Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So I spend a lot my time thinking about time,
and I've come to realize time is power.
The Harvard psychologist Erik Erikson said
the richest and fullest lives make time for the three great arenas of life:
work, love and play.
So you can really only make that kind of time,
you can only make the choices that lead to a good life
if you have power.
So what does that have anything to do with what we're talking about tonight?
We're talking about imagining a future where men and women are equal.
Well, I would argue it has everything to do with it.
Because when we talk about equality,
we're talking about men and women
having the freedom, having the power to make choices without penalty.
And right now, there are penalties.
So how do we get from here to there?
Well, it all starts right here with the stories we tell ourselves,
the movies that play in our heads that we may not even recognize,
and right now, they all kind of look like this.
You know, you might laugh.
It's like, "Oh, come on. Haven't we come further than this?"
You know, in the 1950s, this was the dream, right?
Dad goes off to work; mom stays home in her apron.
And you'll notice what we're taking about:
everyone here is white, middle class, married and heterosexual.
This was the dream.
You know, the US Government
was so worried that this kind of life was soon vanishing
that they actually made a propaganda film
called "Modern Women: The Lost Sex,"
and it was all about how terrible it would be
if Rosie the Riveter actually stayed in the workforce.
This film was about trying to get Rosie to go back home,
and in the film, you'll see kids smoking on the street corners,
lighting stuff on fire,
(Laughter)
playing in the street and getting run over by cars.
This was going to be the end of Western civilization
if mothers went to work.
Well, on the one hand, this propaganda film didn't work, right?
Women and mothers, the majority of them work,
and a small but growing share of fathers, actually,
are the primary caregivers for their families.
But on the other hand, that propaganda movie really did work
because this is the movie that we still play in our head,
this is the movie that perpetuates some pretty powerful myths
that make it difficult to choose how to live our lives without penalty.
For instance, men still work more hours than women do;
they spend more time at the office.
That helps explain why they earn more -
the gender-wage gap -
it helps explain why they rise faster.
But when men try to live a different movie,
when they ask for flexible work
or when they ask for leave so that they can care for their families,
research shows that they are actually punished for that:
they're passed over for promotions, they're not given as good of work,
and often they're not seen as committed to the job.
So there's real penalty for men.
For women, women are still doing twice the housework and childcare
even when they work full time,
so there's real penalty there as well.
And if she does rise to a position of power,
she's the one that's asked,
"Well, do you really have time to balance it all?"
Right?
Women began graduating from college in greater numbers than men in 1982.
They began getting more masters degrees in 1987.
They began getting more PhDs in 2006,
and yet in every field, every profession, every industry,
women are still at the bottom and middle layers.
Let's look at how they spend their time.
This is what I want you to look at:
this was a study done of how professors spend their time,
and if you'd look, the women have a longer work day.
They're also doing twice the housework and childcare.
So that means that over the course of the year,
these women professors are doing more than 600 hours of housework more
than their male counterparts.
Now, the other thing I want you to look at is the red line, the research.
Men are doing more research.
The men and women are spending about the same amount of time at work,
but the men are spending the time in research,
which for academia, that's the coin of the realm:
that's where you get your grants, your promotions, your prestige
and the power to control your schedule.
So these old movies are still playing in our heads,
and they perpetuate some really powerful myths
that are preventing all of us from living our best lives
and doing our best work.
So tonight I'm going to talk about three.
So the first myth - the best workers work all the time.
Okay, how many of you feel that way, right?
Hey, I bought into this.
You know, isn't that what made America great, working all the time?
But you know, the interesting thing is that's not true; I was wrong.
When you look at that picture of the guy from the 1950s,
it was still light outside.
(Laughter)
Right?
He got home at probably around five, five-thirty
after working a reasonable 40-hour workweek.
Well, today, the United States
works among the longest hours of any advanced economy
save Japan and South Korea,
countries where they actually have words for dying at your desk,
(Laughter)
and we like to blame the high tech, the technology -
that that's the reason that we are always on this 24/7 kind of feeling,
and yet economists who track hours,
they notice that the work hours, the overwork hours, started in 1980,
long before we had a smartphone in every pocket.
Now, why this is important:
so we work all these hours,
but when you look internationally, at international comparisons,
we are not the most productive per hour.
So we work those long hours, but they're not all good hours.
