Telling Women's Lives

Kailen Gore: Unfinished Business Reader Response

I found a quote in one of the first sections of the book to be very interesting. It’s the following: “It’s human nature to absorb the values and practices of the system that we survived and succeeded in and to demand that others make it the same way.” Slaughter says this in response to that ‘someone’ who has a female boss who is less sensitive toward family-work conflict, than the male bosses of the same office. I understand the point that she is trying to make. Everyone, not just men, wants other people to work just as hard to reach the same milestones. However, I think to say that it’s human nature, as if it’s a general intrinsic way to handle high positons, is mostly false. I don’t want to believe that that is every female leader’s first line of thinking when it comes to how she treats the women under her. I think, if anything besides just a difference in leadership style, a female leader would be less accommodating to family issues either because of the timely needs of the company. I think there are multiple ways to approach high positions and I don’t think that my subconscious goal would be to make other people work just as much as I do. This may be coming from the fact that I’m used to being the person who takes 3 days to do something that most students only take 3 hours to do. I don’t really care about what other people are doing to get to where they want to go. If they get to where I am without doing as much work as I did, that’s good for them. I can only do the best that I can, and at the same time, there will always be someone out there who’s better than me. So there’s no point in me getting frustrated by those kinds of things.