Nothing changes for women when we are constantly told balance is 'unattainable'

The notion of women 'having it all' has never really been peddled, in fact it's the opposite, writes Ingrid Seim 

Sheryl Sandberg’s 'Lean In' from 2013 to some extent promoted the message, and might be what embodies the source of the lie for some, but it is important to note that despite her book's success and reach it was also very rapidly shut down and criticised for being elitist and unrealistic. File Picture: Jose Luis Magana/AP

Ask almost anyone and they will tell you that at some point women were told they could have it all. They will also then most likely go on to tell you that this was lie, a feminist utopia we were sadly duped into believing in. 

Confronted with the lived experience of frantically, and often unsuccessfully, juggling the multiple and competing responsibilities of work and family life, most women have — not surprisingly — come to the conclusion that they were sold a pup. And we feel let down, betrayed, and at the very least like we have grounds to sue for false advertising. 

We nod wisely and say things like "yes, you can have it all, but not at the same time" or similar, and shake our heads at whoever claimed otherwise. But who was it that told us this, and when? Did anyone actually, ever?

During a recent clear-out, I came across a box full of decades old women’s magazines. As I started flicking through them, fuelled by a mild curiosity about exactly what messages we were being given around the turn of the century, I came across several articles on women and work.

In issues from 1999, I was reading about how women pursuing careers were becoming too much like men and how wrong that was. And not in the "let's embrace more female qualities in leadership" approach that we are now thankfully seeing more of. Simply because it was unbecoming and unnatural. Definitely no inspirational words about how the world was our oyster here.

Almost a decade earlier, in 1991, I had read Susan Faludi's Backlash. Her thoroughly researched book described how feminism at the time was criticised for having gone "too far", and how all this equality was just making women miserable — with the added risk of ending up childless from wasting our fertile years working.

It clearly wasn’t in the 1990s or even the 1980s that we were told that we could have it all. Did it come later? Did the girl power messaging of those decades transcend and eventually transform the backlash, turning the new millennium into a reset with women assured that their ambition to have a meaningful career and a family life was an achievable one?

Mummy wars era

Seems not. Rather than resetting, the cultural narrative firmly locked in. Despite little evidence that anyone had ever claimed it possible, Harvard Business Review published an article in 2002 on "Executive Women and the Myth of Having It All". 

And then we entered the mummy wars era of the 2000s, where the now undisputed choice that had to be made between career and family entered a high-stakes arena.

I had almost forgotten about the mummy wars; such is the power of the myth of the halcyon “having it all” days. But at the time, career versus stay-at-home mum became a zero-sum game where women were pitted against each other in an atmosphere more reminiscent of The Hunger Games than any form of girl power alliance. 

While we see evidence of this dichotomy still in the current tradwife “debate” (what is this obsession with turning everything women do or don’t do into something we need to have opinions on?), there was a nastiness to the mummy war trope that thankfully softened.

But not to tell us we could have it all, in case you were still thinking it was just around the corner. Spoiler alert: It was not. 

Although Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In from 2013 to some extent promoted that message, and might be what embodies the source of the lie for some, it is important to note that despite her book's success and reach it was also very rapidly shut down and criticised — by women, mainly — for being elitist and unrealistic.

The real message — the impossibility of it all — stays on point. It just shifts in accordance with the zeitgeist

With #MeToo taking hold, women’s marches and referenda amplifying and emboldening women’s voices, solidarity and inclusiveness shaping our collective consciousness, and finally with covid blurring the lines between work and home to an extent we had never seen before, it becomes less aggressive and judgmental, more collective and compassionate.

It’s not that anyone was doing it wrong before. It’s just that it was never possible. We were lied to.

Only we weren’t. Once you start looking into it, it becomes quite clear that the only thing women have consistently been told is that the, in fairness, pretty reasonable wish to have a meaningful career and a balanced family life is unattainable. 

That is, perhaps, the biggest and most damaging lie of all, and the message we should take issue with. It’s a message which stops us from finding, and demanding, solutions that actually work. 

If it’s impossible, nobody has to do anything about it. It’s a message which absolves those who choose not to implement policies or working conditions that would actually allow us to balance life and work in a meaningful way, and which instead gaslights those who struggle in the reality those absences have created.

That’s the lie. If we don’t call it out, we will just keep getting iterations of it in new forms, decade after decade, and nothing will ever change.

• Ingrid Seim is an executive coach and leadership consultant specialising in female leadership and work-life balance