The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited

Richard Florida is Co-Founder and Editor at Large at The Atlantic Cities. He's also a Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. He is a frequent speaker to communities, business and professional organizations, and founder of the Creative Class Group, whose current client list can be found here. All posts »

Why Women Still Can’t Have It All

It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.

Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

As the evening wore on, I ran into a colleague who held a senior position in the White House. She has two sons exactly my sons’ ages, but she had chosen to move them from California to D.C. when she got her job, which meant her husband commuted back to California regularly. I told her how difficult I was finding it to be away from my son when he clearly needed me. Then I said, “When this is over, I’m going to write an op-ed titled ‘Women Can’t Have It All.’”

She was horrified. “You can’t write that,” she said. “You, of all people.” What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet. I had always assumed that if I could get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January 2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could.

VIDEO: Anne-Marie Slaughter talks with Hanna Rosin about the struggles of working mothers.

A rude epiphany hit me soon after I got there. When people asked why I had left government, I explained that I’d come home not only because of Princeton’s rules (after two years of leave, you lose your tenure), but also because of my desire to be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible. I have not exactly left the ranks of full-time career women: I teach a full course load; write regular print and online columns on foreign policy; give 40 to 50 speeches a year; appear regularly on TV and radio; and am working on a new academic book. But I routinely got reactions from other women my age or older that ranged from disappointed (“It’s such a pity that you had to leave Washington”) to condescending (“I wouldn’t generalize from your experience. I’ve never had to compromise, and my kids turned out great”).

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The first set of reactions, with the underlying assumption that my choice was somehow sad or unfortunate, was irksome enough. But it was the second set of reactions—those implying that my parenting and/or my commitment to my profession were somehow substandard—that triggered a blind fury. Suddenly, finally, the penny dropped. All my life, I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the faintly superior smile while another woman told me she had decided to take some time out or pursue a less competitive career track so that she could spend more time with her family. I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist cause, chatting smugly with her dwindling number of college or law-school friends who had reached and maintained their place on the highest rungs of their profession. I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).

Last spring, I flew to Oxford to give a public lecture. At the request of a young Rhodes Scholar I know, I’d agreed to talk to the Rhodes community about “work-family balance.” I ended up speaking to a group of about 40 men and women in their mid-20s. What poured out of me was a set of very frank reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children (even though my husband, an academic, was willing to take on the lion’s share of parenting for the two years I was in Washington). I concluded by saying that my time in office had convinced me that further government service would be very unlikely while my sons were still at home. The audience was rapt, and asked many thoughtful questions. One of the first was from a young woman who began by thanking me for “not giving just one more fatuous ‘You can have it all’ talk.” Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.

The striking gap between the responses I heard from those young women (and others like them) and the responses I heard from my peers and associates prompted me to write this article. Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.

I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.

Before my service in government, I’d spent my career in academia: as a law professor and then as the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Both were demanding jobs, but I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done. I had to travel frequently, but I found I could make up for that with an extended period at home or a family vacation.

I knew that I was lucky in my career choice, but I had no idea how lucky until I spent two years in Washington within a rigid bureaucracy, even with bosses as understanding as Hillary Clinton and her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. My workweek started at 4:20 on Monday morning, when I got up to get the 5:30 train from Trenton to Washington. It ended late on Friday, with the train home. In between, the days were crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the writing work began—a never-ending stream of memos, reports, and comments on other people’s drafts. For two years, I never left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those open 24 hours, which meant that everything from dry cleaning to hair appointments to Christmas shopping had to be done on weekends, amid children’s sporting events, music lessons, family meals, and conference calls. I was entitled to four hours of vacation per pay period, which came to one day of vacation a month. And I had it better than many of my peers in D.C.; Secretary Clinton deliberately came in around 8 a.m. and left around 7 p.m., to allow her close staff to have morning and evening time with their families (although of course she worked earlier and later, from home).

In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.

I am hardly alone in this realization. Michèle Flournoy stepped down after three years as undersecretary of defense for policy, the third-highest job in the department, to spend more time at home with her three children, two of whom are teenagers. Karen Hughes left her position as the counselor to President George W. Bush after a year and a half in Washington to go home to Texas for the sake of her family. Mary Matalin, who spent two years as an assistant to Bush and the counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney before stepping down to spend more time with her daughters, wrote: “Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.”

Yet the decision to step down from a position of power—to value family over professional advancement, even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on career professionals in the United States. One phrase says it all about current attitudes toward work and family, particularly among elites. In Washington, “leaving to spend time with your family” is a euphemism for being fired. This understanding is so ingrained that when Flournoy announced her resignation last December, TheNew York Times covered her decision as follows:

Ms. Flournoy’s announcement surprised friends and a number of Pentagon officials, but all said they took her reason for resignation at face value and not as a standard Washington excuse for an official who has in reality been forced out. “I can absolutely and unequivocally state that her decision to step down has nothing to do with anything other than her commitment to her family,” said Doug Wilson, a top Pentagon spokesman. “She has loved this job and people here love her.

Think about what this “standard Washington excuse” implies: it is so unthinkable that an official would actually step down to spend time with his or her family that this must be a cover for something else. How could anyone voluntarily leave the circles of power for the responsibilities of parenthood? Depending on one’s vantage point, it is either ironic or maddening that this view abides in the nation’s capital, despite the ritual commitments to “family values” that are part of every political campaign. Regardless, this sentiment makes true work-life balance exceptionally difficult. But it cannot change unless top women speak out.

