Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter

who have decided to step back for a while, taking on consultant positions or part-time work that lets them spend more time with their children (or aging parents), are worrying about how long they can stay out before they lose the competitive edge they worked so hard to acquire.
Up or Out
    E VEN IF YOU DO SUCCEED in having the family you want when you want, work is often unlikely to cooperate with your sequencing plan. The real world of current work practices still very much follows the tune of “up or out,” of “if you turn down a promotion, you get left behind.” I am reminded of a presentation I gave that was sponsored by a large oil company. At the reception afterward a number of women talked about the many great policies that management had put in place to make balancing work and family easier. One of the women who raised her hand said that she was working part-time after having her third child. She said that she had been grateful for the company’s willingness to allow her to continue working in a way that made sense for her family. After hearing my presentation, however, she said that her take-away was that she realized that she still wanted to be an executive and was going to recommit herself to that goal.
    What she was saying was that by taking advantage of these great policies, she had put herself on “the mommy track,” the path of fewer hours and lower expectations. In other words, not the executive track. When she made her decision to slow down, she’d known and accepted that consequence, but now she had some questions. The mommy (or daddy) track is the opposite of the leadership track, but
why?
Working part-time or flexibly or even taking some time out and coming back will understandablyput you on a slower track for promotion, but why should it take you
off
the track entirely? Because the deep assumption in the American workplace is that the fast track is the only track. Up or out.
    In fact, thinking of careers as a single race in which everyone starts at the same point and competes over the same time period is a choice. It tilts the scales in favor of the workers who
can
compete that way, the ones who have no caregiving responsibilities or who have a full-time caregiver at home. It also means that as a society we lose massive amounts of talent. We lose the distance runners, the athletes with the endurance, patience, fortitude, and resilience to keep going over the long haul. We lose the runners who see a different path to the finish and are willing to take it, even if it is in uncharted territory. We lose the runners who have the temperament and perspective to allow them to see beyond the race.
WHOLE TRUTHS
    N OW LET ’ S LOOK AT SOME whole truths.
    You can have it all if you are committed enough to your career…
and you are lucky enough never to hit a point where your carefully constructed balance between work and family topples over
.
    You can have it all if you marry the right person…
who is willing to defer his or her career to yours; you stay married; and your own preferences regarding how much time you are willing to spend at work remain unchanged after you have children or find yourself caring for aging parents
.
    You can have it all as long as you sequence it right…
as long as you succeed in having children when you planned to; you have an employer who both permits you to work part-time or on a flexible work
schedule and still sees you as leadership material; or you take time out and then find a good job on a leadership track once you decide to get back in, regardless of your age
.
    As I said at the outset of this chapter, the last thing I want to do is to discourage younger women from pursuing high-powered careers that will catapult them into leadership positions and thereby improve society as a whole. Without a hefty dose of realism, however, we will continue to lose talent as women are pushed off the leadership track after they have children and/or when they spend more time caring for