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!

When will we accept we are like quarks ? Part 4: Identity need not be definitive

As I have been arguing, it is time for us to make a jump in collective intelligence and benefit from what we know of quantum physics, integrating their principles into our way of living and allow 21^st century individuals benefit from being like quarks:

·         Accepting that virtualizing space should be used for individuals to live their lives more fully while also improving performance in their work

·         Enabling spherical time development so that individuals can get back in touch with natural life-progressing rhythms without being overly taxed socially or professionally…   and actually improve society and productivity. 

·         Integrating our “selves” into an “Integrated I” freeing us to cultivate our true selfhood and therefore contribute greater diversity to the benefit of collective intelligence and progress

Part 4:  Identity need not be definitive

Looking around, on TV, in the press, in the movies, in scientific journals and books, in advertising, we can see we’re living in a performance society.  This has been true of the United States for a long time and seems increasingly true of European countries.  Of course not everyone wants to honor that and there are more and more movements towards cooperation and interdependence, but on the whole, to “make it”, you’ve got to perform at most every moment and, it seems, against most everyone (including “invisible competition” coming from workers in other countries, as the current economic crisis readily illustrates).  A competitive interpretation of Darwinism reigns and we’ve got to compose with that as individuals wanting to pursue self-fulfillment and happiness within our societies (this is clearly something to be reconsidered but I’ll get into that in another post in the future).

In this competitive performance society, Western countries’ common conviction seems to anchor success is one’s individuality, and the identity with which others associate.    Enabled by relative material comfort, media-age communication habits, and social networking capabilities, people seem to build and solidify the identities they project in order to show the world the great life we have created for ourselves, to stage our great performance.  Instructed by the societal “then and than” logic, we seem to have enjoined a kind of “positive slope rhetoric” with which our exploits, even our challenges, are colored, so as to make our lives appear “more than” (or at least “as much as”) others’ (harder, smarter, more clever, more cheeky, more audacious, more complicated, cuter, lazier, etc.). 

All of these efforts allow for a more or less successful “marketing of me” with which we perform.  It comes out in every crack:  we have to be “google-able” to land that new job.  We have to show how even our downtime and our leisure time are productive, performant, enviable.  I spoke with a good number of recent graduates who explained the importance of qualitative experiences on resumes:  it isn’t enough to travel, you have to have traveled somewhere exotic in a new hip way, and have published a blog about it, etc.   

This marketing relationship with our own lives clearly impacts our “real” lives as we increasingly make our choices based on their resume value.  Back in the 60’s, David Riesman had identified peer-approval logic.  Currently, thanks to internet and other people-connectors, this peer approval has extended to include most every actor of every relational level.  Our “peers” are not only our social circle but now include our employer, our future employer, our parents and friends’ parents, etc.  Suddenly, our behavior (or at least what we or others post on facebook of us), must be crystalline at all times, must be palatable for the general public (consider the woman who lost her teaching credentials simply because someone else published a picture of her drinking a beer).  We are forced into performing rather than actually living.

Performing rather than living has some unintended consequences. 

As much of our performance is responding to societal criteria and approval, and building up whatever “projected identity” that is most winning/marketable/attractive, we are distancing ourselves from our natural talents and preferences, allowing ourselves to fall away from our personal center of gravity.  Like in Plato’s cave, we are rigidifying and reinforcing our projections but, as a result, we are under-nourishing our personal, core identity and its development, its growth.

It’s a great paradox:  in the context of believing that identity empowers individual liberty, we’re actually losing control over our own liberty as we limit our identity to watered-down, LCD societal expectations.  Indeed “performance” is often in itself a redundant logic, reproducing others’ acts instead of building one’s own life with one’s own creativity.   In this time of individualism, we are making ourselves clones.