Only recently have I begun to appreciate the extent to which many young professional women feel under assault by women my age and older. After I gave a recent speech in New York, several women in their late 60s or early 70s came up to tell me how glad and proud they were to see me speaking as a foreign-policy expert. A couple of them went on, however, to contrast my career with the path being traveled by “younger women today.” One expressed dismay that many younger women “are just not willing to get out there and do it.” Said another, unaware of the circumstances of my recent job change: “They think they have to choose between having a career and having a family.”

A similar assumption underlies Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s widely publicized 2011 commencement speech at Barnard, and her earlier TED talk, in which she lamented the dismally small number of women at the top and advised young women not to “leave before you leave.” When a woman starts thinking about having children, Sandberg said, “she doesn’t raise her hand anymore … She starts leaning back.” Although couched in terms of encouragement, Sandberg’s exhortation contains more than a note of reproach. We who have made it to the top, or are striving to get there, are essentially saying to the women in the generation behind us: “What’s the matter with you?”

They have an answer that we don’t want to hear. After the speech I gave in New York, I went to dinner with a group of 30-somethings. I sat across from two vibrant women, one of whom worked at the UN and the other at a big New York law firm. As nearly always happens in these situations, they soon began asking me about work-life balance. When I told them I was writing this article, the lawyer said, “I look for role models and can’t find any.” She said the women in her firm who had become partners and taken on management positions had made tremendous sacrifices, “many of which they don’t even seem to realize … They take two years off when their kids are young but then work like crazy to get back on track professionally, which means that they see their kids when they are toddlers but not teenagers, or really barely at all.” Her friend nodded, mentioning the top professional women she knew, all of whom essentially relied on round-the-clock nannies. Both were very clear that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family.

I realize that I am blessed to have been born in the late 1950s instead of the early 1930s, as my mother was, or the beginning of the 20th century, as my grandmothers were. My mother built a successful and rewarding career as a professional artist largely in the years after my brothers and I left home—and after being told in her 20s that she could not go to medical school, as her father had done and her brother would go on to do, because, of course, she was going to get married. I owe my own freedoms and opportunities to the pioneering generation of women ahead of me—the women now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who faced overt sexism of a kind I see only when watching Mad Men, and who knew that the only way to make it as a woman was to act exactly like a man. To admit to, much less act on, maternal longings would have been fatal to their careers.

But precisely thanks to their progress, a different kind of conversation is now possible. It is time for women in leadership positions to recognize that although we are still blazing trails and breaking ceilings, many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination. As Kerry Rubin and Lia Macko, the authors of Midlife Crisis at 30, their cri de coeur for Gen-X and Gen-Y women, put it:

What we discovered in our research is that while the empowerment part of the equation has been loudly celebrated, there has been very little honest discussion among women of our age about the real barriers and flaws that still exist in the system despite the opportunities we inherited.

I am well aware that the majority of American women face problems far greater than any discussed in this article. I am writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place. We may not have choices about whether to do paid work, as dual incomes have become indispensable. But we have choices about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.

Millions of other working women face much more difficult life circumstances. Some are single mothers; many struggle to find any job; others support husbands who cannot find jobs. Many cope with a work life in which good day care is either unavailable or very expensive; school schedules do not match work schedules; and schools themselves are failing to educate their children. Many of these women are worrying not about having it all, but rather about holding on to what they do have. And although women as a group have made substantial gains in wages, educational attainment, and prestige over the past three decades, the economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have shown that women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.

The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.

The Half-Truths We Hold Dear

Let’s briefly examine the stories we tell ourselves, the clichés that I and many other women typically fall back on when younger women ask us how we have managed to “have it all.” They are not necessarily lies, but at best partial truths. We must clear them out of the way to make room for a more honest and productive discussion about real solutions to the problems faced by professional women.

It’s possible if you are just committed enough.

Our usual starting point, whether we say it explicitly or not, is that having it all depends primarily on the depth and intensity of a woman’s commitment to her career. That is precisely the sentiment behind the dismay so many older career women feel about the younger generation. They are not committed enough, we say, to make the trade-offs and sacrifices that the women ahead of them made.

Yet instead of chiding, perhaps we should face some basic facts. Very few women reach leadership positions. The pool of female candidates for any top job is small, and will only grow smaller if the women who come after us decide to take time out, or drop out of professional competition altogether, to raise children. That is exactly what has Sheryl Sandberg so upset, and rightly so. In her words, “Women are not making it to the top. A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, [the share of] women at the top—C-level jobs, board seats—tops out at 15, 16 percent.”

Can “insufficient commitment” even plausibly explain these numbers? To be sure, the women who do make it to the top are highly committed to their profession. On closer examination, however, it turns out that most of them have something else in common: they are genuine superwomen. Consider the number of women recently in the top ranks in Washington—Susan Rice, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Michelle Gavin, Nancy-Ann Min DeParle—who are Rhodes Scholars. Samantha Power, another senior White House official, won a Pulitzer Prize at age 32. Or consider Sandberg herself, who graduated with the prize given to Harvard’s top student of economics. These women cannot possibly be the standard against which even very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure.

What’s more, among those who have made it to the top, a balanced life still is more elusive for women than it is for men. A simple measure is how many women in top positions have children compared with their male colleagues. Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children. And the third, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, began her career as a judge only when her younger child was almost grown. The pattern is the same at the National Security Council: Condoleezza Rice, the first and only woman national-security adviser, is also the only national-security adviser since the 1950s not to have a family.

