Hillary Clinton's former advisor says one year maternity leave is 'too long out of the workplace'
Hillary Clinton’s former advisor says men and women should split maternity leave because a year is “too long out of the workplace"
Anne-Marie Slaughter, who served as the Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department from 2009 to 2011 under then Secretary of State Ms Clinton, says shared care leave should replace traditional maternity leave.
“My ideal would be the woman takes six months and the man takes six, and they divide that however they want,” she told The Times. “Both parents need to bond with the child and both parents need to understand what it takes to be parents and to be workers.
“You can really fall behind in a year. It’s too long out of the workplace.”
Ms Slaughter, who is the current President and CEO of the non-partisan think tank New America, previously wrote an opinion piece in The Atlantic entitled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”. In the article, she explained how she struggled balancing her high-profile job with being a mother to two teenage boys. However, she was keen to stress that women can have it all but that the current system and environment need to change in order to do this and clarified this position again with the newspaper.
“What I was saying is we still can’t have it all because we haven’t made enough changes,” she said. “The message was ‘Here are the changes we need to make’ whereas many people interpreted me as saying: ‘Women should just accept that they’re never going to be equal.’ No! Not in the least. Of course women can be equal, but only if men are more equal in the area of traditional women’s work.”
Ms Slaughter ended up resigning from her post in the government to focus on her family after she became worried about the behaviour and attitudes of one of her sons.
She says she “absolutely” regrets her decision: “It was my dream job. I would have loved to have been on the front-lines negotiating with Iran or at the UN but on the other hand there are trade-offs in life.”
