Charlie and the Great Glass Ceiling

“Do you think you and your friends are afraid of succeeding?” my mother asked across the dinner table last week. I shook my head emphatically.

“I think we’re afraid of not succeeding,” I responded between bites of a sumptuous feast of homemade eggplant parmesan and pasta.

I’m sure I would not have enjoyed meals as delicious as my mother’s for the first 18 years of my life (sorry, Annenberg, but you just don’t measure up) if she had chosen to apply her B.A. from Yale, M.A. from Columbia, and J.D. from Harvard in the paid workforce rather than as a soldier in America’s army of stay-at-home moms. Lucky for me, even through year after year of high-intensity schooling, the fast track never truly appealed to my mother.  She was happy to step off and slow down when I was born. In fact, she says, she’s glad that she’s a woman. That way, no one faults her for choosing childcare over career.

Of course, there’s the problem: the fact that so many women feel they must make a choice at all.  As Anne-Marie Slaughter puts it, even nearly a century after the 19th amendment enshrined women’s suffrage, “Women Still Can’t Have It All.”  Slaughter, who left her job at the State Department to spend more time with her family, argues that the antiquated belief that the working world belongs to men and the home to women is not so outdated after all. Rather, it remains ingrained in our collective mindset. The consequences of that perception, maintains Slaughter, pervade our workplaces: Policies render it impossible for women both to keep demanding jobs and to care for demanding children. Employers and society as a whole need to adapt to accommodate devotion to family.  Then and only then will women have a fair professional shake.

Sheryl K. Sandberg ‘91, the chief operating officer of Facebook, would beg to differ.  As far as Sandberg is concerned, women could have it all—if they would just buck up and try. In her 2011 Barnard commencement address, Sandberg presented the thesis on which she later built an entire book: “We will never close the achievement gap until we close the ambition gap.” Women sabotage themselves by holding back in the present when it comes to professional advancement because they anticipate a difficult balance between acting as breadwinner and homemaker down the road. The onus of changing the status quo, according to Sandberg, lies not with corporations but with women who must “Lean In” to their career paths and keep pushing until they’ve reached the pinnacle of success.

Slaughter and Sandberg may disagree on the cause of the dearth of women in leadership positions both nationally and internationally, but no one should dispute that we face a problem: Women make up only 18.2 percent of the United States Congress and only 16 percent of corporate directors and officers.

So, where does that leave me? I wasn’t lying when I told my mother that I believe my female peers and I fear not success but rather falling short of it, and I also believe many of us enrolled at Harvard for exactly that reason. Yet a report commissioned by the Undergraduate Council and the Harvard Women’s Center earlier in the month revealed that organizations students consider “prestigious” are largely male-run, and men also outnumber women in extracurricular pursuits dubbed “academic” or “governmental.” The infamous glass ceiling certainly remains intact in the professional world, but might it exist already at the college level, even at an institution that prides itself on its liberal outlook and on the drive of all its students? And if it does, do women bar themselves from achievement as Sandberg contends, or do Slaughter’s myriad structural factors work against them?

The battle between Slaughter and Sandberg presents a false dichotomy. In reality, the two authors’ views are far from mutually exclusive. Perhaps, as Sandberg claims, women do refrain from seizing every opportunity for advancement, worried that other obligations later in life will prevent them from following up on earlier progress. If that’s the case, however, those who would otherwise love to head up both the office and the household likely pull out of the race to the top because of the very social and corporate factors Slaughter identifies. If anything is to change, the impetus must come from players on both sides of the court. By all means, women should lean in, but their partners and employers must support them, or they will fall.

Molly L. Roberts ’16, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Holworthy Hall. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays. Follow her on Twitter at @mollylroberts.