Unfinished Business

Unfinished Business Plot Summary

Introduction

Sarah stared at her phone, the email from her boss glowing accusingly in the darkness of her bedroom. It was 11 PM, and her children had finally fallen asleep after a chaotic evening of homework, dinner, and bedtime routines. Her husband was traveling for work again. The message requested an urgent report by morning, completely disregarding the boundaries she had tried to establish. With a sigh, Sarah opened her laptop, knowing she would sacrifice another night of desperately needed sleep. This scene plays out in countless homes across America every night - the mythical "balance" between work and family responsibilities remaining frustratingly out of reach. The truth is that the very concept of "work-life balance" sets us up for failure. It suggests a perfect equilibrium that few can achieve in a world where both career demands and family needs have intensified. This false ideal has left a generation of women and men feeling inadequate and exhausted. What if we've been asking the wrong questions all along? What if instead of seeking balance, we need to rewrite the fundamental rules that govern how we value work versus care? This transformation requires examining our deepest assumptions about gender, success, and what makes a life well-lived - not just for women trying to "have it all," but for everyone navigating the competing demands of ambition and connection in today's world.

Chapter 1: The Impossible Choice: When Career Meets Family

In December 2010, Anne-Marie Slaughter was working around the clock at the State Department, finishing a major project for Secretary Hillary Clinton. There were whispers of a potential promotion for her, which would have been a significant career advancement. Yet despite this promising trajectory, she faced a profound dilemma. Two years earlier, when Secretary Clinton offered her the position of director of policy planning, Slaughter had accepted with the understanding she could only stay for two years due to her university tenure requirements. But as opportunities for advancement emerged, the decision became more complicated. Her family situation was particularly challenging. Rather than relocating her husband and two sons to Washington, she had been commuting weekly, leaving home early Monday mornings and returning late Friday evenings. While this arrangement worked on paper, the reality was taking a toll, especially on her children. Her younger son would cry on Sunday nights before her departure, once exclaiming, "I don't want you to go. And I don't care about the country!" Her older son, struggling through adolescence, began acting out, skipping homework, and eventually getting suspended from school. As Slaughter contemplated her options, she realized that staying in Washington would mean missing crucial years with her children. Though she had always defined herself primarily through her career achievements, something was shifting in her priorities. After much reflection, she made the difficult decision to return to Princeton rather than pursue the promotion. This choice - prioritizing family over a prestigious government position - felt foreign to her self-image as a career-focused professional woman. The experience forced Slaughter to confront a profound realization: despite decades of feminist progress, women still face impossible choices between career advancement and family responsibilities. Her decision wasn't about "dropping out" but about making a deliberate choice to be present for her family during a critical time. This personal turning point would ultimately lead her to question the entire framework of how we view success, ambition, and the relationship between work and family in American society. This story illuminates the false dichotomy that continues to shape our professional landscape. The assumption that dedication to career and dedication to family are mutually exclusive forces impossible choices on both women and men. What if instead we created structures that recognized the value of both spheres and allowed for meaningful integration rather than painful trade-offs? The path forward requires reimagining not just individual choices but the entire ecosystem of work, family, and gender expectations.

Chapter 2: Half-Truths: The Myths We Tell About Having It All

Michael had always been the model of corporate success. As a senior executive at a prestigious consulting firm, he worked seventy-hour weeks, traveled constantly, and prided himself on being available to clients 24/7. His wife managed their home and raised their three children while he climbed the ladder. When his oldest daughter graduated from high school, Michael gave a heartfelt speech at her celebration dinner about how proud he was of her accomplishments. Later that night, she handed him a gift - a jar filled with colored stones. "Each stone represents a major moment in my life," she explained. "The blue ones were when you were there. The red ones were when you weren't." The jar was overwhelmingly red. Michael stared at the physical representation of his absence and felt something break inside him. This story illustrates one of the most persistent myths in our culture: that success requires total dedication to work at the expense of everything else. We celebrate the executive who answers emails at midnight but question the commitment of the employee who leaves at 5:00 to attend a child's soccer game. This myth particularly harms women, who still shoulder the majority of family responsibilities, but it damages men too, forcing them to choose between being good providers and being present parents. Another pervasive half-truth is that career advancement must follow a linear, uninterrupted trajectory. Jessica, a talented attorney, took two years away from her law firm when her second child was born with special needs. When she attempted to return, she discovered her career had effectively ended - she was placed on a permanent "mommy track" with no path back to partnership consideration. The firm's rigid structures couldn't accommodate the reality that careers, like lives, have seasons of intensity and periods that require more flexibility. These myths persist because they're embedded in workplace structures designed for a different era - when most professionals were men with stay-at-home wives. Today's reality is radically different, yet our institutions haven't evolved accordingly. The notion that dedication can only be measured in hours worked rather than results achieved keeps us trapped in unsustainable patterns. Perhaps most damaging is the myth that care work - raising children, tending to elderly parents, maintaining communities - is somehow less valuable than paid employment. This devaluation affects everyone, but particularly impacts women who still perform the majority of unpaid care work worldwide. Until we recognize care as essential, skilled labor that creates tremendous social value, we'll continue to force impossible choices between earning and caring. These half-truths about success have created a culture that exhausts parents, diminishes caregiving, and ultimately produces workplaces that fail to harness the full potential of their employees. To move forward, we need to question these fundamental assumptions about what matters and what success truly means.

