“At the end of that six-month period,” Murphy says, “I was told by the all-male leadership of my department that I could not continue on a flexible schedule as it would hurt my professional growth.” She ended up leaving the firm entirely for a less prestigious job that pays much less, but where she has more control over her schedule. She was allowed to work “part-time” for six months after her maternity leave ended, though it was still forty hours a week. She had a generous maternity leave and took advantage of their flextime policy when she returned after having her second child. Kathryn Beaumont Murphy was already a mother when she became a junior associate-a rarity at big law firms. This assessment resonated with one young woman who wrote to me after my article in The Atlantic came out. Dame Fiona Woolf, a British solicitor and former lord mayor of London, puts it succinctly: “Girls don’t ask for because they think it’s career suicide.” In a work culture in which commitment to your career is supposed to mean you never think about or do anything else, asking for flexibility to fit your work and your life together is tantamount to declaring that you do not care as much about your job as your co-workers do. Even when firms and their managers actually support flex policies, employees often don’t ask. It is often exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for employees to avail themselves of them. In most workplaces, however, flex policies exist largely on paper. Real flexibility-the kind that gives you at least a measure of control over when and how you work in a week, a month, a year, and over the course of a career-is a critical part of the solution to the problem of how to fit work and care together. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Anne-Marie Slaughter. — - Excerpted from the book UNFINISHED BUSINESS by Anne-Marie Slaughter.
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