Moving Towards a Culture of Care
Following her major article in the Atlantic on why women can’t have it all, Anne-Marie Slaughter has continued her research and has concluded that the issue of caregiving will impact organizations now and for the foreseeable future, and companies who embrace a culture that supports these individuals through offering workplace flexibility will benefit the most.
A MetLife Study found that the percentage of adult children providing personal care and/or financial assistance to a parent has more than tripled over the past 15 years- and demographics suggest that this number will grow sharply in coming years, given an aging population, decreasing mortality rates and low fertility trends. And in many cases, this issue tends to impact more women than men, and as a result hinders their advancement into upper management. Unless we right this fundamental balance — in families, the workplace, and society as a whole — women will continue to lag behind men at work; children, parents, siblings and spouses will not get the full measure of care they need; and American society will continue to fray at the seams.
The When Work Works Sessions at the SHRM Annual conference explore ways to #ReinventWork and create effective workplaces. Visit WhenWorkWorks.org, a partnership between Families and Work Institute and SHRM, for more information.
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Anne-Marie Slaughter is currently the president and CEO of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute and idea incubator based in Washington and New York. She is also the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. From 2009–2011 she served as director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State, the first woman to hold that position. Upon leaving the State Department she received the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award for her work leading the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, as well as meritorious service awards from USAID and the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. Prior to her government service, Dr. Slaughter was the Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002–2009 and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School from 1994-2002.
Dr. Slaughter has written or edited six books, including A New World Order (2004) and The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (2007), and over 100 scholarly articles. She was the convener and academic co-chair, with Professor John Ikenberry, of the Princeton Project on National Security, a multi-year research project aimed at developing a new, bipartisan national security strategy for the United States. In 2012 she published the article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” in The Atlantic, which quickly became the most read article in the history of the magazine and helped spawn a renewed national debate on the continued obstacles to genuine full male-female equality.
Follow Anne-Marie on Twitter @SlaughterAM.