When Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter was asked to serve as the first female Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department, it was her dream come true. She left her tenured position at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and commuted weekly from Princeton to Washington D.C. to work under then Secretary of State and current presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. But between the grueling hours, a rigid work schedule, and raising two teenage sons back in New Jersey, Anne-Marie was struggling. As much as this was a dream job, she knew her family needed her at home. She ultimately left the State Department after two years to return to a full workload at Princeton.
Anne-Marie wrote about the difficulty of women achieving work-life balance in her widely read 2012 Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All”, which became one of the magazine’s most read articles in its history. She continued this conversation with her book Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, and Family, which is now out in paperback. Anne-Marie is now the President and CEO of New America. On the podcast Anne-Marie tells us about her first job in academia at age 30, what's changed since she published her Atlantic article and how to foster equity and balance from the policy level to our relationships.
