by Anna Nordberg

A month after Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” was published, I returned to my job from maternity leave. Like many women in San Francisco, I’d read the book, and had at least partially ticked off the checklist Sandberg laid out — I had work I liked, a spouse who was good at unloading the dishwasher, and I’d cobbled together a four month, paid and unpaid leave that I stretched to five when my baby and I had health complications. As an American woman, that’s as good as it gets.

I lasted two months back at my job.

It crushed me when I resigned. I’d underestimated the challenges of working full-time with a long commute when I was barely recovered from a harrowing birth — and remote work and flexible hours were not a thing at my office. Despite this reality, all I felt was personal failure. I told myself I’d failed my career, failed feminism, failed all those other talented young women hoping to have it all.

Nine years later, I look back on that decision differently. I know how deeply privileged I was to have the choice to leave and go freelance, when so many women cannot. But I also know how absurd it is that I approached caring for a tiny, premature child and keeping my career going full throttle as a private problem that was only mine to solve rather than considering all the ways our policies and culture make motherhood so difficult in America.

The pandemic laid bare how our system is designed to fail mothers. But perhaps even more insidiously, it’s also designed to make mothers feel responsible for that failure. Instead, we should ask why we make working and raising kids in America so astonishingly hard for women, and why we consistently devalue the work of caregiving, not even bothering to count it in the country’s gross domestic product.

“Culturally, motherhood is broken in America,” says Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and the Marshall Plan for Moms, who is writing a book called “Pay Up: Reimagining Motherhood in America.” “All the language is wrong — work-life balance, working from home, having it all — it all has to be thrown in the garbage.”

Part of the issue with our lean-in, girl-boss brand of feminism, Saujani argues, is that it only continues the American tradition of placing the focus on individual achievement rather than on structural changes that would support women.

Basically, rugged individualism over systemic change.

“All this talk about the corner office and having a mentor, it doesn’t matter if women aren’t given the chance to move in and out of the workforce without penalty,” Saujani says.

Right now, that’s simply not the case. One study that followed MBA graduates from the University of Chicago found that reduction of work hours related to children was the biggest factor contributing to an income gap of more than 50% between men and women after 15 years. And mothers are seen as far less reliable than fathers or childless workers by employers, because our private sector understands that when a carpool falls through or a child is sick or a sitter cancels, it’s usually the mother who picks up the slack.

As for mothers who work inside the home, that labor is completely invisible — unpaid and so devalued we don’t even bother to count it as part of our country’s overall economic productivity, even though our country would have ground to a halt during COVID without it.

“I’ve spent my life fighting for women and girls, and I didn’t even think about the space of unpaid labor until now,” Saujani says. “There’s huge value in it. In many developed countries, families get cash payments for child rearing regardless of whether you work.”

President Biden’s child care tax credit, which expires at the end of the year, is a big deal because unlike other forms of assistance, it’s not tied to work outside the home.

The obvious retort is, “Why are we paying people to raise their own kids?” As someone who was raised in America and absorbed the idea of individual responsibility, I get that. But perhaps the starkest answer is that in the U.S., we pay money for what we value. And if we paid women — and men — for the work and effort and care it takes to raise kids, we might value that work more. It’s no surprise that anything that brushes against the idea of “women’s work” tends to be low-paid — caregiving, child care and teaching preschool being just a few examples. That’s why Biden’s human infrastructure bill, which would fund higher pay for child care providers and caregivers, is so important. We need to lift up this work, not just as a means to allow the rest of us to do our jobs, but as the essential, difficult and skilled labor that it is.

Instead of penalizing moms with gaps in their resumes, we should start incentivizing men to take parental leave by, say, tying it to performance reviews. Company goals could specify that at least 75% of fathers take paternity leave after the birth of a child. If that sounds ridiculous, it only goes to show how ingrained our notions are of who should be shouldering care.

Many tech companies have rightfully earned praise for paying for fertility treatments and egg freezing for employees. How about a dedicated human resources person who helps with child care issues? If a carpool falls through, could they provide a safe rideshare option to get a kid to baseball practice? Or help secure emergency child care when a sitter falls through?

For every woman who makes her way to the C-suite, there are thousands of other pulled down by the weight and cost of caregiving responsibilities. The American brand of lean in, career feminism has an uncomfortable time acknowledging that the girl-boss ideal is never going to lift all women up, especially since for a lot of moms, the C-suite is not actually the goal. That is perhaps a radical statement to make, but we will get further in achieving economic progress for women if we focus less on getting them up the corporate ladder and more on creating universal child care and preschool, valuing the work of caregiving, and making it the cultural norm for fathers to also adjust their hours after the birth of a child. We’ve spent 50 years talking about career feminism. What we need now is care feminism.

Anna Nordberg is a freelance journalist who writes about parenting and culture. She serves as board chair of the Children’s Council of San Francisco, which helps families find and afford quality child care.