In this 21st Century, We, Men & Women, are Entitled to Demand "Having it All"

Just back from a trip to India, my intention was to comment on some of what I saw there… but that
will have to wait; I want to weigh in on the Slaughter article and the reactions covered by the Atlantic Monthly & the New York Times.

I agree with much, though not everything, of what Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All”. In the past, I have actually made many similar points in this blog. For example,

- The workplace is out of synch with the realities of non-professional life, has given into quantity of hours/face time over the high value of quality of work; that for professionals to optimize performance, downtime, and time for other aspects of life (hobby, family, leisure) are key contributors to professional performance (for men and women, with or without children). I have also proponed pursing an “integrated I” (for men & women) to counter what Slaughter refers to as a “fetish of a one-dimensional life”.
- I also agree that the expected career curve needs to be revised considering the number of
decades we’re each going to invest in our careers: the idea that a few months of maternity
leave slows a woman’s potential and/or represents a lack of investment in one’s career
(apparently it represents an 11% gap that grows over time) is a flimsy excuse, not
a reflection of reality.  It’s utter nonsense (or simply discrimination) to decide such a short
leave out of 40 years plus of work should put such a hard lid on a woman’s career
development! Especially considering that the big fad is “mompreneurs”: women who start
their own businesses in order to have the flexibility of seeing their kids and having a career.
If someone can balance the bottom line of an entire business on her own while leaving pockets of time to spend with her kids, an employee is also likely to have the capacity to handle both while remaining performing… But such is not current corporate wisdom and mothers are generally suspect unless they exhibit total devotion. This is not just a glass ceiling, this is a glass cage!
- I even go further by arguing that, beyond kids needing their parents, adults spending time with kids (their own or someone else’s) is in itself an asset in terms of the insights it brings, the empathy
& relativism it fosters, and the joy it produces (children’s laughter is infectious), not the
mention our enrichment from the questions they ask and the solutions they provoke.

To tell the truth, what really surprised me was not so much Slaughter’s propos; it’s the reactions they drew. Half the writers didn’t even get the gist of her piece, which, for me, is as follows: with societal mores so much aligned with corporate capitalistic ideals, Americans cannot hope to “have it all”… but with a little more pragmatism, these mores can evolve and create a more propitious environment for a better work-life balance for everyone.  It’s a very positive proposition, even if it will take time.  But many reactions concentrated on details… and ended up either defending the status quo (“of course you can’t do both! It’s a spoiled child’s dream of ubiquity to think you can; adults make choices and stick to them”) or arguing it’s a non issue because many already “have it all” (even though each admit to an awful lot of regrets along the way).  Over all, many reactions showcased great inertia in terms of reframing our society and the potential we want to achieve.

I am not aligned with this criticism. There is a real, fundamental problem and it’s counterproductive
to dismiss the debate for details.  What is missing from Slaughter’s analysis are testimonials from other men and women than those among the elite.  What’s missing is the voice of second and third tier classes.  People like me who have great degrees from great schools, who aren’t trying to be number one but who want to have a good job and build a career… but who face everyday discrimination and suspicion of not being committed enough because I leave work at a reasonable hour to get home for my “second shift”.  People like me who have good heads on their shoulders, have acquired experience, have real value to contribute… but who discover an exceptionally low glass ceiling because we have kids and don’t want to entirely outsource parenting.  My argument is that I don’t see why I can’t expect to have an interesting job (not spectacular!) + a decent wage + a decent life balance.  That’s what “having it all” means to me.  And any of those journalists with their cushy salaries and their flexible, mobile professions can come to me when they pretend “having it all” is a fictitious and elitist predicament.  Why should we settle for less?!  Who dare feel comfortable with the idea that I and other people like me should be sidelined only because we have multiple priorities?!  I am fighting daily in this trench.  Slaughter is touching a major need eve if she isn’t the most legitimate spokesperson.  We need a good dose of realism/ pragmatism and catapult ourselves into the 21^st century with a demand for the society we want.  A society that’s a little more lucid about what actually constitutes worth and value.  A society that believes anew in progress.