The line of high-level women appointees in the Obama administration is one woman deep. Virtually all of us who have stepped down have been succeeded by men; searches for women to succeed men in similar positions come up empty. Just about every woman who could plausibly be tapped is already in government. The rest of the foreign-policy world is not much better; Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently surveyed the best data he could find across the government, the military, the academy, and think tanks, and found that women hold fewer than 30 percent of the senior foreign-policy positions in each of these institutions.

These numbers are all the more striking when we look back to the 1980s, when women now in their late 40s and 50s were coming out of graduate school, and remember that our classes were nearly 50-50 men and women. We were sure then that by now, we would be living in a 50-50 world. Something derailed that dream.

Sandberg thinks that “something” is an “ambition gap”—that women do not dream big enough. I am all for encouraging young women to reach for the stars. But I fear that the obstacles that keep women from reaching the top are rather more prosaic than the scope of their ambition. My longtime and invaluable assistant, who has a doctorate and juggles many balls as the mother of teenage twins, e-mailed me while I was working on this article: “You know what would help the vast majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” The present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms were the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed.

Consider some of the responses of women interviewed by Zenko about why “women are significantly underrepresented in foreign policy and national security positions in government, academia, and think tanks.” Juliette Kayyem, who served as an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2011 and now writes a foreign-policy and national-security column for The Boston Globe, told Zenko that among other reasons,

the basic truth is also this: the travel sucks. As my youngest of three children is now 6, I can look back at the years when they were all young and realize just how disruptive all the travel was. There were also trips I couldn’t take because I was pregnant or on leave, the conferences I couldn’t attend because (note to conference organizers: weekends are a bad choice) kids would be home from school, and the various excursions that were offered but just couldn’t be managed.

Jolynn Shoemaker, the director of Women in International Security, agreed: “Inflexible schedules, unrelenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office are common features of these jobs.”

These “mundane” issues—the need to travel constantly to succeed, the conflicts between school schedules and work schedules, the insistence that work be done in the office—cannot be solved by exhortations to close the ambition gap. I would hope to see commencement speeches that finger America’s social and business policies, rather than women’s level of ambition, in explaining the dearth of women at the top. But changing these policies requires much more than speeches. It means fighting the mundane battles—every day, every year—in individual workplaces, in legislatures, and in the media.

It’s possible if you marry the right person.

Sandberg’s second message in her Barnard commencement address was: “The most important career decision you’re going to make is whether or not you have a life partner and who that partner is.” Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, recently drove that message home to an audience of Princeton students and alumni gathered to hear her acceptance speech for the James Madison Medal. During the Q&A session, an audience member asked her how she managed her career and her family. She laughed and pointed to her husband in the front row, saying: “There’s my work-life balance.” I could never have had the career I have had without my husband, Andrew Moravcsik, who is a tenured professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton. Andy has spent more time with our sons than I have, not only on homework, but also on baseball, music lessons, photography, card games, and more. When each of them had to bring in a foreign dish for his fourth-grade class dinner, Andy made his grandmother’s Hungarian palacsinta; when our older son needed to memorize his lines for a lead role in a school play, he turned to Andy for help.

Still, the proposition that women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately) assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case.

Here I step onto treacherous ground, mined with stereotypes. From years of conversations and observations, however, I’ve come to believe that men and women respond quite differently when problems at home force them to recognize that their absence is hurting a child, or at least that their presence would likely help. I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.

Many factors determine this choice, of course. Men are still socialized to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the breadwinner; women, to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the caregiver. But it may be more than that. When I described the choice between my children and my job to Senator Jeanne Shaheen, she said exactly what I felt: “There’s really no choice.” She wasn’t referring to social expectations, but to a maternal imperative felt so deeply that the “choice” is reflexive.

Men and women also seem to frame the choice differently. In Midlife Crisis at 30, Mary Matalin recalls her days working as President Bush’s assistant and Vice President Cheney’s counselor:

Even when the stress was overwhelming—those days when I’d cry in the car on the way to work, asking myself “Why am I doing this??”—I always knew the answer to that question: I believe in this president.

But Matalin goes on to describe her choice to leave in words that are again uncannily similar to the explanation I have given so many people since leaving the State Department:

I finally asked myself, “Who needs me more?” And that’s when I realized, it’s somebody else’s turn to do this job. I’m indispensable to my kids, but I’m not close to indispensable to the White House.

To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish. Male leaders are routinely praised for having sacrificed their personal life on the altar of public or corporate service. That sacrifice, of course, typically involves their family. Yet their children, too, are trained to value public service over private responsibility. At the diplomat Richard Holbrooke’s memorial service, one of his sons told the audience that when he was a child, his father was often gone, not around to teach him to throw a ball or to watch his games. But as he grew older, he said, he realized that Holbrooke’s absence was the price of saving people around the world—a price worth paying.

It is not clear to me that this ethical framework makes sense for society. Why should we want leaders who fall short on personal responsibilities? Perhaps leaders who invested time in their own families would be more keenly aware of the toll their public choices—on issues from war to welfare—take on private lives. (Kati Marton, Holbrooke’s widow and a noted author, says that although Holbrooke adored his children, he came to appreciate the full importance of family only in his 50s, at which point he became a very present parent and grandparent, while continuing to pursue an extraordinary public career.) Regardless, it is clear which set of choices society values more today. Workers who put their careers first are typically rewarded; workers who choose their families are overlooked, disbelieved, or accused of unprofessionalism.