Chapter 3: Competition vs. Care: Revaluing What Matters

Elena had built her career in finance with relentless drive. As one of few women in her firm's upper management, she prided herself on outworking everyone else. When her father suffered a severe stroke, Elena initially tried to manage his care remotely while maintaining her punishing schedule. Three months in, during a high-stakes client meeting, she received an urgent call from her father's caregiver. As she excused herself to take the call, her boss remarked, "Family issues again?" with unmistakable irritation. That moment crystallized something for Elena. The skills that made her excellent at managing her father's complex care - coordinating medical appointments, researching treatment options, advocating with insurance companies - were the same skills that made her valuable at work. Yet one was respected and rewarded, while the other was treated as an inconvenient distraction. This disconnect reveals a fundamental imbalance in how we value different types of contribution. Our society has constructed a hierarchy where competitive achievement consistently outranks caregiving. We celebrate the deal-maker, the entrepreneur, the visionary - roles that emphasize individual accomplishment and financial success. Meanwhile, we systematically undervalue the teachers, nurses, childcare workers, and family caregivers who nurture human potential and maintain the social fabric that makes all other achievement possible. Consider how this plays out economically. A Wall Street trader might earn millions moving money around, while a childcare worker entrusted with our most precious resource - our children - often earns minimum wage. This isn't because caring requires less skill or creates less value. Rather, it reflects deeply ingrained assumptions about what constitutes "real work" and who should do it. The competition-care divide also manifests in how we structure time. James, a management consultant and father of two, described how his firm celebrated employees who pulled all-nighters but questioned the commitment of those who needed flexibility for family responsibilities. "The irony," James noted, "is that the skills I've developed as a parent - patience, emotional intelligence, the ability to mediate conflicts - make me better at my job. But I've learned never to mention them in performance reviews." This artificial separation between competition and care harms everyone. It forces women to choose between career advancement and family involvement. It prevents men from fully engaging as caregivers without facing stigma. And it creates workplaces and communities that fail to recognize the full spectrum of human contribution and potential. What would it look like to redefine what matters? Imagine workplaces that valued results over face time, that recognized caregiving experience as leadership training, that understood that employees with rich personal lives bring creativity and perspective to their professional roles. Imagine an economy that properly compensated care work and a culture that celebrated the nurturers alongside the achievers. This shift requires more than policy changes - it demands a fundamental recalibration of our values to recognize that care and competition are complementary strengths, not opposing forces.

Chapter 4: Men's Revolution: The Other Half of Gender Equality

Matt Vilano, a dedicated father, was performing his routine "wipedown" of a shopping cart at Target when a middle-aged woman watched him and remarked, "You're a good dad," in a tone suggesting she had just spotted a rare creature in the wild. This "heinous double standard," as Vilano calls it, reveals how men who care for their children are praised for behavior that would be considered routine for mothers. It's what Andrew Romano calls "the soft bigotry of low expectations." This experience highlights why men need a movement of their own. Most gender inequalities cannot be fixed unless men have the same range of choices regarding caregiving and breadwinning that women do. Men need to hear this not as admonition but as permission: they are free to be caregivers too, and they can be just as competent in these roles as women. And crucially, they need to be respected and rewarded as men for making these choices. The resistance to this shift comes from deeply ingrained assumptions about masculinity. Charles, an African American professional, wrote challenging the claim that women feel a deeper imperative to trade work for family: "Couldn't you write a 'Why Men Can't Have It All' article with the exact same statistics arguing that social pressures on men force them to put work over family?" He continued, "As a man, I may choose a high-powered career over child rearing, and be deeply saddened by it, but I won't cry, or complain, or let on at all publicly." Evidence of changing attitudes is emerging. Wharton professor Stewart Friedman reports that for the first time, one of his male students planned to be a "stay-at-home dad" after college. Harvard Business School's student association co-president urged his fellow male students to "man up" for economic and egalitarian reasons. Even professional athletes are beginning to speak openly about their parenting roles. The most poetic description of this shift came from a Dartmouth alumna who noted that men "are starting to feel this pull of multiple directions" and are "no longer just whispers that they do not need to feel consigned exclusively to grey flannel suits, the emotional range of John Wayne or parenthood dominated by only a few tossed balls or late arrivals at school plays." This evolution represents the next crucial phase in achieving true gender equality. True gender equality requires liberation for both women and men from restrictive expectations. Just as women have fought for the right to pursue careers without abandoning family life, men must now claim the right to be fully engaged parents without sacrificing their masculine identity. This revolution isn't about men "helping" women but about men reclaiming essential aspects of human experience that traditional gender roles have denied them.