Let me know what you think. 
Talk to you next week for another bite from the apple!
- Eve

21st Society Feminists Should Reconceive Parenting as a Societal and Professional Asset

Bringing up bébé by Pamela Druckerman is all the rage.  It’s about how “one American mother discovers the wisdom of French parenting”, the secret behind how “the French manage to raise astonishingly well-behaved children,” all while having a life, too.  

I can see the attraction – it always seems exciting when we’re on the verge of learning a foolproof success recipe for something as bewildering and experimental as raising children.

Frankly, Druckerman’s gross generalizations don’t really fit with my personal experience, American with 2 young children being raised in France.  Nor do they match my personal analysis:   as different cultures clearly have their assets on either side of the Atlantic… the strengths of being brought up in one or the other are tightly linked to the cultural realities of each country (historical, geographical, social, religious, etc) with all the positive… and negative…. aspects  and consequences of those realities when it comes to parenting.

But that’s not the debate I want to have here.

What comes to my mind as I read about Druckerman’s “Bébé” has more to do with the premise of superiority.  It’s a major ailment within our competitive performance society.  Instead of more pragmatically and constructively seeing how an individual with his and her personal priorities decides to compose with all this input, our obsession is for the Perfection of it, for our own Perfection in doing it Perfectly. .. and we link it to making the Perfect woman.

But parenting is far more relative.  And so is being a woman. 

Unfortunately, many analyses these days aren’t helping the matter and tend to divide us up and peg us down into superlatives:

·         the stay-at-home moms who have given up their bright career to raise their children, finding themselves living vicariously through the children and managing powerplay between moms via creative playgroups and perfected birthday parties, so well described by Judith Warner in her work, “Perfect Madness”

·         the in-between women who work shorter hours / part time to have a hand in raising their children and who are dismissed for their inability to do either well enough, as profiled by Elizabeth Badinter in her work, “Conflict: mother, woman”

·         the career women who escaped the patriarchal claws of “choice feminism” and who never have children or who have 1 child raised by someone else in order to access power and status, as prescribed by Linda Hirshman in her work, “Get to Work”.

These caricatured divisions anger me.  It’s not that I don’t smell some smoke; the intelligent women who did this research each have valid points in their diagnostics.  And it’s clear:  we still haven’t figured out how to comfortably “Have it All”.   But the sidelining is damaging in a number of ways:

• It risks confirming executives can’t be good pro’s if they have children, giving fodder to the discrimination against women on the job (note that in France, known for all the State-led initiatives to help women work more easily and have good care for their children, Bamboo Conseil, consulting firm in management and personal development, has calculated that a child’s arrival generates an 11% gap in women’s careers, a lag that is difficult to make up).
• It comforts the idea that family has no place in our “public” sphere, including the professional sphere.
• It reiterates that family, “care”, home economics merit no value and should be considered only as a burden.

For me, we need to tackle these issues differently.

1.  We should tap into the underestimated value of children / family in professionals’ lives.

Having children as a professional is generally represented for its negative stereotypes:  exhaustion, too much juggling, sick-leave, a less dedicated professional, etc.

That’s not the reality of the story at all.  And it’s time we (including feminists like the authors cited above) start having the real story be heard.

Raising children renews our learning curves, stimulates us to questioning our presumptions, pushes us to find new and/or alternative solutions… all important skills that are also leveraged on the job.  Having and caring for children kindles empathy and the art of putting oneself in another’s shoes to be able, again, to find more pertinent solutions and improve work efficiency (especially in marketing, communications, sales, and management).  Building a family and balancing career/family ensures flexible/agile organizational skills which, again, can improve professional performance. 
And, even more importantly, children represent a pull of gravity toward other things.  It helps tired professionals resource themselves either thanks to imposed “breaks” from work, offer fresh insight into topics (se changer les idées) and/or refresh the professional’s outlook (avoir plusieurs terrains de jeu and/or bring a little relativity if ever things aren’t going so well at work).  This added-value of child raising can help improve quality of work and can buffer from burn-out.   For so long, we have pinpointed the problem and the unfairness of the “second shift”… let’s get some benefits out of this additional “work” experience!