In sum, having a supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is not sufficient. If women feel deeply that turning down a promotion that would involve more travel, for instance, is the right thing to do, then they will continue to do that. Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.

It’s possible if you sequence it right.

Young women should be wary of the assertion “You can have it all; you just can’t have it all at once.” This 21st-century addendum to the original line is now proffered by many senior women to their younger mentees. To the extent that it means, in the words of one working mother, “I’m going to do my best and I’m going to keep the long term in mind and know that it’s not always going to be this hard to balance,” it is sound advice. But to the extent that it means that women can have it all if they just find the right sequence of career and family, it’s cheerfully wrong.

The most important sequencing issue is when to have children. Many of the top women leaders of the generation just ahead of me—Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, Patricia Wald, Nannerl Keohane—had their children in their 20s and early 30s, as was the norm in the 1950s through the 1970s. A child born when his mother is 25 will finish high school when his mother is 43, an age at which, with full-time immersion in a career, she still has plenty of time and energy for advancement.

Yet this sequence has fallen out of favor with many high-potential women, and understandably so. People tend to marry later now, and anyway, if you have children earlier, you may have difficulty getting a graduate degree, a good first job, and opportunities for advancement in the crucial early years of your career. Making matters worse, you will also have less income while raising your children, and hence less ability to hire the help that can be indispensable to your juggling act.

When I was the dean, the Woodrow Wilson School created a program called Pathways to Public Service, aimed at advising women whose children were almost grown about how to go into public service, and many women still ask me about the best “on-ramps” to careers in their mid-40s. Honestly, I’m not sure what to tell most of them. Unlike the pioneering women who entered the workforce after having children in the 1970s, these women are competing with their younger selves. Government and NGO jobs are an option, but many careers are effectively closed off. Personally, I have never seen a woman in her 40s enter the academic market successfully, or enter a law firm as a junior associate, Alicia Florrick of The Good Wife notwithstanding.

These considerations are why so many career women of my generation chose to establish themselves in their careers first and have children in their mid-to-late 30s. But that raises the possibility of spending long, stressful years and a small fortune trying to have a baby. I lived that nightmare: for three years, beginning at age 35, I did everything possible to conceive and was frantic at the thought that I had simply left having a biological child until it was too late.

And when everything does work out? I had my first child at 38 (and counted myself blessed) and my second at 40. That means I will be 58 when both of my children are out of the house. What’s more, it means that many peak career opportunities are coinciding precisely with their teenage years, when, experienced parents advise, being available as a parent is just as important as in the first years of a child’s life.

Many women of my generation have found themselves, in the prime of their careers, saying no to opportunities they once would have jumped at and hoping those chances come around again later. Many others who have decided to step back for a while, taking on consultant positions or part-time work that lets them spend more time with their children (or aging parents), are worrying about how long they can “stay out” before they lose the competitive edge they worked so hard to acquire.

Given the way our work culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in your career first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or else freeze your eggs, whether you are married or not. You may well be a more mature and less frustrated parent in your 30s or 40s; you are also more likely to have found a lasting life partner. But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make.

You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce. The rest of this essay details how.

Changing the Culture of Face Time

Back in the Reagan administration, a New York Times story about the ferociously competitive budget director Dick Darman reported, “Mr. Darman sometimes managed to convey the impression that he was the last one working in the Reagan White House by leaving his suit coat on his chair and his office light burning after he left for home.” (Darman claimed that it was just easier to leave his suit jacket in the office so he could put it on again in the morning, but his record of psychological manipulation suggests otherwise.)

The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today. Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family. Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s.

But more time in the office does not always mean more “value added”—and it does not always add up to a more successful organization. In 2009, Sandra Pocharski, a senior female partner at Monitor Group and the head of the firm’s Leadership and Organization practice, commissioned a Harvard Business School professor to assess the factors that helped or hindered women’s effectiveness and advancement at Monitor. The study found that the company’s culture was characterized by an “always on” mode of working, often without due regard to the impact on employees. Pocharski observed:

Clients come first, always, and sometimes burning the midnight oil really does make the difference between success and failure. But sometimes we were just defaulting to behavior that overloaded our people without improving results much, if at all. We decided we needed managers to get better at distinguishing between these categories, and to recognize the hidden costs of assuming that “time is cheap.” When that time doesn’t add a lot of value and comes at a high cost to talented employees, who will leave when the personal cost becomes unsustainable—well, that is clearly a bad outcome for everyone.

I have worked very long hours and pulled plenty of all-nighters myself over the course of my career, including a few nights on my office couch during my two years in D.C. Being willing to put the time in when the job simply has to get done is rightfully a hallmark of a successful professional. But looking back, I have to admit that my assumption that I would stay late made me much less efficient over the course of the day than I might have been, and certainly less so than some of my colleagues, who managed to get the same amount of work done and go home at a decent hour. If Dick Darman had had a boss who clearly valued prioritization and time management, he might have found reason to turn out the lights and take his jacket home.

Long hours are one thing, and realistically, they are often unavoidable. But do they really need to be spent at the office? To be sure, being in the office some of the time is beneficial. In-person meetings can be far more efficient than phone or e-mail tag; trust and collegiality are much more easily built up around the same physical table; and spontaneous conversations often generate good ideas and lasting relationships. Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.

Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments. State-of-the-art videoconferencing facilities can dramatically reduce the need for long business trips. These technologies are making inroads, and allowing easier integration of work and family life. According to the Women’s Business Center, 61 percent of women business owners use technology to “integrate the responsibilities of work and home”; 44 percent use technology to allow employees “to work off-site or to have flexible work schedules.” Yet our work culture still remains more office-centered than it needs to be, especially in light of technological advances.

One way to change that is by changing the “default rules” that govern office work—the baseline expectations about when, where, and how work will be done. As behavioral economists well know, these baselines can make an enormous difference in the way people act. It is one thing, for instance, for an organization to allow phone-ins to a meeting on an ad hoc basis, when parenting and work schedules collide—a system that’s better than nothing, but likely to engender guilt among those calling in, and possibly resentment among those in the room. It is quite another for that organization to declare that its policy will be to schedule in-person meetings, whenever possible, during the hours of the school day—a system that might normalize call-ins for those (rarer) meetings still held in the late afternoon.

One real-world example comes from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a place most people are more likely to associate with distinguished gentlemen in pinstripes than with progressive thinking about work-family balance. Like so many other places, however, the FCO worries about losing talented members of two-career couples around the world, particularly women. So it recently changed its basic policy from a default rule that jobs have to be done on-site to one that assumes that some jobs might be done remotely, and invites workers to make the case for remote work. Kara Owen, a career foreign-service officer who was the FCO’s diversity director and will soon become the British deputy ambassado

What Twitter has done for wine

©Ingram Pinn

I’m sitting in bed in a hotel room on the Costa Brava. I’ve just discussed with our daughter, two floors below us, who will give our grandson his breakfast, organised accommodation in Paris for an American friend, taken advice on how to promote my next book in Australia and discovered where to find the cheapest flight from San Francisco to Newark. All this without moving or saying a word.

There are huge benefits to the communication revolution, but how is it affecting the world of wine? Trading fine wine, like virtually everything else – with the emphasis on the virtual – has become far faster and all transactions are far more transparent. With credit card payments and websites that can keep track of stock in real time, a case of wine can be sold and paid for within minutes of being offered to a merchant or broker – very unlike the courtly rhythm of auction sales.

For many of us, handling a bottle and, ideally, being given the chance to taste its contents before making a purchase is the best way to buy wine, but online selling is making ever-increasing inroads into all sectors of the trade. There are now many successful online-only wine merchants such as Slurp and Naked Wines in the UK, Millésima in France, Pinard de Picard in Germany, but also even the likes of vinfolio.com, wine.com, winetasting.com, wineaccess.com and Lot18.com in the US, where it has long been more difficult to transport alcoholic liquid than guns.

Thanks to Wine-searcher.com, the most successful – and seriously useful – price comparison website, everyone should now be paying the right price for the wines they buy. A few unscrupulous operators still seem to pop up to take advantage of those who know nothing about the subject by offering them “investment wine” at ridiculously inflated prices, but it is a wonder that they manage to get away with it.

Wine-searcher.com records the stock and prices of more than 16,000 wine retailers around the globe and lists availability in ascending price order for any wine in almost any likely market, dramatically exposing price gouging. And once wine drinkers have acquired their carefully researched bottles, safe in the knowledge they have not overpaid for them, they can share the impressions of the contents on another hugely popular wine site based in Seattle. CellarTracker.com has a giant communal database of more than 2.5 million wine reviews written by what its founder Eric LeVine calls “real users”.

But who would have thought that Twitter, of all things, would not just offer all manner of wine commentators and “real users” the chance to swap recommendations, but also play a part in setting fine wine prices? Tweeting is becoming an increasingly significant phenomenon during the primeurs tastings of the latest vintage in Bordeaux each spring. The 2011 primeur campaign of even such a supposedly traditional wine merchant as Berry Bros of St James’s, London, was orchestrated by one @BigSiTheWineGuy, its Bordeaux specialist Simon Staples, tweeting furiously in the Berry’s people carrier between châteaux. “Dom de Chev – what a corker!” and all that.

There are still merchants doing the tasting rounds in Bordeaux, making notes that will, after sober reflection back home, be transformed into a printed offer of the latest vintage with order form on the back page, but they are becoming a rarity. Not least because the prices now come out later and later – and entirely unpredictably.

Château owners now find their wines being rated in the unforgiving public glare of the Twittersphere even before the main primeurs week at the beginning of April, so eager are some of the American wine commentators to pronounce. None is more powerful at providing proprietors with the confidence to overcharge than @RobertMParkerJr whose tweets from Bordeaux are analysed as forensically as any pronouncement from the Sage of Omaha. When he tweeted from Bordeaux in March that the 2011s were better than he had been expecting, our hearts sank. Bang went any chance of really attractive discounts for the vintage just released.

But the stuff still has to be sold somehow, so we have @BigSiTheWineGuy desperately trying to flog Château Palmer 2011 (£900 for six bottles in bond) with the tweeted observation that this “Bentley” of a wine is “Half the price of neighbour Ch Margaux and as good. Perfection costs. Also makes Giscours and Issan look like Jaguars with 15k miles on them.”

