Slaughter acknowledged that we’ve made strides toward her envisioned workplace, but we’re not there yet.
“We’ve transitioned the where we can work, and we have the flexibility — so now, if your kid is sick or you have a teacher’s conference or you need to take a parent to a doctor’s appointment, you have the flexibility to do that,” she said. But we haven’t reached the place where professional and personal ambition can coexist.
Aside from major structural changes we know are needed to support families — such as 12 months of parental leave, plentiful and affordable child care, free pre-kindergarten and well-funded public schools — there is one big thing that needs to change in the workplace, according to Slaughter: management practices. Face time is still the reigning tool for performance measurement, and that disadvantages anyone working remotely.
“If you’re in the office and that other person is in the office, you are still going to have a better sense that they are working than the person who is not [in the office],” she said. “I’ve said for a long time, to really make this work, you have to have much more objective and precise management practices, and that takes more work. I don’t think we’re there yet.”
Indeed, McKinsey’s Women in the Workforce reports from both 2022 and 2023 found that women in leadership are leaving their roles in record numbers, in part because their labor isn’t being recognized by their superiors. They’re taking on diversity, equity and inclusion work or heading up employee resource groups in addition to their full-time roles, for example, but it’s not being counted toward their overall performance, and they’re working remotely (often to juggle family responsibilities), which is being counted against them.
“They are looking for the ability to advance. They are looking for flexibility and choice in terms of where, when and how they work. They are looking for companies that authentically prioritize DE&I. They are looking for people who are backing their careers,” said McKinsey senior partner Lareina Yee in a podcast about the 2022 report. But, quite frankly, she said, “companies haven’t stepped up.”
Beyond changes in performance evaluation and management, Slaughter also advocates for what she described in her Atlantic article as “investment intervals,” the idea that you grind hard in certain periods of your work life ― early in your career before you have kids, for example ― and then make different choices as your career moves forward, including saying no to promotions that won’t work for your family life or taking time off from full-time work to consult, take a sabbatical or accept project-based work. Then when your kids are grown, you can lean back in and keep rising.
In my view, when it comes to frazzled millennial moms, a wholesale shift in the way we understand and reward professional ambition is due. Forget this idea that moving up, down, back or sideways in your career is a sign that you’re not committed. Instead, we must think of ambition as a tide — sometimes rolling in, sometimes rolling out, always doing its part. Under this rubric, millennial moms aren’t losing their ambition, they’re simply moving with the tide, and there’s no reason to feel ashamed about that. We shouldn’t be sent back to square one in our careers simply because the tide of our ambition went out while our children needed us most.
Slaughter said that taking a break to have kids or to work on professional development isn’t the kiss of death that it used to be, but “there are still plenty of workplaces where, if you get knocked off that straight-up path, it’s going to be very, very hard to get back on. I can see it changing; it just hasn’t changed yet.”
At her company, New America, Slaughter said she’s found that a flexible and supportive culture, which includes hybrid work, paid parental leave and a “family comes first” mantra, has ensured the work always gets done without sacrificing people’s personal lives and has also helped more junior staff find opportunities to rise and be seen.
Parental leave, for example, “creates opportunities for other people, younger people, other members of the team” to step in and work with Slaughter and other senior staff who they might not have otherwise crossed paths with directly. “It builds resilience in the workplace.”
Embrace a holistic view of ambition.
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