I’m not trying to say every single woman / family should have children.  That is choice.  I’m saying that those of us who decide to have children bring new added-value that is usually used against us.

2.  We should tap into the underestimated value of child-rearing in society.

Beyond the arguments above, I would also like to impress upon us the importance of child-rearing (I make a difference between child-rearing and simply bearing children whose education is entirely outsourced)… including among our top decision-makers in both the public and private sectors… has on society as a whole. 

Short-term vs. long-term relativity, comprehension of others, desire to build / be constructive, renewed attention to discovery, recycled and renewable love often inherent in child bearing and raising… without mentioning the mirth… are all qualitative aspects of raising children which are often ignored but which can actually help gain time and efficiency in our professional work and build a society in which we build with cooperation instead of destroying with competition, we innovate with love instead of stagnating with rivalry.

3.  We should bolster the value of transmission to collective progress

When we transmit our knowledge in culture, two things happen:  the person being initiated learns… but also questions in new ways/ differently from the presumptions formerly internalized by the initiated / initiator.  In turn, the initiated learns from these questions / new perspective and can even join with the newly initiated to weed out what to maintain and what to improve, and move beyond the clashes of culture we’re witnessing a little all over the world right now between past and present (just consider the Republic primaries in the US and some candidates’ pitch to return to 1950s values, turning their backs on progress, future potential, and human flourishing) and the pseudo conflict within companies worried about the clash of generations.

4.  We should renew the demand that family NOT weigh only on mothers’/women’s shoulders and work away from the nuclear family (key to performance society) towards the concept of “it takes a village”.

Just as women should be able to take advantage of the added-value in child-raising, so should men (and they increasingly are).  We should all be responsible in raising future generations and benefiting from what our interaction can gain for us individually, societally, and even competitively (when it comes to the professional sphere, as noted in point 1). 

In France, for example, free public schools with fine, trained teachers welcome children starting at the age of 3.  “School” is of course a big word for the children have nap time and play time in addition to arts, crafts, singing, story time, etc.  I used to think of this as a convenient, free “day care” for children whose parents worked… but I now espouse the idea as of utmost societal value.  It seems to me absolutely critical that children receive love and education from their parents… but also that they diversify their sources of interaction and learning.  They’re also given the space to resolve some of their own quarrels (vs. parachute parents) and build their resilience, crucial to surviving in today’s world. 

Further, we must facilitate men’s implication in this education.  In the book Jocast’s Children, Christiane Olivier’s analysis postulates that girls can better build confidence and be less beholden to “hyper-sexualisation” if they’ve had a chance to interact more with their father, including at puberty.  Today, many families don’t have a “father”.  But this building oneself vs. the “other” (l’alterité) can be supported by fostering more male teachers – including in elementary and pre schools – so that children have more male and female role models outside the home. 

The point here is that family should be carried by society rather than being uniquely nuclear-based.  This would free up women to work without fearing they are “bad mothers” or their children “abandoned”.  Further, it would free children from our own personal neuroses and/or the crushing pressure we may be putting on their shoulders for vicarious fulfillment and/or anxieties. 

These are some of my thoughts that are, of course, to be improved.  But I am convinced that a key to enabling women’s… and men’s… and future generations’ fulfillment is to stop making family quite so personal and allow it to be a rich societal asset.

Let me know what you think!  Then, talk to you next week, for another bite from the apple.

CEO Moms, Trophy Husbands... why don't we try for balance instead?

I just read an article in Business Week 9/01/2012 titled, « Behind Every Woman, the rise of the CEO mom has created a new kind of trophy husband », written by Carol Hymowitz.  