And it is not just at this rarefied price level that communication about wine has been speeded up. Nowadays I am sometimes reminded about a tasting I should attend by reading tweets by those who are already there. The Evening Standard’s wine writer Andrew Neather (@hernehillandy) is quite splendidly curmudgeonly about almost everything – including the selection at Tesco’s recent showing of its latest wines to the media. But at least he reminded me that I had promised to attend myself. (I will report next week on one or two of the finds I made there.)

Much to the horror of some of my more literary friends, @JancisRobinson has found that she enjoys tweeting. For the past three years, I have found it both fun and valuable. I can make short recommendations, share some of life’s quirks and idiocies, stir up support for campaigns and good works and, most importantly, garner advice. My Twitter followers have been extraordinarily ready to help when I needed to find, say, a decent radio station in south-west France or advice on drying out shoes in Hobart.

One other entirely beneficial development for us wine nerds has been the increasing tendency of restaurants to put their wine lists online. We have to depend on them to keep it up to date of course – a crucial aspect of web behaviour – but this does give us an invaluable opportunity to study what’s available in advance, researching other online opinions of the wines if necessary. This is particularly useful for those establishments with wine lists like bibles. (Some of these wine lists are already moving on to iPads.) And yes, of course, everything written above is already way out of date.

See also JancisRobinson.com, fed daily

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Jancis’s Grapevine

Carville: What if the rich lost 40% of their wealth?

Editor's note: James Carville is a Democratic strategist who serves as a political contributor for CNN, appearing frequently on "The Situation Room" as well as other programs on all CNN networks. He and Stan Greenberg are the co-authors of "It's the Middle Class Stupid" to be published in July by Penguin Press.

(CNN) -- Let's imagine that yesterday there was a front page story in The New York Times that read the following:

"The recent economic crisis left the top 1% of Americans in 2010 with no more wealth than in the early 1990s, erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity, the Federal Reserve Monday.

"A hypothetical family richer than the median net worth of the top 1% of the nation's families had a net worth of $77.3 million in 2010, compared with $126.4 million in 2007, the Fed said. The crash of the stock market, in addition to the collapse of housing prices in Greenwich, Connecticut, the Upper East Side of New York City, Beverly Hills, Highland Park in Dallas and the North Shore of Chicago, directly accounted for three-quarters of the loss."

What do you think the reaction would be to that?

The elite would call for the suspension of habeas corpus, the government would call out the National Guard, invade Honduras and the Supreme Court would announce that it is in session 24/7 to take any action deemed necessary to help their friends.

The Wall Street Journal would have a black border on the newspaper. The Financial Times would go from pink to gray. CNBC would play funeral music for nine months. Steve Schwarzman would compare it to the H-word. Cable networks would roadblock all coverage.

Minimum wage laws would be suspended, the 40-hour work week would be thrown out, perhaps they would even do away with child labor laws to get productivity up so profits could increase to make up for lost revenue.

OK, we know that story did not appear in Wednesday's New York Times, and we would certainly agree that a massive loss of wealth in the top 1% would wreak economic havoc on the country. But there was, if anything, a worse story on that front page with only minor variations from our hypothetical scenario.

The story said that the recent economic crisis left the average American family in 2010 with no more wealth than in the early 1990s, erasing almost two decades of accumulated prosperity, reducing their net worth by almost 40%.

How are you coping? Share your economy story with CNN iReport

And the response of the national elite, the people Paul Krugman refers to as "very smart people" or I like to call the "chin-scratchers," was a barely audible whimper.

To put it bluntly, the middle class in this country has been screwed, blued and tattooed.

Rising health care costs, job insecurity, declining real estate values, massive cuts to public education and public safety (no Mitt, we don't need fewer police officers, we actually need more of them and yes, the federal government has a large hand in this.)

It is a depressing state of affairs when about two-thirds of our fellow citizens are caught in an economic trap that is wrecking their lives financially and emotionally.

And the reaction to all of this has been limp at best.

The Republicans say that if we just give the rich more tax cuts, it will make everyone's life better -- seems as though we've tried this before, doesn't it?

The Democrats have done some things that have been helpful, such as payroll tax cuts and the Affordable Care Act, but there is much more work to be done. As far as other institutions around the country, the response has been pathetic.

Opinion: Why the middle class has taken a big hit

There is an entire industry devoted to denying that this is even a problem.

I read a piece written by Andy Kessler in The Wall Street Journal, stating that thanks to "consumption equality," the wealthy work their 60- to 80-hour weeks inventing things for the masses, but there's not much they can buy with their money that the middle class can't afford.

You can only afford a product, because some rich person invented it for the masses, just like they did with smartphones, hard drives and affordable air travel.

Who cares if you can't afford to send your children to college or pay for your health insurance premium or what you owe on your house is more than what it's worth? Hey, you can buy them a cell phone, now that they don't cost $4,000, and talk to them as they stand in line for a job interview at McDonald's.

Where are our nation's institutions that should be raising holy hell about this? Lets start with my own Catholic Church: They are spending all of their time hunting down masturbators and birth-control takers.

Academics: Have you ever heard of the Princeton Center for Middle Class Studies? Not hardly.

The press: There is much more coverage on George Zimmerman's wife than on the destruction of the middle class in this country.

The lobbyists: Give me a break. When was the last time you heard of a lobbyist for the middle class? The point here is that we are reading the most significant economic story of our time and its effect on the psyche of the people who should know better is minimal.

In the words of Warren Buffett, "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

The big scandal in America is that our middle class is shrinking, and no one seems to care. Maybe someone somewhere somehow should consider doing something else.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of James Carville.

