Summer 2012. A tsunami shakes the feminist planet. One of them, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first woman to hold the prominent position of director of strategic planning at the White House, adviser to Hillary Clinton, resigns two years after reaching the top. Reason? To devote herself to her sons, ages 12 and 14. “I worked my whole life for this job, but when my oldest son started skipping class or disrupting class, I realized I couldn’t have it all. He blamed me for my absences; yet I came home every weekend and their father was there during the week.” A renunciation justified in an editorial-fleuve, titled on the “front page” of the magazine “The Atlantic”: “Why women still can’t have everything”
“But of course we can have everything,” says Brigitte Grésy, Secretary General of the Conseil supérieur de l’égalité professionnelle entre les femmes et les hommes, who is responsible for the quotas introduced in the boards of directors of companies, following her scathing report (2). “Even if it is complicated and difficult at times. The equation is not “women = children = we do what we can, as we can, and if we don’t have a career, too bad”… The equation is: “women = children = reconciling the time needed for a career and the time needed for children”. And for that, parenthood must become something other than what it is, this kind of burden put on the backs of women only.
Reconciling the status of a mother with the status of a working woman
In other words, it is urgent to transform mentalities. By following in the footsteps of the pioneers who already combine career and motherhood. How can we do this? No recipe, but instinct. Above all, the instinct of having built an intimate sphere that allows for a winning match. As if they were throwing off a straitjacket, they began by dusting off the obsolete psychological myths that weigh on motherhood. Elisabeth, a pediatric oncologist and mother of two boys, aged 5 and 17, sums it up: “Staying loyal to myself and not denying my career choices, neither for them nor because of them, means loving my children. They exist outside of me, and I exist outside of them. Our bond is inscribed in the freedom to be as individuals. They are my breath, my job too. My equilibrium lies in this entanglement, which makes me a mother who is not too shaky, even if, working at the hospital from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., I accumulate failures… I assume my DIY, I don’t prevent all the pitfalls, but my sons know that I am there for them and that I keep my promises.”
They are free women, in fact, because “they have renounced the ideal of perfection and have accepted not to receive the gratifications traditionally assigned to women,” says psychologist and psychoanalyst Sylviane Giampino. Instead of being depressed or feeling devalued by the remarks or the low blows of the social discourse addressed to the insufficiently available or present mother, they have the capacity to treat them with humor and distance. They do not seek to resolve the internal tensions they face because they may feel they are not living up to their family’s expectations. They are able to live with a sense of dissatisfaction and are willing to take the risk of being blamed and blaming themselves.”
A risk that Anne-Claudie, mother of three children, aged 18 months, 3 1/2 years and 5 1/2 years, and head of a contemporary art gallery among the most quoted on the world market, puts into perspective: “A mother who is always present is not a better mother. What counts is to be there at the important moments for them, at the symbolic moments of their life, like the visit to the pediatrician. But not being home every night for bath time is not a big deal. I have a full-time nanny, fifty hours a week, plus Saturdays, because I also work. When I come back from a trip, my children are happy to see me happy, they ask me questions, I took them to the gallery to explain my job, and when I am successful, I explain why I am happy. My older daughters are happy about my success. That’s what takes the guilt out of it.
The great strength is to have understood that a marathon year-round schedule does not mean being an absent mother. One can be geographically distant and still remain emotionally and psychically close. Because the secure emotional bond persists despite the distance. “I leave drawings on Post-it notes for my 5 year old to remind him of little things, like brushing his teeth properly. This way, he understands that I am always watching over him,” says Elisabeth.
The other strength is that they “consider very deeply that they are replaceable,” says Sylviane Giampino. These women know perfectly well how to distinguish between situations where they are irreplaceable in the eyes of their child – for which, if necessary, they will cancel a board meeting – and those where, in fact, they are not. Another myth that has been seriously debunked is that of availability, the famous “more than the quantity of time, it’s the quality that counts”. This is true. On the condition that we do not let ourselves be phagocyted by the concept of “quality”, which drains the idea of absolute pleasure for the child and, in fact, of total availability of the mother
Tapie in the shadows, guilty compensation. Emeline, a senior civil servant and mother of eight-year-old Theo, negotiates differently: “When we play, if I have to blackball, I do it. Being available means not cheating or pretending. My life, and therefore his, is made up of interruptions, that does not take anything away from us. On the contrary, he sees that he has a full place in all my lives. “
Reconciling couple and family life around the career
The other strong link is within the couple. “We have an equal relationship, we support and encourage each other. My man values my projects, I benefit from his experience. It’s the only space outside of competition, where I can drop the mask. Feeling loved is very rewarding,” says Carole, CEO of an architectural firm and mother of two young daughters. “The golden rule of success for a woman is to choose the right partner,” warned one of Claire Léost’s professors at HEC, who is now an editor in a magazine group. “It’s essential to find someone who believes in you as much, if not more, than you do yourself, and who always considers that your career path is as important as his.