In the article, Hymowitz portrays a number of families in which the male partner has put his career on hold to enable his wife or, in one example, male partner, full availability to build her/his career.  Hymowitz notes some of the satisfactions (success, greater hand in parenting by the father) and frustrations (lack of balance, missing out on the kids for the women, missing out on career for the men, alienation of being an at-home husband, difficulties for getting back into the workforce), as well as some of conclusions being made (woman or man, you need a “wife” to be a CEO and parent, and the corollary need to choose a spouse who won’t mind staying home – “marry down or marry older men who are ready to retire”, cites Hymowitz of one author). 

Hymowitz counter-balances these familial examples with quotes from “Get to work” author Hirshman who reminds the need for both professional and personal happiness and Kathleen Christensen’s warning that a simple role reversal risks leading to a “masculine mystique” by 2020.

It’s a fine article and I’d like to build on it.

Before I get started, I want to celebrate the fact that pioneering women are making strides, showing it increasingly possible to be a woman, make it to the top, be taken seriously, and stay there… all while also having children.  They are still few but growing in number (Hymowitz notes 18 women CEOs among the Fortune 500 vs. 0 in 1970), and, as the world’s opinion of women’s leadership capacity evolves and improves, every additional “member” may potentially create in-roads for other female contenders who have yet to make it.

That said, of the world’s 500 biggest companies’ CEOs, only 13 are women… and while there are increasing numbers of women executives (in 2010, 45% of executives and managers in the US were women, and 5% of top management, according to a Pew Research Center study, May 2010), the salary gap remains considerable (17.9% in France and 24.1% in the US). 

So we are making strides, but we still have a long way to go… giving us just enough leeway to proactively decide the system we actually want to put in place for our society and that of future generations. 

For starters, a simple reversal of roles doesn’t make much sense for the mid to long-term.  It doesn’t make sense for men.  It doesn’t make sense for women… or for children… or for society at large. 

• We know the frustrations women have experienced with such a model.  Who could possibly benefit from thrusting them onto men?  It’s a dead-end street and we know it.  We need to switch from a sum zero game to building together as partners.  We shouldn’t be in retaliation mode but rather constructive mode.
• We also know the frustrations of staying home with the kids was at times (and is now increasingly so) mirrored by a frustration of not getting to take care of the kids at all.  At long last, men are coming a little more into their rights as fathers whereas for so long they were confined to their breadwinning roles.  We as women should be wary of giving up those rights entirely just for the sake of “making it”.
  Meanwhile, it remains questionable as to whether women should integrate the 20^th century masculine model of work and management or if women can catalyse the implementation of a new, 21^st century model.  Especially considering the new profile increasingly expected form upcoming generations seeking leaders enabling better work-life balance, giving more meaning, inspiring more, leading by example and greater ethics (les echos, 24/01/2012, “le dirigeant de demain?  L’inverse du profil actuel”)
• We also know too that more and more men (joining many, many women) are raising their children alone (in France, at the end of 2010, 10% of children aged 0-6 in single parent families were being raised by their father and 18% of 17-24 year olds – france soir, 14/12/2010).  For neither of these growing populations of single parents can we decide having a “wife” is the only key to “having it all”!  This population already proves that the “wife” model is not a model of the future.
• Going further, I don’t believe it sustainable for the nuclear family of 2 parents with kid(s) either.  I just saw the movie, “I don’t know how she does it” which depicts our Western expectation of equality-based relationships with our spouses and in which everyone must play their full role.  The happy ending with which she narrowly escapes the collapse of her marriage thanks to the fact that, after selling her soul to her employer, she finally asks for a weekend off, feels very short lived and unlikely to really resolve any of the issues at hand.