Chapter 5: Workplace Revolution: From Rigidity to Flexibility

When Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini's teenage son nearly died in a skiing accident, the experience transformed his understanding of what matters. After spending months as his son's caregiver, Bertolini returned to work with a radically different perspective. He raised the minimum wage for all Aetna employees to $16 an hour, introduced free yoga and meditation classes, and implemented flexible work arrangements across the company. Most significantly, he expanded paid parental leave and created a culture where caregiving responsibilities were openly acknowledged and accommodated. The results were striking: employee satisfaction soared, turnover dropped by 50%, and the company's stock price and productivity increased. "Taking care of people isn't just the right thing to do," Bertolini explained. "It's good business." This story illustrates an emerging truth: workplaces that recognize and support caregiving responsibilities don't just benefit employees - they perform better. Companies like Patagonia, which provides on-site childcare and allows parents to bring infants to work, report higher employee retention, stronger workplace culture, and increased loyalty. Similarly, when accounting firm PwC implemented a flexible work program that allowed employees to customize their schedules, they saw improved performance metrics across the board. These pioneering organizations are challenging the false dichotomy between profitability and humanity. They recognize that the traditional model - expecting employees to compartmentalize their personal and professional lives - is not only unrealistic but counterproductive. Instead, they're creating what management experts call "whole person workplaces" - environments that acknowledge employees as complete human beings with responsibilities and relationships beyond work. What makes these new models effective? First, they focus on results rather than face time. Companies like Netflix and LinkedIn have eliminated formal working hours entirely, allowing employees to work when and where they're most productive as long as they meet their objectives. Second, they normalize caregiving across genders. When Etsy extended parental leave to 26 weeks for all employees regardless of gender, they saw a dramatic increase in men taking full leave, shifting company culture around caregiving expectations. Perhaps most importantly, these organizations understand that the skills developed through caregiving - empathy, adaptability, crisis management, multitasking - are valuable professional assets. Rather than viewing family responsibilities as distractions from work, they see them as experiences that can enhance an employee's contribution. As one executive put it, "The parent who has managed a toddler tantrum probably has something valuable to teach us about negotiating with difficult clients." The workplace revolution isn't just about accommodating care - it's about recognizing that integrating work and life creates more sustainable, innovative, and ultimately more productive organizations. As these pioneering examples demonstrate, the future belongs to workplaces flexible enough to embrace the full humanity of their employees.

Chapter 6: Redefining Success: Career Paths for the Long Haul

During a lecture to Princeton's graduating seniors, Anne-Marie Slaughter argued that students should value breadwinning and caregiving equally over their lifetimes. One economics major responded with a thought experiment: "Suppose we decide that the value of janitors and computer scientists to our society is the same. However, it's unlikely a janitor will get as much social respect as a computer scientist, because many people can be janitors, but few can be good computer scientists." His point was that caregiving, like janitorial work, is something many people can do with little training. This assumption deserves challenging: Is managing money really harder than managing kids? Megan Gunnar, a Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, argues that a good early-childhood caregiver needs "the analytical skills of a physicist, the adaptive abilities of a crisis manager, the emotional insight of a psychologist, and the range of general knowledge of a Jeopardy! champion." Neuroscientific evidence now confirms that the care children receive from birth to age five can set them up or hold them back for life. The Carolina Abecedarian Project demonstrates this powerfully. This North Carolina social experiment compared disadvantaged children who received high-quality, stimulating care from birth to age five with a control group that received no intervention. Four decades later, the adults who received great care as children were over four times more likely to have a college degree and were physically healthier than those in the control group. Caregiving is not just giving; it's also getting. Allison Stevens, a journalist, wrote that while mothering includes hard work and boredom, "it's also been laughter, sunshine, swing sets and wonder. Some of the best stuff life has to offer." Wharton professor Adam Grant's research shows that "givers" can be highly successful in all fields, including business and politics, not despite but because of their giving nature. By reframing caregiving as an investment in human capital and recognizing the skills it requires and develops, we can begin to value it properly. This isn't about devaluing competition but elevating care to its proper place as an essential human drive and activity. When we value competition and care equally, we move closer to true equality between men and women, seeing work and family not as a "women's issue" but as a human issue for anyone who works and also loves. Redefining success means creating a world where achievement isn't measured solely by titles and income but by the quality of our contributions across all domains of life. It means recognizing that a well-lived life includes both meaningful work and deep connection, both individual accomplishment and service to others. This expanded definition creates space for diverse paths to fulfillment, liberating both women and men to craft lives aligned with their authentic values rather than narrow cultural scripts.