This has far-reaching repercussions in today’s landscape in which we have the ability to increasingly man-make ourselves.   At every level: 

-          Body (including plastic surgery, botox at increasingly young ages, a normalized expectation of seductivity with which we’re pressured to be seductive to all people at all times… and which used to be mainly women’s lot but which is increasingly enslaving men too (Nickel, L’Oréal)…

-          Personality (molded to what’s most efficient and attractive to potential employers/ partners, etc. with which we tend to create memes instead of creating something new or more specific to oneself)…

-          Aspirations (for girls, “being hot” (The Lolita Effect), for going on 30s: having it all and having something to show for it (Midlife Crisis at Thirtysomething)…

-          Choices (limiting our personal activities in terms of Resume value and employability including sidelining important personal potential (either losing out on love, children all together or living them ‘in absentia’ as we have nannies etc. take care of it), trying to be more masculine than an alpha male at the executives’ table (“flight from woman”)…

These strategies have a cost.  They make our identity “taxidermist” as it rigidifies into a kind of still-life or snapshot despite our hyperactivity.

So what?  First of all, let’s consider the toll it takes of keeping up appearances – especially those we’ve projected and which are estranged from our personal core competencies.  Open up any journal or talk around you to discover the extent to which we, as a society, depend on medicated success (taking uppers to get a 4.0 GPA, taking uppers just to get through the day while remaining “pleasant, and pleasing”…).   Close to 10% of American adults were on anti-depressants in 2008 (before the financial crisis!), and the UK has seen a 43% rise in antidepressant prescriptions in the last four years.  And this goes without mentioning other strategies to which people are resorting to try to get a hold on their lives (over-indebtedness, eating disorders, dependence on shrinks …).

Second, carrying around a “still-life identity” is like using one’s identity for defensive or offensive purposes instead of constructive or developmental purposes.  This stifles growth for ourselves and creates antagonism rather than cooperation with others. 

Third, the more energy we allocate to maintaining a fixed posture, the less we can build new muscles, create new synapses, or foster new discoveries.  It is increasingly accepted scientifically that every experience, every interaction, every activity strengthens some neural circuits at the expense of others.  It follows that maintaining a still-life identity undermines our potential and reduces our possibilities.  The more statue-like we become, the less we breathe or oxygenate our beings.  Meanwhile, we’re writing a chronic of a failure foretold!  No matter how hard we try, we won’t ever be able to entirely do away with nature, which will always rear its head.  Keeping up with appearances becomes less and less natural and requires more and more energy.  It’s totally unsustainable.

Clearly, we have developed unhealthy relationships with perfection leading to all types of indigestion due to immobility (decision paralysis, excessive risk management, cynicism vs. over-inflated optimism…).  I’ll comment on this in an ulterior post. 

Finally, it may or may not behoove us to build up such projections for we may be crystallizing aspects of ourselves we think are most winning when in fact our self-analysis may be faulty or may quickly become obsolete (cf. Dan Gilbert whose research shows that humans, as subjective beings, misperceive reality then use those misperceptions to build a mistaken view of the future).

What will quantum do for all this?

1.   The flexibility of being more than on being at once gives a greater margin of maneuver when it comes to building our identity.  I’m not talking about role acting via avatars or fictitious identities over the net.  I’m talking about integrating our dualities and inconsistencies into one, evolutionary being who is enriched by its versatility and multiplicity. 
Consider Sartre's insight into our being which can be applied to our identity.  For him, to be, "être", describes all that isn't human (objects, animals) for they are described by their physico-chemical properties whereas humans are also decribed by their potential.  For Sartre, this is a kind of "anti-being" ("le néant").  To be "anti-being" is to accept that "I" could not have been... and contingentally, that "I" could be something else and still have the liberty to become.
I call the quarkishness of simultaneous being and anti-being “fertile identity” with which identity shifts from being a still life snapshot requiring high maintenance to a springboard for further growth, exploration, discovery, progress.

