Telling Women's Lives

Emma Kook – Reader Response for Unfinished Business and The 30% Solution

Can women really have it all? Slaughter seems to believe it can only be the case if caregiving dilemmas become a gender neutral issue. Deriving from personal experiences, Slaughter found it difficult to move up in her career while finding time for family commitments. When she finally decided to choose family over a promotion she was greatly criticized by colleagues. This seemed odd when most people at work were going through the same problems. The main problem appeared to stem from the workplace. It made people choose, which led to a lack of value for caregivers. Slaughter says we are locked in “the struggle to combine competition and care in a system that rewards one and penalizes the other.” In order to change this, Slaughter has proposed to make it everybody’s business. Change it from a primarily female issue to an issue that affects all parents in the situation, while educating companies on the importance of balancing family and career goals.

The 30% Solution complemented the Slaughter piece well. Its main idea is to push the number of women found in leadership roles to 30%. The belief is that by having at least 30% of women represented in these roles, equality will happen and changes will be made to ensure it does. In other words, solutions for gender equality will be implemented because they won’t just be talked about but will be taken seriously with women at the helm. As Senator Landrieu says, “Do you really think if the US Senate was comprised of 91 women and 9 men we’d still be just talking about good child care instead of making it happen?”

These two pieces are significant because they raise the issue that women are still the primary gender that has to choose between promotions or family. Slaughter believes the solution is to convert caregiving into a neutral dilemma which will begin to trigger the 30% Solution. Once caregiving becomes a neutral issue, more women will likely stick in the competition and move up to more leadership roles. This will, in turn, start to create an equal working environment which will lead to more gender equality solutions being implemented, forming almost a circle of progress taken from the two pieces.