Chapter 7: Personal Strategies: Navigating Work and Family Today

Alex graduated from business school with a clear five-year plan: work at a prestigious consulting firm, make manager by 30, then partner by 35. The plan didn't account for falling in love, having twins, or his partner's equally demanding career. By year three, he was traveling four days a week while his partner struggled to manage their young children alone. Something had to give. After intense soul-searching, Alex approached his boss about reducing travel and working remotely two days a week. To his surprise, his boss revealed that he had faced similar challenges years earlier and regretted not making changes sooner. Together they crafted a role that maintained Alex's career trajectory while accommodating his family needs. "I realized my original plan was based on someone else's definition of success," Alex reflected. "I needed to write my own script." Alex's story highlights a crucial truth: navigating work and care requires strategic thinking and personal agency. While systemic change is essential, individuals need not wait for perfect policies or enlightened employers to create more sustainable lives. The key is approaching your career with intentionality and a long-term perspective. First, recognize that careers span decades, not years. With increasing longevity, many professionals will work into their 70s or beyond. This extended timeline means careers can accommodate different phases - periods of intense ambition and achievement interspersed with intervals that prioritize caregiving or other pursuits. Rather than viewing career interruptions as derailments, see them as strategic pauses that may ultimately enhance your professional contribution and personal fulfillment. Second, invest in developing transferable skills that maintain value across different work arrangements. Technical expertise, communication abilities, project management, and relationship-building are portable assets that remain relevant whether you're working full-time, part-time, remotely, or returning after a career break. Continuously expanding your skill set creates resilience and options. Third, build and maintain robust professional networks. Research shows that women often underinvest in professional relationships, particularly during caregiving-intensive periods. Yet these connections provide crucial information, opportunities, and support when navigating transitions. Even during periods of reduced work engagement, maintaining professional visibility through selective involvement can preserve future options. Fourth, choose environments strategically. Not all workplaces are equally hospitable to integrated lives. Research potential employers' cultures and policies before committing. Sometimes a lateral move to an organization with more progressive practices offers better long-term prospects than advancement in a rigid environment. Similarly, certain fields and roles inherently offer more flexibility than others. These strategies don't eliminate the very real structural barriers that constrain choices, particularly for those with limited resources or facing discrimination. Individual planning cannot substitute for policy change. However, approaching your career with care in mind - anticipating future needs, building flexibility, and making conscious choices - creates more possibility within existing constraints.

Summary

Throughout these chapters, we've witnessed the profound disconnect between how our society structures work and how our lives actually unfold. We've seen how outdated assumptions about gender, success, and value create impossible binaries that force painful choices between career advancement and caregiving responsibilities. Yet we've also glimpsed emerging possibilities - workplaces that accommodate the full humanity of their employees, policies that support care as essential infrastructure, and individuals crafting more integrated lives through strategic planning and conscious choices. The path forward requires transformation at multiple levels. We must challenge the cultural narratives that devalue care work while glorifying competitive achievement. We must redesign workplaces to recognize that employees have lives beyond work - not as a concession to weakness but as acknowledgment of our shared humanity. We must implement policies that distribute the costs and benefits of caregiving more equitably across society. And as individuals, we must approach our careers with greater intentionality, recognizing that meaningful lives encompass both achievement and connection, competition and care. The future belongs not to those who can perfectly balance competing demands, but to those brave enough to rewrite the rules entirely - creating institutions and relationships that honor the full spectrum of human needs and contributions.

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Anne-Marie Slaughter

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