Another Museum Mulls Pulling Up StakesAnother Museum Mulls Pulling Up Stakes

By ERIC GIBSON

Philip Beaurline/courtesy Corcoran Gallery of Art

With its prohibitive renovation costs, the Corcoran is exploring the sale of its 19th-century Beaux Arts building.

Well, that didn't take long. Less than a month after the Barnes Foundation relocated to downtown Philadelphia from suburban Merion claiming financial necessity, another museum is planning a copycat move. Citing its own troubled balance sheet, a rundown physical plant and a desire to retool its mission, last week Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art announced plans to explore the sale of its 19th-century building and move to a purpose-built facility elsewhere in Washington, or even in Maryland or Virginia.

Buildings again? Only a few years ago the Corcoran wanted to add one, a Frank Gehry-designed wing. But it had to scrap that idea in 2005, having been unable to raise the necessary funds. Now it wants to sell the building it's in and move away. Outsiders can be forgiven for being confused.

The Corcoran was founded in 1874 to house the collection of financier Wiliam Wilson Corcoran (1798-1888), and it is one of a handful of institutions in this country that are both art museum and art school. At the Corcoran, the two share the same building. The school, founded in 1890, offers multiple degree programs and is so successful it needs larger quarters.

The museum's collection of more than 16,000 works ranges across a variety of periods, styles and media. One of its better-kept secrets is the Salon Doré, an 18th-century French period room featuring gilded wall paneling and a ceiling mural. But the collection's strength is American painting to 1945, and it boasts one of the greatest American landscapes ever painted, Frederic Edwin Church's "Niagara" (1857). A generally lackluster exhibition program has been relieved by the occasional show of real importance, such as the 2009 "Sargent and the Sea," which played off a painting in the museum's collection to explore a little-studied aspect of the society portraitist's career.

In recent years the museum has been plagued by declining attendance and a persistent, seven-figure budget deficit. But according to officials there the most serious problem is the building, an 1897 Beaux Arts structure on Seventeenth Street N.W., a short walk from the White House. It has room to display only about 3% of the collection (on average, museums can show about 6%) and by the most recent estimate needs about $100 million in renovations. Some of that is deferred maintenance, but the bulk derives from the cruel Catch-22 of occupying a historic structure: The Corcoran has been "grandfathered," or exempted, from various ordinances and codes over the years. But once it begins making changes, those exemptions expire—forcing the Corcoran to conform to every legal jot and tittle. "We have some historic protection on ADA issues," says its director and president, Fred Bollerer, referring to the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act. But "once we do something on the building, we have to comply." And add such things as a proper fire-suppression system. The estimated cost for that? Mr. Bollerer puts it at $28 million.

Even after renovation and associated costs, such as temporarily relocating the college so it can stay open while the work is being done, "we'd still have a less than optimum facility for the college," says board chairman Harry F. Hopper III.

That's an undeniably tough nut. Still, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that what the relocation and Gehry plans have in common is the delusion that in museums, architecture is destiny. Ever since the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened a satellite in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997 designed by Mr. Gehry, museum boards around the U.S. have come to believe that all will be well if they can just hitch their wagons to a starchitect. Never mind that some museums have faltered after opening a flashy new building, most notably the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

Yet success, defined as building audiences, attracting support and making your institution part of the conversation, comes not through architecture but programming, primarily exhibitions and acquisitions. And this is where the Corcoran has fallen down. In a town of some dozen art museums, it has never been able to project a clear sense of its own identity, of what it can offer the museum-going public that no other institution can. The National Gallery is the country's flagship museum. The Smithsonian American Art Museum is exactly what its name advertises. The Hirshhorn is a modernist temple of international modern and contemporary art. The Phillips Collection is dedicated to the unique aesthetic vision of a single individual. And the Corcoran? "A visual-arts institution with education at the core that is leveraging the collection and engaging the community," Mr. Hopper says. Not exactly words to make someone smack his forehead and cry, "Get me over there right now!"

There was always the risk that once the Barnes embraced the idea of relocation as a cure-all, other institutions would resort to the same thing. But the Barnes example needs to be understood for what it is: a one-of-a-kind situation where a move of still-questionable necessity that seemed destined to destroy the institution miraculously did not. This is not a play that should be repeated anytime soon.

Besides, the Barnes has a well-articulated identity and mission. The Corcoran does not. Its officers need to come up with a better answer to the question, "What is this place about?" Until they do, the Corcoran can pull up stakes as many times as it likes, but wherever it goes, its problems will go, too.

Mr. Gibson is the Journal's Leisure & Arts features editor.

HILLARY CLINTON OPENS WOMEN IN PUBLIC SERVICE INSTITUTE

Hillary Clinton '69 to open Women in Public Service Institute at Wellesley, Monday, June 11

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Hillary Clinton to open U.S. State Department’s First Women in Public Service Institute at Wellesley College, June 11-22, 2012

–One year following the Arab Spring, the MENA region’s rising women leaders convene at Wellesley; first global effort launched by Secretary Clinton to get world leadership from 17.5% female to “50% by 2050”—

WELLESLEY, Mass—Wellesley College, in partnership with the U.S. State Department and the nation’s leading women’s colleges, will host the inaugural Women in Public Service Institute, June 11 through June 22, 2012. The Institute is a first-of-its-kind, two-week program that will train the next generation of women leaders, and part of a global project to get world leadership from 17.5% female to “50% by 2050.” The delegates attending the Institute were selected from 21 nations in the process of political and social transformation, including countries that are drafting new Constitutions and undergoing major reform. Many of the women are from the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region and were involved in the Arab Spring.