For our 21^st century society that we are building, we need to pursue a more balanced ecosystem.  Everywhere I turn, there are studies bringing evidence to this need.  Companies are better managed and more profitable when there’s good mix of gender.  Families are reportedly better balanced and happier when there’s a good mix of masculine and feminine (a subject upon which I’ll elaborate in another post).  Society flourishes and progresses more when both men and women are (equally) empowered (I put equally in parentheses because it’s debatable as to whether there’s equality in any country…).  And, in our Western temples of individualism, let’s remember that individuals also thrive on personal balance.  Further, the collective makes progress when individuals are healthy and balanced in order to be able to share and cooperate with others.

It seems so obvious but the way we are living is unintentionally preventing it from being our reality.  In a study published last week, the greatest discrimination experienced among professionals in France is age and maternity.   From experience, I’m prepared to vouch that it’s increasingly the case for parents in general (at least for the parents who expect to play a major role in raising their children vs. outsourcing it entirely to nannies).   As companies increasingly require total availability of its employees, employers panic at the very thought of someone not being at their full disposal, heart and soul.    The dominant managerial model demands hyper-availability, mobility (often at maternity age), minimal personal infringement on professional aspects, networking, and, in certain countries like France, “presence”.  Perhaps as a result, there is a worrisome, albeit unsurprising, rise in burn-out with pretty much the same diagnosis across the board:  work overload and pressure, exhaustion caused by the sprint-marathon our performance society is demanding of men and women.  In France, it has even caused a series of suicides.

The shareholders are most certainly delighted…  but, as far as I’m concerned and concerned for future generations, I think we must demand a different model and reconsider the way we work.

The way we work, what we understand as the new keys leading to profitability and performance (plus, perhaps, some considerations as to ethics and responsibility!!!) and… beyond corporations’ performance, we need to consider the new keys to a healthy, sustainable society.

For this, we must start by revaluing life outside of work.   The whole conception of doing nothing but work when we’re executives makes little sense.  Lydie Salvaire, psychiatrist in France and author, says she sees people who are no longer the subjects of their work, they’ve just become pawns that are moved around without a second’s thought… she notes their feeling of loss of self as they give their all to companies’ culture of results without developing themselves otherwise (muze oct nov dec 2011).  Indeed, I recently met a woman who was greatly deceived and disappointed by the company model when she found herself fired after 11 years of total devotion to her job, allowing no time for reomance, family, or life in general.  Companies cannot be expected to “care” for us – we need to look out for ourselves and make sure we’re not getting a bum deal.

That said, it is evident that both refreshing our minds and building our competences by way of other activities and discoveries are key to doing a good job professionally.   We, as a society, have accepted that for children, realizing that much of their learning is acquired through play.  It seems foolish to not accept that, with the diversity of our brain functioning and so forth, that we can improve the quality of our work, input, and innovation thanks to external stimuli… and rest (ah, but in a performance society, need for rest seems a weakness!).

We also need to revalue all the unpaid work within that ‘out of office’ life.  And most urgently,   to re-value the work of child rearing… by both the mother and the father. 

What I’m getting at is:  maybe we shouldn’t be applauding the fact of structuring families so as to perpetuate lopsided-ness in which one parent meets with burn-out and the other meets with isolation or the ugly realities of getting back into the workforce (such has been the case for women for decades and, according to Hymowitz’s article, stay-at-home dads seem to have similar barriers). 

Yes, women and men should be able to develop their careers, make it to the top, etc.  And yes, they should simultaneously be able to have children and/or hobbies, etc. 

Hopefully at-home husbands’ acts and testimonies will help Western societies become more aware of this precious contribution as well as how hard it is to accomplish.  Oftentimes our society tends to see the “feminization” of professions as a way of gutting them of their roles and attractiveness (cf. Eric Zemmour’s Premier Sexe)… hopefully the “masculization” of home economics will help those fields gain in legitimacy and importance.   At the very least, we seem to be waking up to the positive and negative realities of child rearing.

And with this knowledge, we should pursue changing the myth.  Shift from the hero myth in which we can only devote energies to our singular self… to the motherself myth with which men and women can still develop themselves… but with others, not against them or without them.

