Anne-Marie Slaughter
President and CEO at New America
Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family
When Anne-Marie Slaughter, Ph.D. accepted her dream job as the first female Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department serving under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009, she was confident she could juggle the demands of her position in Washington, D.C., with the responsibilities of her family life. But then life intervened. Parenting needs caused her to make a decision to leave the State Department and return to an academic career that gave her more time for her family.
After that decision and the reactions to it, Slaughter began to question the feminist narrative she grew up with. She wrote an article for The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which created a firestorm, sparked intense national debate, and became one of the most-read pieces in the magazine’s history, with over 2.5 million views. Her brand-new book, Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family, is an extension and refinement of her views. In it, Slaughter calls for a societal shift towards caregiving, one that places issues of family – parental leave, subsidized sliding scale high-quality child care, elder care, and flexible work hours – on equal footing with workplace issues. It’s her contention that true equality between men and women requires resolving the tension between the drive to compete in the workplace (the pursuit of self-interest) and the drive to care (the impulse to put others first). Both behaviors are equally valuable and necessary, yet in our contemporary work world, competition is valued more. Slaughter calls this the “taproot” problem, and calls for a society that constructs an “infrastructure of care” as robust as our existing infrastructure of competition.

Upcoming Events
Poverty, by America (Event 1 of 2)
Matthew Desmond, Ph.D.
Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
Reuben Jonathan Miller, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Poverty, by America (Event 2 of 2)
Matthew Desmond, Ph.D.
Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology, Princeton University
Alex Kotlowitz
Bestselling author, journalist, and professor at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University
Evanston Township High School Auditorium
Note: Event start time is Central Time (CT).
Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society
Arline T. Geronimus, Sc.D.
Professor in the School of Public Health and Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan
Doriane C. Miller, MD
Professor of Medicine and the inaugural director of the Center for Community Health and Vitality and the director of Health Equity Integration for the Institute of Translational Medicine at the University of Chicago
ON ZOOM