Why Women Can't Have It All: The Unique Challenge for Generations X, Y and Z

EDIT 10/14
This just in! Apple and Facebook now pay to freeze their employees' eggs. Women of Apple and Facebook, now you can have it all!

I recently saw this 2012 Atlantic cover story. I'm two years behind, so that means that it's had plenty of time for reading and dissecting on the internet and Anne-Marie Slaughter herself followed up with it earlier this year. I'm really wondering how I missed this the first time around (or have utterly forgotten about reading it), considering it was the most "liked" Atlantic story ever on their website.

Dr. Slaughter's thesis goes like this: In the United States, women experience a high degree of reverence and also monitoring during pregnancy, but after a baby is born, a woman's experience of motherhood goes unsupported throughout her offspring's childhood. A lack of [paid] parental leave, an arcane school schedule, inflexible work scheduling with ever-increasing hours, and the socialized (and perhaps biological) need for women to "be there" for their children all help to create a structure that makes it impossible for women to have both a successful career and successful home life. To the detriment of her family, says Dr. Slaughter, she has been ignoring the blatant truth that women can't have it all--and it took the wisdom of younger generations to point out this truth.

It's not all hopeless. A redefinition of career success, policy implementation, and demographic shifts toward female leadership in government and business can address the issue. As far as workplace and government policy goes, Dr. Slaughter makes some concrete suggestions: (1) use technology to to limit work hours and travel; (2) leave avenues open for promotion and tenure to women who take parental leave by extending windows of opportunity and evaluation; (3) enact family leave policies that provide generous money and time following the birth of a child; (4) make family-work balance the priority of men by extending these same considerations to men.

This is all fine and well. How I'm going to launch my career and my family at the same time is literally an issue that keeps me up at night. But, Dr. Slaughter failed to realize that the problem of work-life balance will absolutely be worse for the upcoming Generations X, Y, and Z. The structural solutions to this issue will be much more drastic than planning for and around children.

At age 56, Dr. Slaughter is a Baby Boomer. The Silent Generation (also called the Lucky Few or Luckiest Generation) started the Baby Boom by having babies earlier than the generation before them. At age 20, 29.4 percent of women were already mothers, and by age 29, 82.8 percent of women were mothers. I can't find on the internet the birth dates of Dr. Slaughter's parents nor the exact year of birth for her firstborn--though if he was 14 or 15 in 2011 when she resigned her position, he was born either 1996 or 1997. So, given these assumptions, I would guess that when her first child was born in the 1990s, Dr. Slaughter's parents were between the ages of 58 and 66.

Birth trends have changed drastically since the Boomers were born to the Silents. Boomers started having babies older. At age 20, 25.3 percent of Baby Boomers were mothers. By age 28, 67.2 percent of Boomer women were mothers. Baby Boomers started their families later, and then continued having babies at later ages than their parents.

So, what does this mean? Well, for Dr. Slaughter's generation, the burden of aging parents was concurrent with their children's adolescence. This has two implications. First, Boomers as a generation were able to use grandparent support (if geographically possible) for childcare needs. They could rely on the older generation to still be young enough to take care of the Boomers' young children. Second, as the Boomers' children aged and needed less direct parental supervision--tweens and teens as opposed to babies or toddlers--Boomers' could afford to allocate time to supporting their aging parents.

This will not be the case for Generations X, Y, and Z. Maternal age has continued to increase and these generations will face the challenges incurred by aging parents concurrent with their children's most time-intensive younger years. That is, Generations X, Y, and Z were likely born to parents in their late 20s, 30s, or even 40s. They are also likely to be starting their families in their late 20s, 30s, or 40s. So, this generation will have both an infant and parents entering old age. Using myself as anecdata, if I have my first child at age 35, my parents and in-laws will range from 69-73 years old.

So, my parents and in-laws will be drastically older than the Boomers' parents when they had kids. That means that I'll be taking on some caregiver role earlier than the Boomers did for their parents. This effect will be compounded too for Generations X and Y, because Baby Boomers are in poorer health than the Silent Generation.

This has been a lot of birth rate trend discussion to get to my point, which is this: going forward, it is imperative that policy support younger generations in taking care of the aging Boomers. Family policy cannot have a singular focus on babies and children. It needs to support Generations X, Y, and Z by also implementing a much more expansive (and humane) eldercare system. 

Younger generations will need more support than previous generations for family policy, because the care structure is shifting. Instead of relying on grandparents for support in their children's formative years, more parents will be juggling the care of their toddlers and their parents.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is correct; women face structural discrimination that prevents them from achieving the mythical work-family balance. However, her policy suggestions miss the greatest challenge for generations moving forward, dual care-giving.