Rendez-vous next week for another bite from the apple!

21st Century Challenge: Redefining Motherhood on Our Own Terms

Happy Thanksgiving!  In honor of millions of families gathering today for Thanksgiving, I've decided to take a short break from my quarks series to write about motherhood and our need for a new take on motherhood for the 21st century.  Cheers!

21st Century Challenge:  Redefining Motherhood on Our Own Terms

Katrin Bennhold did an interesting article on women in Germany in International Herald Tribune’s series “Female Factor”.  In it, she cites a book published this year in Germany by Bascha Mika called, “The Cowardice of Women”.  Apparently it has yet to be translated and so I have not read it, and am going to base my discussion on Bennhold’s coverage:

                “…[Mika] thinks women have largely themselves to blame.  According to her, they aren’t putting enough pressure on politicians, are failing to negotiate equal terms in relationships and often voluntarily retreat into a traditional mother role that spares them other hard questions about identity and purpose in life… [Mika says,] “we are collaborating with a system that reduces us to motherhood… we voluntarily choose to be powerless and adjust to self-inflicted victimhood.  That’s cowardice.”

Indeed, German women who try to balance children and work are allegedly frowned upon societally and are highly challenged by social mores and lack of day care, etc.   This I have read about in numerous works as well as hearing first-hand accounts of these types of pressure and difficulty.  The choice of words of cowardice does not seem appropriate to the types of obstacles Germans have to overcome, especially coming from a woman who had to opt out of motherhood in order to pursue a career.  That could be called cowardly too, but I’ll come to that.

Mainly, Bennhold’s article got me thinking about Mika’s ideas in relation to American, English, and French cultures and our strategies for self-realization and self-fulfillment.

First of all, I want to take issue with the notion of “retreat into a traditional mother role”.  There is nothing simple about carrying what she calls a traditional mother role. 

For starters, the “traditional” role hasn’t been quite so comfortable.  Outside of aristocratic families, our current Western conception of mother role in which the mother is devoted only to the child’s well-being is as recent as the late 19^th century.  Women worked and have always worked.  Aristocratic families may have at times carried this torch; Abigail Adams and her concept “Republican Motherhood” comes to mind, with which she pleaded women be afforded good education, et al, in order to better educate their sons… but aristocrats otherwise tended to their own social networks while help or servants cared for the children.  Even in the 20^th century, many “housewives” were everything but “mere” mothers, between the canning and the washing, the buying and the organizing, running a family could and still can be like running a small company. 

In France, as well as other Western countries, stay-at-home fathers are becoming increasingly common.  Their experiences are bringing to light what women have known for decades.  Damien Lorton, who recently published a book called (if I translate loosely), “a father is a mother like any other”, about his experience as a “househusband” and how housework is relentless, with never a moment’s rest, but without the gratification of a paycheck.  A second stay-at-home father has pointed out that socially it isn’t easy and that people’s disinterest can at times be hurtful.  This is an experience corroborated by many women.

Objection #2:  “retreat into a traditional mother role” is its total underestimation of what it means to be a mother today.  It has become its own “rat race”.  Judith Warner describes it well in her recent work, “Perfect Madness” in which she exposes a one-upmanship in which many stay-at-home mothers get entangled.  This is a subject upon which I’ll later expound as there’s much change to make, but clearly, as of today, Warner’s study demonstrates the confines and the expectations of this ‘traditional mother role’ is not such an easy route to choose.

The other point Mika reportedly raises is that opting to be a “traditional mother” “spares hard questions about identity and life”.  It’s a good question.  Perhaps some do fall into the patterns of their mothers because of lack of day care or because that’s the way the country is set up or because they want to concentrate their energy on raising young children or maybe because their husbands have the means for them to not work…  Maybe some really are just coasting.  Maybe.

BUT.  Reading articles and books from many Western nations, I have also seen a whole lot of women “sparing themselves hard questions about identity and life” by plunging into work and career.