Why a springboard?  Because the learnings we acquire in one aspect of our lives allows for exponential development in others (cf. blog time)

Because giving oneself to growth builds understanding and knowledge in a way that "living in abstentia" cannot.  Oftentimes the best relational bonding happens during downtime.  When we don’t participate in the actual building of aspects of our lives, we don’t internalize the learning curve, nor do we really reap the fruits of our labor.  Take the example of Dawn Lepore interviewed in this week’s Business Week who regrets having missed out on raising her kids.  This shouldn’t have to be the case. 

Because attempting perfection for each of our roles pushes us to look at each facet of our lives in a fragmented way instead of viewing the whole, not only leaving us blind to mid to long-term gains but vulnerable to burn-out, statistically rising in Western countries.

Because going against our personal, natural inclinations can never be fully controlled.  On the other hand, if we embrace our natural rhythms, we can bask in the facility inherent in going with the flow instead of corseting ourselves against it.  Of course this is not the message society is giving us – especially to young women hoping to “have it all” (family and career).  But if we can rewrite our societal myths and integrate the quantum, there is no real obstacle / we can overcome the current obstacles.  We can choose how our society is formatted.

Because, the ability to roll with the punches, to deal with the surprises life will always reserve for us, our survival and well-being depends on our flexibility.  For no matter how hard we plan, life will always bring out the unexpected (or worse, we might miss out on the unexpected entirely!  We need to welcome evolution even when it doesn’t come according to plans.

2.   Perpetual motion and a bildungsroman “growth visa” for women

-    Applying the quantum spherical, integrated space-time helps us accept that life is perpetual evolution and movement.  As long as we seek to convince others of our happiness by creating Kodac moments, we won’t succeed in acquiring happiness.  But once we channel the dynamic of growth, with its slow moments and fast moments, troubled times and easy times, we can take on a whole new perspective of happiness and success.  It’s unsustainable to give free reign to our societal dread of difficult times and determination to avoid them. 

After all, there is no such thing as “successful life insurance”!   But perhaps we can manage “life ensurance” : rent for mistakes and for spontaneity.  As has said Gilles Clément, « La réalité biologique est l’imprevisibilité ».  Integrating the quantum can include reinstating a bildungsroman approach to create a “growth visa” for women and a dedication to living deliberately.  So many are about men and their hero myth whereas we need to construct one for women enriched with our creative potential and the motherself.    

3.   This leads me to a third benefit of integrating the quantum in our societal outlook : exploring the fullness of both the masculine and the feminine in each of us.  Westerners know about the concept of the yin and the yang but this too is a perspective yet to be fully assimilated.  So many conversations are about gender, post-gender, performativity… but these postures seem to me prey to the still-life identity I described above.  The quarkish Idea of carrying both the masculine and the feminine at once would enable us to have better access to our whole nature and ourselves.  Instead of working to be the alpha male or the archetype of femininity, we could integrate relativity, thus improving our empathy for others (the basis of imagination) and our creativity, our constructiveness.

It would also free us from trying to beat men at their own game and instead empower women to redefine the rules on our own terms… The point here is certainly not to level all differences but, on the contrary, to foster (real) diversity while rendering traditional boundaries & stereotypes permeable … enabling us to demand acknowledgement of our talents (cf. "Lehman sisters") as we do what comes naturally, with all the pleasantness and aggressiveness that each of us embodies.  This is a vast subject that I will treat in a separate post.  Suffice it to say that we’ve still a lot of work to do on this topic! 

Here’s the point:  for all of us 99% across the world, we need to rethink our society and start putting to better use our history and collective intelligence to make strides and informed choices.  We can see the way things are.  We can see how we don’t want things to be.  Now we need to collectively think about how we want things to be in order for us to make it happen.   I am convinced we can use some of scientists’ knowledge and hypotheses of quantum physics to metaphorically inform our sociological and societal systems.

I will stop here and come back in later blogs for the fifth benefit of integrating the quantum into our current way of living:

1.       Space need not be physical

2.       Time need not be linear

3.       Individuals need not be singular

4.       Identity need not be definitive

5.       Love need not be crystalized

Rendez-vous next Thursday for a new bite from the apple.  In the meantime, share your comments based on your own knowledge and consciousness!