Work-Life Balance: Realistic Goal or Feminist Myth?

Working women can't have it all. At least, that's what Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former policy director under vice-president Hillary Clinton, says. In a thought-provoking cover story for the Atlantic, Slaughter describes two years of bending over backwards to balance a hectic government job with being a mother of two. For a long time, she believed achieving work-life balance was a strictly personal matter of becoming better at managing her time. If other women around her could do it, why couldn't she? But as one of her children hit a rocky adolescence and her high-level job began taking its toll on her family life, Sluaghter began feeling differently. “The feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet,” she writes. As she spoke to younger women around her, she realized that many of them believe that “glibly repeating 'you can have it all' is simply airbrushing reality.”

What do you think? Is successfully balancing careers and family lives a strictly personal matter? Or do you think that we have been chasing an elusive ideal and that changes are needed at structural level for all working women?