You know who's most productive per hour?
Norway, where they work a 37.5 hour week by law.
So let me show you a new movie
because these overwork hours
are actually robbing all of us from living a good life.
So I'm going to show you a new movie.
I spent some time at a place called Menlo Innovations, in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
and they base their company on one principal, and that's joy.
And you could say, "Oh, well, isn't that nice?"
(Laughter)
but actually, they're discovering that that's a really smart business decision.
Because there's research that shows
that when you're joyful and happy and in a positive mood,
you're actually more productive and innovative:
creativity triples,
your productive energy rises 31%,
your chance for promotion rises 40%,
sales, 37%,
and doctors make better and faster diagnoses.
I talked to a woman there who came to Menlo
and was working the same way she'd worked at another high-tech firm:
70, 80 hours a week.
You know, there are firms that have T-shirts: "90 hours and loving it."
So she was working these 70-hour workweeks,
and the boss came over to her and said,
"If you cannot figure out how to do your job in 40 hours,
we will fire you."
And she said, "I had to go home and learn how to have a life again."
So let's talk about the next myth:
Mother knows best, right?
Mothers are just wired to know what to do.
Well, let me tell you a little story about my own life.
You know, we talk about women
coming home to this second shift of housework and childcare.
I like to call the holidays "the third shift."
(Laughter)
Right? Because women are still responsible for making the holiday magic.
Thank you, Martha.
(Laughter)
So this is a couple years ago,
and yeah, I did, I had Martha, full-on Martha, going in my head,
and I had invited 18 people over for Thanksgiving.
I'd spent several days just a maniac, running around, going to the store,
looking for the perfect tablecloth, right?
It's 2:00 in the afternoon.
The kitchen looks like a bomb's gone off.
You know? There's vegetable peels, there's flour everywhere.
Of course, I'm alone in the kitchen, chopping,
with all these weird vegetable recipes I know nobody's going to eat,
but I think I've got to do from scratch.
(Laughter)
Martha.
And my husband comes over to the fridge,
and I think, "Oh good, he's going to put the turkey in the oven."
You know, men, meat, right?
(Laughter)
And he opens the fridge, and he takes out a six-pack of beer.
(Laughter)
He says, "I'm going to go to Peter's house and help him with his turkey."
(Laughter)
I said, "Uh, Peter's smoking his turkey.
So you're going to go over and sit on his patio in the back porch in the sun,
drinking beer, watching Peter's turkey?"
(Laughter)
And he shrugged, and he walked out the door.
Now, I had a knife in my hand.
(Laughter)
You know, if I had just had those Cirque du Soleil lessons ...
And in that moment, though, I was livid, but I was also profoundly sad
because when we had gotten married,
we had promised each other that we would be equal partners,
and in that moment,
I realized how far we had fallen from what we had promised each other.
So I did the only thing I knew how to do as a reporter,
and I interviewed him.
(Laughter)
We went on a long walks, and I took my reporter's notebook with me.
I'd say things like, "Why did you never take parental leave?
You know, I've hated you for years."
(Laughter)
And in the course of those walks,
we realized that when it was just the two of us,
we actually did pretty well, we divided things pretty fairly.
But once that baby came home from the hospital,
once our son came home,
man, those old movies started playing in technicolor.
Well, aren't I, you know, don't I have the maternal instinct?
Shouldn't I just be doing everything at home?
Well, we were wrong.
We both assumed that was true,
but science is now showing us
that men are just as wired for nurture as women are.
Their bodies change when they become fathers.
Their testosterone levels drop,
their bodies also produce prolactin,
the hormone that's responsible for breast milk -
not in the same quantity.
(Laughter)
In brain scans, their brains also light up in the same way
for communication and nurture -
the same patterns that women do,
and the funny thing is, scientists found that by accident
because those old movies were playing in their heads too.
We didn't know this, we didn't look for it;
we found it by accident.
So men are wired for nurture.
So what did I have?
I certainly didn't know what to do with that baby at first:
Oh my God. It's crying. Now what?
But I had time.
I took a long maternity leave,
and my husband, his company had the policy, but no man took it.
He said you had to understand, it was the kiss of death.
"If I took that parental leave policy, everybody would think that I was a loser."
So he didn't take it, and our lives started to change.
Well, let's take a look at what happens when you do give men time.
This is really exciting.