At the State Department’s December 2011 launch of the project, Secretary Hillary Clinton said, “I’m very proud that my alma mater, Wellesley College, will host this inaugural Institute, which will rotate to each of the founding Sister colleges in the following years.” Secretary Clinton will address the delegates on the opening day of the Institute.

The women will gather at Wellesley for training and networking sessions with their peers and with established leaders, including Madeleine Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State; Jane Harman, former Congresswoman and President of the Woodrow Wilson Center; Mu Sochua, Minister for Women’s Affairs and leader of the Opposition in Cambodia; Honorable Judge Nancy Gertner, and many more.

Opening day proceedings will be streamed live from Wellesley’s web site:

http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/Live/

About the Women in Public Service Institute Delegates

According to former Secretary Albright, "The fifty delegates are among the best and brightest rising political talents from countries in which women's voices are desperately needed in seats of power. The Women in Public Service Institute will give these women the tools they need to amplify their voices, build networks, and bring about positive change—not only for women, but for the world."

Selected through a vigorous application and nomination process, the delegates are women that have begun careers in public service and demonstrate great promise. The women represent 21 countries: Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kosovo, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Myanmar (Burma), Pakistan, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Tunisia, Turkey, and Yemen. Most of the women are under the age of 40.

Delegates include:

--A 27-year old activist whose family returned to their native Afghanistan just months before the Taliban came to power. She remembers the day the Taliban attacked her city as “the worst memory of my life.” Today, she is the youngest member of Afghanistan's parliament, yet still faces enormous challenges.

--A 24-year-old Egyptian dentist who, during Arab Spring, worked in field hospitals and participated in medical convoys. One of the convoys was sent to Upper Egypt, where genital mutilation is prevalent.

--A 31-year old civil activist from Tunisia and founder of Voix De Femmes, an NGO that aims to make the voices of Tunisian women heard and be part of active society. Much of her work focuses on single mothersand their children.

The expectation that participants will learn from one another and shape the curriculum is one of the hallmarks of the Institute and its collaborative structure. Delegates will benefit from intensive training and practice of critical leadership skills that include negotiating peace agreements, Constitutional drafting, organizing caucuses for women’s rights, and the role of social media in women’s empowerment and good governance. Institute faculty include distinguished scholars and leaders from around the world: Ambassador Moushira Khattab, former Egyptian Ambassador; Juliette Kayyem, the most senior Arab American appointee in the Obama administration; Dr. Haleh Esfandieri, Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree; Craig Murphy, M. Margaret Ball Professor of International Relations at Wellesley College; and pre-eminent Pakistani human rights lawyer Hina Jilani.

The Women in Public Service Project – the first global effort aimed at achieving leadership parity

A mere 17.5 percent of the world’s elected offices are held by women—and the U.S. percentage is even smaller. However, Wellesley and its sister Colleges hold a longstanding record for sending leaders out into world. Wellesley’s graduates include two of the three females to hold the post of U.S. Secretary of State: Secretary Madeleine K. Albright ’59 and Secretary Hillary R. Clinton ‘69.

Founded by Secretary Clinton, the U.S. State Department, and the sister schools Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley, the partnership envisions a world in which political and civic leadership is at least 50 percent female by 2050. The project will identify and educate the next generation of women committed to public service, create an infrastructure of support and mentoring, and overcome barriers that prevent more women from entering public service and government leadership. Mills College, Scripps College, and Mount St. Mary’s College have joined as partners.

At the Project’s December 2011 Colloquium, Secretary Clinton said in her remarks, “There are many benefits of bringing more women into government service, whether they are elected or appointed, whether they work in the public eye or more quietly for the public good. The World Bank has found that women tend to invest more of their earnings in their families and communities than men do. That in turn makes societies stronger and economies more likely to grow. At the government level, those are the kinds of instincts and priorities we would all like to see.”

Clinton added, “If you’re trying to solve a problem, whether it is fighting corruption or strengthening the rule of law or sparking economic growth, you are more likely to succeed if you widen the circle to include a broader range of expertise, experience, and ideas. So as we work to solve our problems, we need more women at the table and in the halls of parliament and government ministries where these debates are occurring.”

According to Wellesley’s President H. Kim Bottomly, the College has a long history of investing in the leadership potential of women, and Wellesley and its partner institutions have a key role to play. “Wellesley is delighted to host the inaugural Institute of the Women in Public Service Project. It is an important step toward enabling more women around the world to advance to leadership positions. This Institute is about giving women the tools they need to be leaders, to address the global challenges of the 21^st century.”

About Wellesley College

Since 1875, Wellesley College has been a leader in providing an excellent liberal arts education for women who will make a difference in the world. Its 500-acre campus near Boston is home to 2,400 undergraduate students from all 50 states and 75 countries.

Press Contacts

Sofiya Cabalquinto, Director of Media Relations, Wellesley College, 781-283-3321, cell 917-691-7558, scabalqu@wellesley.edu

Anne Yu, Assistant Director of Media Relations, Wellesley College, 781-283-3201, cell 617-549-1969, ayu@wellesley.edu

Journalists: To request press credentials, please email mediarelations@wellesley.edu