Let’s Talk About Palin’s Family Challenges

Gov. Sarah Palin’s commando muscle-flex in St. Paul Wednesday night eviscerated the argument that she might not be capable of handling the vice presidency and five children at the same time. Indeed, we were left with the distinct impression that on a slow day, she could clean up America, balance our budget with a little help from eBay, and win the Iditarod — all with 10 kids tied to her back.

What Sarah Palin did not do, however, is put an end to the latest national conversation about "trying to have it all." Because the question we’re all asking isn’t can she do it, but why is she doing it? Mrs. Palin, you see, happens to be bucking a new national trend. Even as most mothers across America chuckle appreciatively about pit bulls and lipstick and applaud her bravado, they are making choices that look very un-Palinesque.

This week we’ve heard our feminist foremothers argue that any sentence mixing the words woman, kids and work is inappropriate — heretical even. "A man wouldn’t face this sort of scrutiny," they grumble darkly.

But Mrs. Palin and her career aspirations are not falling victim to a secret cabal of men trying, once again, to impose an impossible standard on women. And this is not a redux of the old Mommy Wars — that stale, red herring of a debate between "career" moms and their "stay at home" counterparts.

Mrs. Palin is actually putting a spotlight on a new women’s movement we call "Womenomics." Thanks to women’s fast-growing market value we can finally live and work in a way that wins us time and avoids that agonizing choice of career or kids. Today as never before women can define success on their own terms.

Fed up with 50- and 60-hour weeks and a career ladder we didn’t build and don’t want to climb, women are looking for jobs that demand fewer and freer hours. We want to work but we also want quantity time, as well as quality time, with our children. Most of us no longer buy the onwards-and-upwards drive to the corner office (or in Mrs. Palin’s case, the West Wing) at the cost of a fragmented family life. More and more, women are choosing a tapestry of family and work in which we define our own success in reasonable terms — even if we sacrifice some "prestige."

In 1992, 57% of women with degrees wanted more responsibility at work, but by 2002 that figure had plummeted to 36%, according to the Family and Work Institute. Four out of five women want more flexibility at work and call it a top priority; 60% of us want to work part-time. What we’re saying is we’ll trade responsibility, title — even paycheck — for more time and more control. And we have company. Increasingly men say they too want more flexibility at work. Gen X and Gen Y won’t even talk about sitting at a desk for 10 hours a day.

What makes this revolution possible is that it’s grounded in hard-core economics. Women are the hottest commodity in the hunt for talent.

We’re 58% of college graduates, we get graduate degrees in greater numbers than men. Companies are waking up to the fact that women are more than a politically correct nod to diversity. We help the bottom line. A recent 19-year study of 215 Fortune 500 firms found that companies that have more women in executive positions make more money. Companies with more women in senior management get higher valuations on the American Stock Exchange.

Overwhelmingly, women are using this professional clout to redefine work, not chain themselves to it. And companies, eager to keep us and terrified of the cost of replacing us, are responding. They’ve discovered that offering work-life balance actually increases productivity. There are accountants who get home at 3 p.m. every day but remain on the fast track. Top New York Law firms have part-time partners who are still players. Can investment banks be far behind?

This isn’t really about whether Mrs. Palin can do the job with five children. Will she do it all well? That depends on your yardstick, at least on the home front. How much time is "enough" with your children, or at work, is an extremely personal decision. The point is we now have reasonable options — it’s not all or nothing. Our mother’s generation may bemoan the fact that there is still a dearth of female CEOs, but our generation knows a big part of the reason why isn’t that we can’t get there, but that most of us don’t want to make the sacrifices necessary, as the jobs are now defined, to get there.

It’s important to understand why, then, Mrs. Palin has hit a nerve. It’s not because she’s a woman with children trying to do a man’s job. It’s because she’s actually pushing the combination of professional and personal ambitions beyond the sensibilities of this generation of working moms. As women, we may be awed by her, but she’s not necessarily a role model for so many professional women who now say they want to do it differently, that they don’t want to do 150% of everything all of the time.

So what you are hearing is less condemnation than a collective gasp of amazement — and exhaustion — at the thought of juggling five children, one of them an infant, and the most extreme example of a job with little or no flexibility. It would make supermom feel feeble. And we should celebrate the fact that all of this can now be discussed openly.

It is not sexist to have this conversation. It is sexist not to.

This story first appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 6, 2008