INTIAL IDEAS
INITIAL RESEARCH
Even though women make up half the population, less than 20% of leadership positions are currently held by women, whether in politics or the corporate world.
“We are stuck in our gender-specific roles. Men need to do more childcare and housework. We cannot have equality in the office until we have equality in the home.” - Sheryl Sandberg
“We’re told, ‘It is fine for you to conquer the world and be a powerful executive but everything still has to be managed beautifully on the home front – if it is not then you’re a failure in one way or the other’. The truth is that is impossible” - Tiffany Dufu.
Tiffany Dufu believes at some point in women’s lives it hits them that it is impossible to both be successful professionally and perform "flawlessly" at home.
“I was on Stepford Wife auto pilot, there was always this disconnect that I hadn’t come to terms with, because as modern, empowered women, we don’t want to admit we are not in the driving seat of our own lives and we have succumbed to gender norms.”
Dufu says for the first eight years of her marriage to her college sweetheart Kojo the household responsibilities “fell along traditional gender lines”. She cooked, cleaned, washed and moved around the country as her husband’s job changed.
This continued for a long period until Dufu decided to drop the ball at home, let up a lot of the micro-managing she had been doing, and call on her husband for his help in their domestic life as well as their financial life. This involved extending practises from her job into her home life. So, as she had assigned her juniors tasks at work, she later divvied up chores like cleaning the bathroom sink and vacuuming between herself and Kojo.
In the book 'Drop the Ball', she tells the story about when Kojo worked abroad in Dubai and was trying to get a job in the US partly because he missed his family. However, when he explained that he wanted to return to the US to prospective employers and peers he said it was because his wife was “nagging” him. When Dufu confronted him about it, he responded: ‘Am I supposed to tell people I miss my family? That I want to take my kids to school? That I’m tired of my toddler thinking I live in a screen through Facetime? I can’t say that.’”
“How do you do it all?” ‘I expect far less from myself and more from my husband than the average woman.’
Women can successfully flourish at work and in their personal lives, whatever this may entail, but in order to do so “we have to drop unrealistic expectation of doing it all”.
"'Oh, you mean the mail can pile up and it can be spilling over my kitchen counter and no one’s going to come and arrest me for not paying the parking ticket, and none of my friends are going to divorce me and life can still go on.' That for me was a huge awakening that I wanted more women to have because if there’s one thing I feel like we need more practice in, it’s just failing publicly. To know that life can still go on."
"It doesn’t mean that I don’t ever wash the dishes—it just never occurs to me anymore that it’s my job to wash the dishes. Or that I’m a bad person or a bad mother or a bad wife or a bad worker because I don’t."
"We begin usually as daughters and it goes onto friend, to student, to worker, maybe to wife, mother. And, unfortunately, men have roles too, but women have to put the word “good” in front of all our roles. So we can’t just be a daughter, we strive to be a good daughter, right? And a good sister, and a good friend, and a good student, and a good worker. And all of what is required in order to fulfill those roles is far too much work than is humanly possible. "
"Like when I think about how closely I tied how my children’s hair looked to my value as a mother, it’s remarkable to me. If my son doesn’t have a haircut, if my daughter’s hair isn’t beautifully braided with her beads, or isn’t beautifully twisted, I really feel like my kids are going to be walking down the street and someone’s going to look at them and say, “Ooh, who is their mother, and why doesn’t she love them?” My husband never has a thought that he’s a bad father or that anyone would question who he is because his son needs a haircut."
"The unequal division of labor at home literally stifles the ambition of whoever is the primary caregiver."
"If what matters most to me is raising conscious global citizens, and I’ve got scheduling a dentist appointment on my to-do list, is scheduling a dentist appointment my highest and best use in raising conscious global citizens? No! All of a sudden, something that I was stressing over, that I thought if I didn’t do meant that I was a terrible person, wasn’t very important, at all, in the scheme of things."
"You already have everything you need to be successful. Though I remember spending a lot of time trying to reach outside of myself in order to acquire things that I thought that I needed, when now in hindsight, the things that had made me most successful, the things that are my capital, the things that are my highest value, are things that I had all along. And it’s so ironic, but you’ve already got it. You are everything that you need, as opposed to operating from this feeling of inadequacy, as if we’re not enough. "
"If you want something and you’ve never had it before, you’re going to have to do something you’ve never done before in order to get it. "
Sources:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/women-expect-less-need-drop-ball-do-less-relationships-men-partners-boyfriends-tiffany-dufu-book-a7688911.html#gallery"'Oh, you mean the mail can pile up and it can be spilling over my kitchen counter and no one’s going to come and arrest me for not paying the parking ticket, and none of my friends are going to divorce me and life can still go on.' That for me was a huge awakening that I wanted more women to have because if there’s one thing I feel like we need more practice in, it’s just failing publicly. To know that life can still go on."
"It doesn’t mean that I don’t ever wash the dishes—it just never occurs to me anymore that it’s my job to wash the dishes. Or that I’m a bad person or a bad mother or a bad wife or a bad worker because I don’t."
"We begin usually as daughters and it goes onto friend, to student, to worker, maybe to wife, mother. And, unfortunately, men have roles too, but women have to put the word “good” in front of all our roles. So we can’t just be a daughter, we strive to be a good daughter, right? And a good sister, and a good friend, and a good student, and a good worker. And all of what is required in order to fulfill those roles is far too much work than is humanly possible. "
"Like when I think about how closely I tied how my children’s hair looked to my value as a mother, it’s remarkable to me. If my son doesn’t have a haircut, if my daughter’s hair isn’t beautifully braided with her beads, or isn’t beautifully twisted, I really feel like my kids are going to be walking down the street and someone’s going to look at them and say, “Ooh, who is their mother, and why doesn’t she love them?” My husband never has a thought that he’s a bad father or that anyone would question who he is because his son needs a haircut."
"The unequal division of labor at home literally stifles the ambition of whoever is the primary caregiver."
"If what matters most to me is raising conscious global citizens, and I’ve got scheduling a dentist appointment on my to-do list, is scheduling a dentist appointment my highest and best use in raising conscious global citizens? No! All of a sudden, something that I was stressing over, that I thought if I didn’t do meant that I was a terrible person, wasn’t very important, at all, in the scheme of things."
"You already have everything you need to be successful. Though I remember spending a lot of time trying to reach outside of myself in order to acquire things that I thought that I needed, when now in hindsight, the things that had made me most successful, the things that are my capital, the things that are my highest value, are things that I had all along. And it’s so ironic, but you’ve already got it. You are everything that you need, as opposed to operating from this feeling of inadequacy, as if we’re not enough. "
"If you want something and you’ve never had it before, you’re going to have to do something you’ve never done before in order to get it. "
Sources:
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/interview-with-tiffany-dufu-on-her-new-book-drop_us_58c2cd9be4b070e55af9ee0c
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