Unfinished Business

University of Chicago economist Marianne Bertrand and her colleagues Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan show in a time-use study that women who outearn their husbands do more housework than women who do not.

Consider the women you know. How many are struggling to squeeze even more into already packed lives? How many are saying yes too often and no all too rarely? How many are trying to convince themselves that perfection is just beyond the horizon? All they have to do is work harder, sleep less, push more, smile wider, be tougher, and, then, maybe, they will get there, somehow, someday.

my younger years, I was an active participant in this game. Gene Sperling, who rose to become director of the National Economic Council under President Obama, was a legendary workaholic. I used to meet him at two A.M. at the vending machines in the tunnels at Harvard Law School when we were both staying up all night working on cases for different professors. And indeed, when my parents came to visit for my law school graduation, they wanted to see the big armchair in my professor’s office where, I joked, I had spent more nights than in my own bed.

“TIME MACHO,” AS I LIKE to call it, is the relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours the international dateline affords you.

Law firms and businesses are well acquainted with the “second-child syndrome,” where suddenly a talented woman who was making it work with one child can no longer work full-time or at the same job with two children. Other women manage two children and their careers until a child gets sick or starts having real trouble in or out of school; an aging parent needs care; a partner gets a promotion requiring him or her to travel extensively; a marriage comes apart; or a move requires leaving a vital family support system behind.

reason she’s in this job is because she never turned down a promotion.”

My schedule was often so finely calibrated that a kid’s ear infection could send a week’s worth of appointments toppling into one another like dominoes, and I certainly faced days where I felt like I was letting both my family and my

MANY WOMEN AND MEN MANAGE to juggle two careers and caregiving responsibilities for children and/or aging parents through remarkable organization and time management, often coupled with chronic sleep deprivation. Making it all fit, from baking school cupcakes at midnight to rising at five to get writing or reading done to prep for a meeting or a class, can be exhilarating even if exhausting.

was working round the clock with my team on the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department to finish a major eighteen-month project for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It was bitingly cold; as one of my colleagues and I walked home in the early morning hours,

went from a world in which my office was a ten-minute walk away from home to a world in which I left the house at five A.M. Monday morning and came back late Friday afternoon or evening.