I see much less of an ambition gap and much more of a workplace and society that isn't allowing us to use the talent that is multiplied well beyond this room ... There are millions of women out there who ... need more than, Honey, you can do it if you try hard enough.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

Categorized in : Trying Ambition Powerful

Having it all means having the same work and family choices that men do. It doesn't mean having everything that you want. No one has that.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

choices men mean

I’d been part, albeit unwillingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).

Anne-Marie Slaughter

home beautiful men

Only when women wield power in significant numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women … that will be a society that works for everyone.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

significant-numbers significant numbers

What mothers need, as well as fathers, spouses, and the children of aging parents, is an entire national infrastructure of care, every bit as important as the physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, tunnels, broadband, parks and public works.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

mother father children

The societies that work build an infrastructure of care

Anne-Marie Slaughter

infrastructure wells care

Biological sex should not determine what we are capable of, what we aspire to, what we do in our life.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

determine should sex

Young men keep telling me they don't 'have it all' either. And they may have a point. But if you define 'having it all' as the opportunity to have a successful career and a family, I'd say this. When a man tells his coworkers he's going to have a child, no one asks him how he'll manage or if he'll be coming back to work.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

successful opportunity children

In the end, no matter how much you love your work, your work will not love you back.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

ends matter love-you

If we're going to have better choices for women, we've got to have better choices for men.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

choices ifs men

Believe it or not, we will actually be better and happier workers if we are allowed to be better parents. We might even rediscover our capacity for fun.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

parent fun believe

There's a tremendous loss of talent to businesses who cannot make room for their employees to attend to family responsibilities. It really amounts to corporate waste: They hire really talented women and then lose them because they can't find ways to keep them productive and content the minute they can't "lean in."

Anne-Marie Slaughter

responsibility loss way

Over my lifetime, women have demonstrated repeatedly that they can do anything that men can do, while still managing traditional women's work at the same time. But the same expansion of roles has not been available to men.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

expansion roles men

It was interesting that feminists of my generation told me: You are discouraging younger women; you are confirming stereotypes of women; you are opening a door, initiating a debate, that will harm our movement. And my point was: We are already having this debate, especially in the younger generation.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

feminist doors interesting

Do not vote for Hillary [Clinton] because she is a woman. Ask yourself, who has done more for women so far and who will do more for women in the future - and then make your choice.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

vote choices done

We should be proud of our country when we have done something to be proud of, when we have lived up to our own standards. But the flip side of genuine pride is being able to recognize when we have fallen short, and to hold ourselves to account.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

proud pride country

The American work environment has to change, not the women. We should be recognizing that what women are not fitting into is a very narrow, male-dominated workplace of the 1950s.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

males workplace environment

When I used to teach civil procedure as a law professor, I would begin the year by telling my students that “civil procedure is the etiquette of ritualized battle.” The phrase, which did not originate with me, captured the point that peaceful, developed societies resolve disputes by law rather than by force.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

peaceful law years

Women still can't have it all.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

stills

Motherhood is a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender is. It's enormous.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

gender enormous motherhood

I'm a child of the Cold War. You do not say, "Oh, my God, there are Russian planes, so I'm going to cede the field." I mean, what kind of world would we have had if the United States had done that for 60 years?

Anne-Marie Slaughter

war mean children