In French it’s called “une fuite vers l’avant”.   It isn’t only women’s lot but also men’s lot in this “accelerated” world we’re abiding (cf. Acceleration by German philosopher Hartmut Rosa).    It happens quite naturally then ends up a spiral that’s difficult to escape. 

And it’s becoming a societal phenomenon.  Women working so hard that they skip out on relationships and children.  And when their biological clocks hum the “last opportunity” in their early 40s, they discover that media’s discourse of the possibility of pushing back the clock isn’t a reality that can be generalized.  In Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s work, Creating a Life, her study unveiled the great pain upon which some women stumble:  the great frustration of spending tens of thousands of dollars on fertility procedures only to undergo miscarriages and other heart-wrenching experiences.  These women have gone with the worklife flow... without pounding their fists on the table to make politicians and companies change the dynamic as Mika says should stay-at-home mothers.

BUT #2.  Why point the blame?  Instead of pitting ourselves against each other, why not instead push together for greater capacity to really get what we want.  Putting our fists down for the real end goal:  choice.  Informed choice.  Actually empowered choice.  Which leads me to the next BUT:

BUT #3.  Why be so disparaging of mothers and the role of motherhood?  The propos illustrates the groove we have all taken to follow in men’s footsteps instead of calling our own shots and building our own version of work, motherhood, and life.  Maybe part of Mika’s beef is that even the concept of motherhood has been defined in androcentric terms rather than being called by our own shots.  As points out Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi in her great work Motherself, women have folded their pursuit of self-realization into “heroself myths”, individualistic quests for identity that leave no room for others and which wield only domination when it comes to relationships (think Greco-Roman myths, even if Rabuzzi bases herself on myths and tales from across the globe).  What I appreciate about the points she raises is the fact that the “motherself” (pertaining to both genders and independent of whether the person actually has children) requires a self-realization that incorporates others.  We have come to a point in our world, our societies, etc., in which such rigid, taxidermic-like identities are unsustainable and impractical: 

-          Longevity will weigh in on the number of lives we lead… meaning an identity quest at one point in an individual’s life does not exclude the need for further, ulterior “apprenticeship” quests.  For me, this means reconsidering our ideal of “identity” as a springboard instead of a shield, in a way that can swing with life’s evolutions instead of societal clichés/snapshots (more on that in another entry).

-          84% of the world’s developed regions’ population and 66% of less developed regions’ populations will live in cities by 2050, implying restricted territory per person.  For me, this means we need to reconfigure our interdependence and interrelations within our quest for individualization.   

-          Our common need is to ensure our survival as a species.  Zero population growth, for me, should include the full diversity of representation.  This means we can’t entirely accept the idea of no children among the women who have to spunk to have a grand career…

-          …knowing that studies show that diversity, and most importantly a good balance of men and women, in a company is key for productivity and performance in most all sectors.  For me, this means that we need to get a more comprehensive societal contract in terms of work-life balance (I’ll come back to this one because this entry is already too long to cover such a vast subject).

-           …plus other studies show women’s empowerment, thus their education and financial independence, is key to improving the world.  For me, this means that our children must be born into and raised by families/communities who are themselves educated and industrious.

But the real point is: we have to stop denigrating physical realities that are specific to women.  We should reclaim the beauty, importance, utility, and necessity of bearing and raising lives (without, of course, creating a new requirement:  of course we should have the choice!).  Too often, childbearing is defined negatively within the workplace (with extravagant fantasies about absences due to children’s sick leave, problems due to day care difficulties, shorter hours because they need to go pick up the kids, mind divided by other priorities… they have all been named).  I beg to argue that this capacity to bear life is ENRICHING (even for our companies and our added-value) and needs to be valued by our society instead of being dismissed as cowardly or traditional or proof of women being less implicated in their work (this too I will develop).

Let’s stop confusing victims, culprits, and heroes and get back on a more constructive track!

And on to next Thursday for a new installment about why we're like quarks:  individuals needn't be singular