haven't they're not quite there but but they focus on the number of hours worked I I wish I had wish I had read that paper and heard you before I wrote my book because I think that's another piece that it's absolutely critical I just wanted to call your attention to something that really lays out the structural uh the plateau is in governance in in women in government and all you have to do is um I think google representation 2020 it's a three-minute video have you seen it and it's really the conclusion it just lays out I think that you know 20% in the senate 10% in governors that if we continue if women continue at this rate uh parody won't come for 500 years it's pretty stunning yeah and that I think is particularly important I was I was very lucky yesterday I got to see senator Claire McCaskill briefly on Morning Joe and then um senator Gillibrand in the afternoon in her office and I'm like I've met 10% of all the women in the senate in one day um but what what senator Gillibrand who I think is terrific I think they're both terrific was saying is that you know the women of the senate really work together they work across party lines they're less ideological um I want to try and do a study on this so just people have done this just sort of pull it together because I think getting more women in these positions of government is not just important because we want more women I think we would get a different kind of governance which we kind of desperately need and more bipartisan yeah your suggestion yeah whether or not that would stay if we had 50% it it may be because it's a small believing group but it is interesting it's absolutely worth trying just to see what it would look like we yes she thank you I'm a women's rights uh activist which after hearing you talk strikes me now as a rather retro career um the the feminism problem is really it's multi-headed but it's got two sides the macro and the micro and your book and Cheryl Sandberg's book and this conversation pretty much seems to be about micro what can we women do how can we change our attitudes if we identify less as housekeepers homemakers and child wearers and let that go these individual choices we can be more successful have more social status have more political power in the Harvard business school incident they noticed that the women there was a grade gap a gender grade gap and so that prompted their changes structurally to how they graded to how they trained the students how to raise their hands to how they wanted the professors to assess the students progress and aptitude and not aptitudes performance performance so they did infrastructural changes so yes we can talk about the changes that women can make in their own lives the value we place on certain things how much we identify but it seems to me kind of disingenuous to leave out of the discussion this cultural paradigm shift we have to make which has to happen in our institutions and systemically so unless we also have the other side of the conversation which to my mind is paid sick days paid family medical leave a national early education child care program so it's affordable and available and that's not a lower class or lower income problem it is a middle class and an upper middle class problem the child care cost until we talk about the the macro side of it women can try harder and raise their hands more boldly and be incredibly polished in their performance but until we make those changes we're still only ever going to be partially successful right and I think you know the good news about the conversation right now and I hope it stays is that we are getting a more multifaceted conversation so I think Ann Marie's book is is probably the most structural of them shells is probably the most individual and mine is kind of in the middle which is always place which is bad for book sales but I think so I mean it's where I am for you know for what that's worth you know I think it's both I you know and I couldn't agree more we have massive structural problems in this country I wish we could do more along the lines of Norway I think it's the realest in me that says I have less faith than I wish I had in that congress is going to pass any of these things so how do we begin to at least work on the other side and to Liza's point how do we start to get more women into the committees on congress so that we can try and get a different model of rule formation I also think that this is the pessimism you know maybe we give up at some of these things on the national level and we fight for state level or city level or county level changes but I think it's I think it's both I think if you just wait for the government or the structural solutions we've been I mean this is where feminism started we've been waiting for those for 50 years and sadly we haven't made a lot of progress for which I don't blame feminism it's just it just hasn't happened so how I think we have to work at both the micro and the macro level simultaneously because that that that you need that combination to make change come about and just just to use the the HBS example for a moment I think the reason they started putting these structural solutions in place was because it was two women who had survived the place who said you know there's actually a problem with women raising their hands because that's not something that I think the guys at the top would have thought about as a problem they just thought oh the women aren't as good and so I think you actually need these micro voices from the grassroots if you will to say this is actually a problem that we can address structurally and that's what I'm hoping corporations and organizations will do more of they've gotten to the point of saying we want women we want diversity it's now more I think at the micro level saying okay what actually happened to that woman who you let go on Wednesday let's you know aggregate in the aggregate let's look at why she was let go let's look at why she felt like she couldn't stay and then think about whether there's a structural solution to what looks like an individual problem and one last thing I will say somebody once made the comment at one of my talks that we don't use the word suffragette anymore so just because we may change the words but I think the cause remains yeah yeah I have a question hi just a comment the question first to comment in talking about your book you said sharing the dirt I would call it sharing humanity thank you yeah better yeah and then the question um at least the way politics and finance have traditionally operated in society they're kind of killer sports and if if you um argue that different leadership styles maybe a little bit a little bit different personality is it possible women aren't attracted as much to killer sports yeah yeah no I think that's right and I think you know this was the the kind of stuff that you know Larry Summers can't say but I think should at least be put out there you know if if finance or certain parts of finance are eat what you kill and very competitive and very greedy and about maximizing everything if fewer women are attracted to that that's okay um and I and I think what we're seeing sort of in in finance which is an area I know something about women are going um managing more university endowments which is high level finance but for a social purpose they're managing sort of the social responsibility funds so there's they're keeping very much of foot in finance but but but perhaps operating in a different way not making quite as much money and that's okay sure we have one more one more question yeah okay sorry thank you hi my name is Christine I work for Deloitte Denmark and I've just moved to DC so I found it very interesting that you mentioned an Norwegian example uh Denmark is quite similar to Norway and um and I thought it was important to problem here because in Deloitte Denmark we don't share away for 60 hour weeks work weeks either uh and it's we have the same career problems women going to the manager level and then leaving the company for working in a different company on public um on the public sector um but what has been quite interesting and what happened lately is that the government passed a law uh saying that women have to be represented on the boards in in companies and that they're in all private companies have to be policies for um empowering women to get through uh to have a career and uh of course that has been debated a lot um the law doesn't formulate a specific number for how many women there should be on board but it says that it has to be at least a balance between the underrepresented sex and the majority so it has to be at least I think it when you are at 43 percent or something you stop being underrepresented technically um so that is being implemented right now and I was just wondering whether you have been looking at those examples and if you have been discussing discussing here in the U.S. how like legislation or and corporate governance could improve things yes and I think that the U.S. is very much looking at the European examples a number of countries have put these these systems in place my own view on it for what it's worth is that I think those are those are solutions that would have a very tough time getting traction in the U.S. we're less comfortable with quotas we're certainly less comfortable with any kind of government mandate about what private firms should do for better or worse um I don't I don't see those happening um although I think what you know we should learn from the European example and see how they play out what's also happening in this country which is compounding it particularly the finance sector is for all good reasons there's a big spotlight right now on the boards of these financial services company and it's actually making it harder for people who don't have years and years and years of very specific financial expertise to be put on these boards because they get attacked by the shareholders and because there are so few women who have years and years of financial industry expertise the here's where the pipeline actually is pretty slim so it's just it's I think the chances of getting something like that implemented in this country right now are very very slim but it's going to be really interesting to see what happens in in Scandinavia and the UK is also moving towards that so thank you so much Deborah for fitting us into your schedule thank you everybody for coming a great conversation great questions thank you so much for making time out of your mornings to come join this conversation and