Anne-Marie Slaughter

3.5, but I'm rounding up because I did enjoy this book. It is a title I would recommend to friends struggling with career planning and work-life balance, and it gave me a lot to think about when it comes to planning my career on my own terms. Slaughter's policy recommendations were excellent, and I appreciated her inclusion of men in the conversation; permitting and encouraging male participation in caregiving is absolutely a feminist issue (I think she could have been clearer about this in her discussion, in fact - we probably don't need a "men's movement"; third-wave feminism is for men too).

Unfinished Business is a discussion of how to adapt the U.S. workplace to the modern family and modern realities of caregiving. As our population ages, it's a conversation that feels urgent. Slaughter's thesis - that we need to value caregiving as a society - is a response both to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and to criticisms of Slaughter's own article "Why Women Still Can't Have it All." Both works got a lot of flack for putting the burden of career success on women and not on the institutions that deny them equal opportunity.

Now, I have followed a lot of feminist criticism, and it is pretty rare that the writer of a "women's issues" article turns around and says, "Hey, you're right, I was downplaying the role of institutional sexism." I really admire Slaughter's willingness to evaluate her beliefs. She debunks a lot of sloppy thinking about gender, caregiving, and the workplace and advocates for a society where people who engage in caregiving aren't penalized for having families and lives.

However, the book is weak when it tries to address the experiences of people outside of Slaughter's small and privileged upper-middle class world. Slaughter knows she's privileged and part of her motivation in writing this book is to include workers who can't "lean in" in her narrative. However, she still relies on anecdotes and ideas from the white-collar corporate world. I am an educated white woman myself, but I've spent my working life for small businesses and local government, so I had a hard time relating to the workplaces she describes. Maternity leave? Flexible schedules? As a part-time worker, I currently don't even have paid sick leave, and even when I was unionized, there was no way in heck I could work from home. I worry that the changes Slaughter imagines will remain perks for the elite and in demand. We are already seeing this in tech companies that woo their developers with great benefits and offer almost nothing to hourly employees.

The focus on childcare also made for a strange read. I don't have children and wanted to see my experiences acknowledged in this book, but all I got was a page acknowledging that, yep, the single and/or childfree might want lives outside work too. I feel pretty strongly that I am part of a growing demographic, and the system is broken for us too, if not as profoundly.

Not everything I hoped for, but still a good book about an important topic.… (more)

Loved this book for calling out real life problems and the probable solutions in the most candid manner. My initial thought was this is just another book on feminism , was pleasantly surprised to see that it was much more than that.
It is a book on what our notions on equality are and what it should really be. The author has managed to give a fresh perspective of feminism that includes men as opposed to doing it all on our own. A workplace that values work and family equally sounds utopian but doesn’t seem that impractical. Much to learn from this book and definitely worth a read by everybody who has ever had to ponder on the big question of work-life balance (or fit, as this book suggests)!
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This book taught me that I'm not supposed to say "Stay at Home Dad" but instead say "Full time Parent". I also learned that I am both a role model and looked down on by other guys because my wife works full time while I watch the kids. It did recognize though that women are encouraged to be anything they want but that men are not encouraged to take up what is seen as traditionally women's roles (parenting, nursing, teaching). Mostly though this book is geared towards working women.

Most annoying thing I learned though is that the author wrote an article for The Atlantic. I know this because it is mentioned every other page.… (more)