Translation: spare yourself a partner who might take priority over your career imperatives, to the detriment of yours. It’s also best to be in sync on the value placed on money: “A spouse’s salary is the biggest obstacle to women’s careers,” says economist Marianne Bertrand of the Chicago Booth School of Business (3), “according to the cliché that the one with financial power has a kind of decision-making right. Coincidentally or not, all the women we met for this survey earn more or as much as their spouses.
Their careers are carried by the ideological cohesion of their couple. The couple climbs the ladder in solidarity, “in rope”, like two mountaineers, the momentum of one lifting the other to the summit. “One of them takes on more at home, while the other takes on a new professional challenge, and vice versa. The spouses cross their respective professional agendas to organize the family, the choices and opportunities are lived in an equitable way”, summarizes the sociologist and consultant Sandrine Meyfret.
Reconciling fatherhood with a career as a working mother
This mutual consideration also makes it possible to establish a real sharing of parenthood. By (re)taking his place with the children and fully assuming his role, the father becomes the balance of the mother’s career. In my husband’s eyes, my career doesn’t have to suffer more than his,” explains Anne-Claudie. He takes over and makes himself available when I am less available, he is also there if I have a commitment in the evening or if I go on a trip.”
The problem is that there is still an abyss between the official discourse on the need for fathers to invest and the reality of their state of mind. Relegitimizing their status as parents requires the deconstruction of old-fashioned schemas, such as the specialization of functions (for the mother, closeness to the child, fusion, gentleness, mothering, and for the father, “separator” from the mother, authority…). We know today that each adult plays all these roles with the child. And studies show that the earlier a man becomes involved in fatherhood, the more he remains a father throughout his life. It remains for mothers to accept to really delegate, to share this space of omnipotence in which our “mother-centered” society keeps them, and to dare to answer, to the school that calls them immediately: “Contact their father, I am on a conference call with Tokyo.”
The private revolution is only a first victory. It remains to shake up mentalities in the professional world. Children are a kind of shameful disease for companies,” deplores Brigitte Grésy. We pay lip service to them at birth, and then it’s ‘hide these children from me’. Parenthood remains discouraged for mothers and taboo for fathers. Resistance to be broken and denounced, like the Italian MEP Licia Ronzulli, who regularly sits in the Strasbourg hemicycle with her daughter Vittoria, since she was 6 weeks old, “so that women no longer have to choose between career and private life. An obviousness that, even to the supposedly progressive Parliament of Europe, was opposed: “We are not a nursery! That’s how big the task is…” A large part of the construction of the West rests on the separation between public and private life, which overlaps that between male and female, reason and heart, decodes the sociologist François de Singly. The action of this woman is revealing of a great transformation.”
The world of work must stop opposing private and professional spheres. New technologies allow for an efficient porosity between the two and a better fluidity of daily life. There is also an urgent need to establish a parenting policy that puts both sexes on an equal footing, with balanced parental leave that facilitates male investment. Less than 1% of fathers with a child under the age of 3 took parental leave in 2011; for all ages combined, 3.5% (4)… Managerial practices also deserve an anti-ageing treatment that revisits the concepts of performance, which are based on resolutely male criteria. “A good employee, woman or man, is still one who behaves in a masculine way: constant availability, zero interaction with domestic life, problems linked to private life that remain in the private sphere,” analyzes the sociologist Alain Pichon. The solutions? Reconsider the organization of working time. Introduce flexibility, a possible modulation of schedules, remote work.
Put an end to the cult of absolute “presenteeism” and to meetings with massive overflow in the evening. Adjust the “good” career gauge that many human resources managers have in mind, namely a linear CV, without breaks or stalls, whose peak is around 35 years old, the age at which women who are in their careers consider a first pregnancy or have young children. Also to be dethroned: the major dissonance that remains between our daily landscape and public discourse on gender equality. Public authorities, like companies, must support parenthood by ensuring that quotas and agreements already signed are applied and by developing public childcare policies.
