Welcome back to Global Insider’s Friday feature: The Conversation. Each week a POLITICO journalist will share an interview with a global thinker, politician, power player or personality. For this week’s issue, Politico’s D.C.-based China Correspondent Phelim Kine talks to New America CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter about the battle for work/life balance both in the U.S. and around the globe.

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Anne-Marie Slaughter has had a storied career as an Ivy League law professor and broke the glass ceiling at the State Department by becoming the first woman to become State’s director of policy planning under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And she’s now the chief executive of the think tank New America, which grapples with the challenges and opportunities of fast-paced social and technological change.

But Slaughter is best known for revealing the often-impossible dilemmas that women — and particularly those with caregiving responsibilities for children or elderly parents — face in trying to juggle high-level professional careers with their family lives without burning out, a discussion she drove with her 2012 Atlantic magazine article “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.”

Long before pandemic-imposed home lockdowns spawned a national appreciation of Zoom-powered work-from-home flexible jobs, Slaughter was calling for a rethinking of the demands that traditional workplaces imposed on women.

I spoke with Slaughter about the Capitol Hill work culture, challenges for women across the world and what New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s recent resignation says about the male-female divide in top political jobs.

What were the uniquely pathological elements of D.C.-Capitol Hill work/life balance?

Particularly with political jobs there’s a sense of “we are at the center of the universe and a lot of people depend on us doing these jobs well.” Which is true. In a foreign policy or domestic crisis what the U.S. does is usually consequential. And in the government — particularly doing anything where you have to respond to crises — you just can’t dictate your hours.

Secretary Clinton was as generous as any boss could be, but you couldn’t say to the Egyptians “hold the revolution.” If there’s a bank run and you’re at the Fed or the Treasury, you have to be working around the clock. It’s not more intense than Wall Street or startup culture, but it is also amplified by a tremendous amount of ambition. There was this kind of “time macho” — a kind of competition of “I can work longer than you can” is definitely a big part of D.C. culture, some of which is necessary and some of which isn’t. You could start the day at 8:30 am as Secretary Clinton did to let people take their kids to school. It is doable, but it’s not traditionally been done.

I think it’s amplified by this sense that we’re in Washington, D.C., which is the capital of the United States of America, which is the leader of the free world and everything we do has enormous consequences. Again, a lot of what we do does but not everything. There are definitely things you can do to make it easier. That said, if somebody tells me they’re going to work on the National Security Council, I tell them, “Okay, you’re not going to see your family for two years. Just accept that and prepare for it.” And you know, after two years, it depends on your priorities, but I would say that you’ve done your tour, just like in the military, and then take time out.

Where in the world are countries actually delivering policies that allow for work/life balance and put a premium on care rather than competition?

The Europeans are far ahead on care and work life balance. We always look to the Scandinavians, the Dutch and now the Germans who have parental leave. Ursula von der Leyen, who is now the president of the European Commission, enacted a rule when she was Germany’s Family Affairs minister that paternity leave required men to use it or lose it: You couldn’t give it to you wife so if you didn’t take it you left money on the table. So there are a lot of innovative policies like that. Britain has the right to part-time work policy, which prevents people from getting fired if they could no longer work full time.

Most of those initiatives are too “statist” for the U.S. But Americans who go to France and discover that they can have a child and then spend a week in hospital and then have a nurse visit you at home and then your child goes directly into a wonderful creche with all the other babies — they’re like “I think I’ll stay here.”

So I think there’s a growing awareness of just how insane and threadbare our infrastructure of care is. It’s shown the difference between a “working to live” versus a “living to work” ethos.

In recent months both New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon have announced they will resign due to the pressure of those jobs. What does that tell us about how men and women who reach the highest levels of electoral office manage the stress of those roles differently?

There’s a much deeper point here, which is if a man did that — and this is where gender stereotypes hurt both of us — he would be pilloried far worse in many ways than Jacinda Ardern. Men showing vulnerability means you’re basically emasculating yourself in many ways. For women, it’s a fine line. You have to be really careful, but remember, Hillary Clinton went up in the polls when she cried in New Hampshire in 2008. Sen. Edmund Muskie (D-Maine) in 1972 not so much.

So there’s this incredible double standard there but I think Jacinda Ardern and other women — and some men but more women — are pioneering a much more human side of leadership. Because what she also said is “politicians are people too, and I can’t do this.” And I think that’s just healthier.

Being able to be honest and vulnerable with the people you lead should be a sign of strength, up to a point. You don’t fall apart, you’ve still got to lead, but not being afraid to show that you are human is a more honest way to lead.

What are you doing at New America to connect your ideas on care and work/life balance with a global audience?

We have a set of programs on what we call “people and planet centered global politics.” There’s a tremendous overlap there in that it really does come down to how much you value care. If you think about human beings as caring beings and competitive beings and you really accept the evidence from anthropology and other social science psychology that human beings need to be connected to one another to thrive in good ways, then looking at global issues, you really start thinking about how we foster a world in which human beings have positive relationships with one another and to the planet.

I hope for the next 10 years, I will be able to bring together some of the work on gender equity and care and apply a global perspective. The first thing you see is that the threats that we’re facing — pandemics and climate change and food insecurity and water insecurity and energy insecurity — those are all at a much more human scale. There are geopolitics of course, but ultimately, these are issues that come down to what human beings do. And the impact is on human beings. So New America is pushing for a new American role in the world to lead on on these big global issues, but also to think about what we need to do so that people flourish, which is more of a development agenda, but I think it really has to be equal with the geopolitical agenda.

Thanks to editor Heidi Vogt and producer Andrew Howard.

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