Anne-Marie Slaughter > Quotes

“Balance” is a luxury. Equality is a necessity. When we stop talking about work-life balance and start talking about discrimination against care and caregiving, we see the world differently.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“the real revolution for this century “would be to stop seeing the home as a gendered space” but rather as both a male and female domain, just as we now see the workplace.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“flexibility cannot be the solution to work-life issues as long as it is stigmatized. The question that young people should be asking their employers is not what kinds of family-friendly policies a particular firm has. Instead, they should ask, “How many employees take advantage of these policies? How many men? And how many women and men who have worked flexibly have advanced to top positions in the firm?”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Real equality for men and women needs a men’s movement to sweep away the gender roles that we continue to impose on men even as we struggle to remove them from women.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“High-quality and affordable childcare and eldercare • Paid family and medical leave for women and men • A right to request part-time or flexible work • Investment in early education comparable to our investment in elementary and secondary education • Comprehensive job protection for pregnant workers • Higher wages and training for paid caregivers • Community support structures to allow elders to live at home longer • Legal protections against discrimination for part-time workers and flexible workers • Better enforcement of existing laws against age discrimination • Financial and social support for single parents • Reform of elementary and secondary school schedules to meet the needs of a digital rather than an agricultural economy and to take advantage of what we now know about how children learn”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Of the world's 175 largest nation-states and private firms, 112 are corporations.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

“It is one thing to let go of the housekeeping. Quite another to relinquish being the center of your children's universe.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter

“It is society as a whole that assigns value and prestige to what people do;”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“This crisis had forced me to confront what was most important to me, rather than what I was conditioned to want, or perhaps what I had conditioned myself to want.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“influence flows across networks up to three degrees away. What your friends’ friends eat or do or think will influence what you eat or do or think—but further connections will not.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

“Corporate anthropologist Karen Stephenson argues that though trust is the natural glue of human connection since prehistoric times, it is mostly absent in modern hierarchies—especially in government, where vertical silos compete with and undermine one another, often within the same bureaucracy.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

“building a network—connecting people or institutions in specific ways for specific purposes—is a far better starting point than a strategy of deterrence, cooperation, or coordination with another government.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

“Email is just the most obvious manifestation of a much bigger issue: the 24/7 work culture and its associated feelings of responsibility and guilt.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Similarly, we see a common discriminatory assumption embedded in our view of a woman’s caregiving years spent out of the paid workforce as a yawning gap on her résumé and our failure to include the hundred million–plus hours of unpaid care work done in households across the country every year in our national GDP. In both cases we assume that care work is not work that really matters, even though it is essential to the dignity and the wellbeing of the elderly and the sick and to the very brain formation and growth of the young. Nor do we assume that it can in any way benefit the caregiver in ways that are individually valuable and desirable in other contexts.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Another way to frame the issue is that leaning in when you have significant caregiving responsibilities requires an intensive support structure at home and lots of flexibility at work. Think about simple physics. Imagine a tree leaning over the water”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Humans pursuing deep, complete connections respond to quite different incentives from those that influence self-interested utility maximizers. Rewards, monitoring, and punishments are less likely to be effective than engagement, communication, norms, socialization, identity, and common purpose. They share not out of a calculation of reciprocity but from a psychological pleasure in sharing. Those seeking connections make decisions from their hearts as well as their heads, influenced by emotion, fairness, empathy, and intuition. Their behavior, thoughts, feelings, and even personal attributes are highly socially contingent.
The range of humanity includes individuals who display every possible combination of selfishness and sociability.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

“We can only change and bring about change if we can genuinely open our minds to new thoughts and possibilities, for everyone.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Caring requires us not to put ourselves aside but to put others first”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“On the other hand, the disconnection of millions of young people from the possibility of a decent education, a job, and a fulfilling life fuels rage and violence that spill across borders. Without positive connections to schools, jobs, families, and visions of their future, they connect to destructive causes that make them feel like part of a larger whole.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

“The first step toward persuading others is an evident and sincere willingness to be persuaded yourself.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

“leaning in when you have significant caregiving responsibilities requires an intensive support structure at home and lots of flexibility at work.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Language is one of the principal ways that we make the invisible visible and the silent heard. Think”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“The McKinsey Global Institute predicts that by 2020 the world will face a “skills gap” of nearly 40 million people, meaning that employers will need that many workers with a college degree or higher than the global labor force can supply.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Many network theorists note that human beings differ dramatically from the rational profit maximizer of social science theory. Neuroscientists exploring different regions if the brain, sociologists mapping an increasingly networked society, and entrepreneurial enthusiasts of the sharing economy challenge the highly individualist conception of the individual that many economists embrace. Instead of homo economicus, let s consider homo sociologicus, a person driven as much by the desire to belong and connect as by her individual goals.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

“Abram and Antonia Chayes even redefined sovereignty itself to mean not the right to be left alone but the right to participate in international organizations and networks.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World

“The first half-truth is that the issue of work-life balance is a “women’s problem.” If we define it that way, then it is up to women to find or at least implement the solution. The second is that employers can make room for caregiving by offering flextime and part-time arrangements.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“The majority of American women have demanded over the last half century that society reject and revise traditional norms about what women want and what they can do. It is time to do the same for men. WHAT”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Mayeroff lists a number of elements necessary to be a good caregiver, attributes that are just as necessary to be a good employee or manager. His roster includes knowledge, patience, adaptability to different rhythms, honesty, courage, trust, humility, and hope.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“Now it’s up to all of us, women and men alike, to make the next big push toward equality between men and women. We’ll have to start by changing how we think.”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family

“The question that young people should be asking their employers is not what kinds of family-friendly policies a particular firm has. Instead, they should ask, “How many employees take advantage of these policies? How many men? And how many women and men who have worked flexibly have advanced to top positions in the firm?” DANGER:”
― Anne-Marie Slaughter, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family