In Iceland - I know, people are, "Oh, Scandinavia, oh."
(Laughter)
But this is really a lesson we can learn.
In a lot of countries, they gave women long maternity leaves,
and then they saw it really disadvantaged them at work.
So Iceland was one of a number of countries that said,
"Well, let's get men to take parental leave and see what happens."
So in 2000, they made it a law.
Their policy was women get three months, men get three months
and the family gets three months to share,
and if the men don't take their leave, the family loses the time.
Wooh, take-up rates went right through the roof:
nobody wants to lose something that you've got, right?
And so what happened - I want you to look at that yellow line -
because what happened is in three years -
men who had taken solo parental leave -
when the child was three years old,
70% of the couples are equally sharing housework and childcare.
That's a new movie; that's pretty exciting.
Now, as for those poor, abandoned children - right? -
smoking on the streets and lighting stuff on fire,
well, I've got to tell you, I also bought into that.
Can we just have a little shout-out for mother guilt there?
Right? That's where it all started.
But I'm telling you,
when you look at time-diary data,
all parents are spending more time with their children than ever
in the United States.
Working mothers today spend more time with their children
than stay-at-home moms did back in the 1950s.
And when I first saw that, I thought, "That's nuts. How can that be?"
And you look at the data:
Mothers have given up time for sleep - so everybody's exhausted -
they've given up time for personal care - so maybe we don't look as good -
and we spend virtually every ounce of our leisure time with our children.
And I'm telling you, that's not good for any of us.
It's stressing us out,
and what our kids need is the same thing that we need,
which is large stretches of unstructured time to play.
And that leads to the final myth: leisure is stupid.
Right? We're in the United States.
We work. That's how we define ourselves, right?
Well, you know, it was interesting:
as I was reporting the book,
I was trying to understand, Why do we not take vacation?
You know, we have no vacation policy in this country,
only about one quarter of our workers have no paid vacation at all,
and those of us that do have vacation, we don't take all of it
and we take work along with us when we go.
Any takers here, right?
You don't want to come back to that email inbox.
It's so terrifying that you'd rather work on vacation than enjoy it,
so I wanted to understand why.
And I found a researcher who studies busyness and the fast pace of life,
and her contention is that we have made busyness the way we show our status.
It goes along with work.
So the busier we are, the more important we feel.
And sometimes we'll even create it when it doesn't exist.
Now, she came to this conclusion with a very interesting thing:
she studies holiday letters.
You know, those big brag sheets that come every year
and you get exhausted after you read them?
It's like, "Oh, my God."
So leisure time actually is really important.
I didn't realize this; I've changed my mind.
Let me tell you a story.
There was a researcher, an Amnesty International researcher,
and she was stuck on a train between Manchester and London
for four hours,
and so what did she do?
She looked out the window and she daydreamed.
And at the end of that four hours,
the author J.K. Rowling
has said the entire plot of the Harry Potter series
fell into her brain.
So what we're discovering through neuroscience
is that when we are idle, our brains are actually most active.
And it is in this time of leisure,
when you're lost in thought, when you're pursuing a passion,
that civilization has been created:
art, music, philosophy, literature,
scientific discoveries,
and if you wonder why,
Why do we not have more great women painters
hanging in the museums?
Why do we not have more great women authors
lining the shelves of our great libraries?
It's not that women haven't had the talent;
women haven't had the time.
International studies also look at women's time,
and they found one thing:
it didn't matter your age, your race, your ethnicity,
what country you came from,
women around the globe feel that they do not deserve leisure time;
they have to earn it.
And the only way to earn it
is to get to the end of a very long to-do list,
and let's face it, it never ends.
So it is time for new movies.
Thanksgiving in my house looks really different.
We're all a work in progress.
I'm a recovering workaholic,
I"m a recovering helicopter parent,
doing my best,
but Thanksgiving looks different.
We're starting to make new movies.
Now we get around the table a couple weeks beforehand,
and we ask one question:
How do we want the time to feel?
And then we figure out the work that it's going to take to do it,
and we divide it up fairly.
The writer Annie Dillard said,
"The way we live our days is the way we live our lives."
So it's time to make new movies.
New movies that will free all of us -
men and women -
to make real choices
about what do they want to do with their time
and how to spend their lives without penalty.
It's time for new movies so that we can all live the good life.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)