Five questions with Commencement speaker Anne-Marie Slaughter

Anne-Marie Slaughter has deep North Carolina roots.

Her father’s side of the family — the Hokes — moved to Lincoln County, North Carolina in 1791, and the family has lived there ever since. Her great grandfather’s legal papers are even stored at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

On May 8, Slaughter will return to her family’s home state to deliver the University’s Commencement address.

“My grandmother is smiling somewhere,” she said.

Slaughter, a foreign policy expert and public commentator, made waves in 2012 with her groundbreaking article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” It became The Atlantic’s most read piece in the history of the magazine.

It sparked a renewed national debate about the continued obstacles to genuine full male-female equality, ultimately spawning her 2015 book “Unfinished Business.”

From 2009-2011, Slaughter served as the director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State, the first woman to hold that position. Prior to her government service, she was the Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002–2009 and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School from 1994-2002.

Slaughter is currently the President and CEO of New America, a non-partisan think tank committed to the solution of public problems and enabling those working on solutions to drive stages of change, from inspiration to implementation. She is also the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.

We caught up with Slaughter earlier this week as she prepared to speak at Commencement:

What is the message you hope to share with Carolina’s graduating class?

“I want to convince them that care is as important as career in their lifetimes — care meaning investing in others. It’s how we’re going to get to gender equality. We of course want to focus on advancing women, but really we need to equally focus on valuing the work of care that women traditionally did and has gotten short shrift in recent decades as many women have moved out of those roles.

“It’s great that women now can have a full range of roles, but we can’t devalue that work. We have to value it when women do it and when men do it. The only way to do that is for all of us to see that the care side of our lives is as important as the career side.”

As a public commentator, you’ve long been focused on gender equality. In your opinion, what will be the key to achieving that goal?

“The most important thing that we can do is to make room for care in our lives, our jobs, our government and the way that we think about our own lives.

“There are many pieces to this puzzle. We do still need to fight discrimination, we need to close the pay gap and we need to fight unconscious bias, but there are many different pieces. I think the missing piece of the puzzle — the piece that we have not paid attention to — is to understand that somebody has to care for our children, our old people, for each other, and for the disabled and ill among us.

“A society that doesn’t focus on that work, the importance of that work, support that work and value that work is a society that is going to increasingly leave poor women in the shadows doing that work and wealthier women will still be held back by the fact that they’re trying to do two jobs while the people they’re competing with — largely men — are only doing one. To really level the playing field for everybody up and down the income scale, we have to be honest about how much time and effort care takes and support it and value it.

Finding solutions to some of the biggest problems facing society is the focus your think tank “New America.” Do you think this next generation of college graduates can be the ones to find solutions to major problems?

“I have great optimism when I look at the kids graduating today who are only three years older than my oldest son and also only four or five years younger than many of the kids who work at New America.

“What I see is a tremendous appetite to make a difference in the world, to tackle the problems that they are very aware of. This is a generation that is the first generation that’s grown up not necessarily expecting that they’ll do better than their parents. That is a very sad commentary on the nation as a whole, but these individuals are determined to change that and tackle big problems.

“I see this generation as much more inclusive than previous generations, much more inclined to being committed to equality across the board — certainly in gender terms, but also racial, ethnic or sexual orientation terms — and a generation that is willing to roll up its sleeves.

“What’s really interesting is to see how many young people want to be social entrepreneurs or apply new techniques to solving public problems. I think they’ll forge a very different synthesis in terms of the role of government and the roles of the private and civic sectors in how tackle these problems. But they understand that these are the tasks that fall to them.

Wanting to tackle those big problems and actually being able to do so are two very different things. What will the graduating class need to find the solutions?

“They have to be willing to take risks. Some of them are going to be forced to take risks because it’s harder to get a job than it was for many of their parents. The jobs that are out there are far less secure. There’s no notion of getting a job and working there for 30 years and collecting a pension. That’s gone. Many of the jobs they can get won’t have benefits attached to them.

“So they’re being forced to take risks, but they’re going to have to take those risks to say ‘Look, we’ve got to find a better way. We have to find a better way to balance work and family. We have to find a better way to provide for our retirement. We have to find a better way to provide for those people who fall through the cracks in our society.’

“I think they have to be willing to embrace risks being forced on them to say ‘How can we come up with a different way to live together?’ That’s why my organization is called “New America.” We think America is renewing itself in many different ways, but it’s a question of bringing all those ways together.

What is one piece of advice you wish you had when you graduated from college?

“I wish somebody had told me that when your stomach hurts, it’s a sign that you should do it. I remember vividly going off to graduate school and I was so scared. I was very scared at my first jobs, and now I look back and think ‘Yeah, that kind of horrible feeling in the pit of your stomach where you just want to go back to bed, that’s a sign that you’re on the right path.’ You’re pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.”