Anne-Marie Slaughter: Author, campaigner, CEO

Here’s some advice for anyone who is introducing Anne-Marie Slaughter: don’t describe her as the person who declared women can’t have it all.

Slaughter, who in 2009 was the first female policy planning director at the US State Department, understands why she is constantly pegged that way. In 2012, she penned an explosive essay for “The Atlantic” titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, which became one of the most read articles in the magazine’s history. It was based on her experience of leaving her high-powered job after two years to be with her husband and two sons.

“It’s been a complicated time,” Slaughter says. She has been president and CEO of the New America think-tank since 2015. When we meet, she is surrounded by boxes and plastic-wrapped pictures in her new office just a short walk from the White House. “I am in my bones a foreign policy person so being primarily defined, often wrongly, as ‘This is Anne-Marie Slaughter; she says women can’t have it all’, I just want to shoot myself.”

She laughs heartily. Slaughter, 57, is blunt about her views and quick to make fun of herself. But she is also quite serious: she is done talking about balancing work and family as a woman’s issue, instead seeing it as a dilemma that should be gender-neutral. It is this evolution in her thinking that resulted in her latest book, “Unfinished Business”, which solidified Slaughter’s position as a spokesperson for modern-day feminism. The book broadens the debate to focus on how childcare is viewed in society, how to reinvent the workplace and the role of men.

“The single most frustrating thing with the book is people think it’s an extension of the article,” she says. “But my thinking has just moved on a long way. I’m talking about valuing care and how are we going to expand men’s roles. This isn’t just a debate about lean in or lean back. Every time someone says women [in this family context] I say, ‘You mean parents’. If we could even just make that change, that would be huge.”

Slaughter never intended to write a book such as “Unfinished Business”. She spent decades building up her foreign policy credentials in academia and was the dean of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs when she was tapped for the State Department position. Seeing it as a dream job, she commuted from her New Jersey home to Washington every week, leaving her husband, Princeton professor Andrew Moravcsik, to be the lead parent of their two sons.

She was used to a demanding role but being at the State Department was another universe. As Slaughter puts it, you couldn’t tell a global crisis to put itself on hold until Monday. At the same time, her oldest son was having trouble at school. “People ask me why I couldn’t get more help from Hillary Clinton,” she says. “But it wasn’t her. She was great. I had a job that revolved around what was happening in the world and those events weren’t going to stop so I could go home and see my family.”

In 2011, after two years in government, she decided to leave. She taught full-time at Princeton and gave speeches but she wasn’t travelling all the time, and was “really home”. Her son is now a freshman at a good college. Slaughter doesn’t say she single-handedly fixed the situation but having both parents there to focus on him helped get him on the right track.

“I feel very good about the decision,” Slaughter says. “I was home at times that were very important for him. No one would ever say I was the world’s most attentive mother. But I feel like I can look back and know I was there as much as I could be when my children were still at home.”

Then, in the summer of 2012, the “Atlantic” essay was published. The reaction was overwhelming and the demands for her time increased. Her husband was once again lead parent. “The whole family felt suddenly that we had been caught up in something that was bigger than any of us,” she says. Her oldest son told her she was “kind of a B-list celebrity”. “My sons were proud. I think we all felt having said all of that and saying we needed to have this conversation, I could not then shrink from it.”

Still, when it came time to write her book, Slaughter didn’t immediately know what she thought about all the issues she ended up addressing. It took three years of soul searching and questioning her biases. She notes that when she said in her essay that women feel the tug of being away from their children more than men, her husband pointed out he was the one who called their kids more when they are away.

“I had to really re-socialise myself, deprogramme myself and ask myself all sorts of very, very hard questions,” Slaughter says. “It forced me to drop the last vestiges of my own prejudice. We don’t want to face that in ourselves when we have it.”

Published to widespread acclaim last year, Slaughter’s book takes its place in an ongoing discussion about women and the workforce, alongside volumes such as “Lean In” by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, a guide for what women can do to reach their career goals. This conversation has put the issue of parental leave in the spotlight. Sandberg’s boss, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, announced that he would take two months of paternity leave to help care for his new daughter Max.

“That’s fantastic,” she says. “What he’s doing is just extremely important for the signalling. Every time I see a man say, ‘This is of course my issue as much as it is my wife’s issue,’ that’s the progress we need to make.”

These questions have become part of a national and local debate about the workforce. US presidential candidates, including Slaughter’s old boss Hillary Clinton, now talk about ideas such as tax credits for caregivers and tax cuts to address rising childcare costs.

“If you talk about this as a woman’s issue, then I agree [a solution] is a long way off,” Slaughter says. “But if you say daycare [for two children] costs more than rent in all 50 [American] states and we are driving women out of the workforce — and that has put us behind Japan and our GDP is going to drop — that becomes an economic issue and it becomes a middle-class issue.”

Slaughter says each partner in a couple should be allowed to work 75 per cent of the time for the first five years of their child’s life. They would be making a similar amount because they wouldn’t have to pay as much for childcare, while employers could maintain productivity through job shares. “We obsess over innovation and we’re all for the latest gadget but the idea of innovating around how you work is much more frightening,” she says.

Critics note that Slaughter doesn’t offer recommendations that most employers would actually want to implement, given the pressures on their bottom line. Her suggestion of government subsidies for childcare also ignores the political challenges in reaching such a goal. Slaughter acknowledges that companies face many short-term pressures but in the long run, she argues, employees will be happier and, therefore, more productive if these issues are addressed.

Slaughter extends her discussions to her own home. She has talked to her sons about whether they would mind if their spouse out-earned them or if they ever imagine being a lead parent. She has also encouraged them to see their father as a pioneer, as someone who is willing to change traditional gender roles. If she had a daughter, Slaughter says, she would advise her to understand her degree of ambition and that she was probably not going to be with a partner who is just like her.

“In my 20s, if you had told me I was going to marry a man who would be the lead parent, I probably would’ve wrinkled my nose and said, ‘I need a man who is even stronger and more successful than I am.’ Well, that was my first husband,” she says. “My husband now is a tenured professor at an Ivy League university so no one is going to suggest he’s a slouch. But I now understand there has got to be some give and take.”

Now that she has one son in college and another in high school, Slaughter is thinking about the next stage of her career. She missed out on some opportunities in foreign policy when she left government but she notes that, at 57 years old, she has plenty of time to return, especially if Clinton wins the election.

Still, what she calls the dysfunctional US political system puts her off jumping into frontline politics. “But if I lived in Britain and it were a six-week campaign, I would run for office tomorrow,” she says with a grin.

For the moment, she is working on a book about foreign policy and working to elevate New America to the national stage. She still commutes between Washington and Princeton, but her life has a more manageable rhythm now. “I’m thrilled to be back writing about foreign policy and this is honestly easier because I know what I think about it. I’m on much firmer ground,” Slaughter says with a chuckle. “But I won’t stop talking. Going forward, I’ll always be both. The other half of me was always the family half and I’m not going to stop speaking out.”

–Financial Times

Gina Chon is Financial Times’s enforcement correspondent, based in Washington DC.