Can Women Do It All? That’s the Wrong Question

For decades, women have been asking some version of the same question: Can we really do it all?

Can we build meaningful careers and be good mothers? Can we keep pursuing the work that matters to us without sacrificing our children? Can we be ambitious without someday looking back and wondering whether our ambition cost us something we can’t get back?

We’ve debated this question so many times that most of us have absorbed an answer, whether we realize it or not. No. Not really. Something has to give. You can have the career, but your kids will pay for it. You can be the kind of mother you want to be, but you’ll have to scale back your ambition. You can try to do both, but eventually you’ll burn out.

When we hear a message often enough, it can become what I call an organizing principle: a deeply learned expectation about ourselves or the world that begins shaping how we interpret what happens around us. And once we have an expectation like this, our brains are very good at finding evidence that confirms what we already believe.

There’s actually a scientific term for this: confirmation bias.

If somewhere inside you is the expectation that a woman cannot actually have everything she truly wants in her life, you will inevitably find evidence for it. Your brain begins collecting that evidence: the meeting that runs late, the school event you miss, the morning you’re answering an email while your child is asking you to watch something, the resentment you feel when work is demanding and your child needs you at exactly the same time.

And there it is: See? This is impossible.

There’s another way this same belief can play out, and I think this one is particularly interesting. We become determined to prove it wrong. We will show everyone that women can do it all.

So we work incredibly hard. We become excellent at our jobs, remember the pediatrician appointment, plan the birthday party, answer the Slack message, sign up for the class field trip, make dinner, keep track of the summer camp registration, schedule the babysitter and try to exercise somewhere in between. Oh, and make sure we’re the ones putting our kids to bed every night while somehow also keeping the kitchen clean.

We push and push and push because giving something up can feel like admitting that everyone was right. And then eventually, we’re exhausted. We might even burn out, which seems to prove the original point: Maybe women really can’t do it all.

But I think there’s a problem with this entire conversation. We’re asking the wrong question.

“Can women do it all?” is fundamentally a question about output. It asks how much one person can accomplish, manage, produce and hold together. I’m much more interested in a different set of questions.

Can a woman be all of the things she wants to be? Can she be an extraordinary physician, founder, attorney, executive, artist, teacher or leader and also be a deeply devoted mother? Can she feel inspired and alive in her work and experience real joy, presence and connection at home? Can she maintain a healthy, loving, secure relationship with her child while continuing to pursue excellence in a career she cares deeply about? Can she remain deeply connected to herself while engaging fully in the life around her?

Those are very different questions from the original “Can women do it all?” And I believe the answer to them is yes.

But we won’t get there by becoming more efficient at doing everything. Most of us have spent decades trying to solve a relational dilemma with strategic intelligence. Strategic intelligence is enormously valuable. It helps us analyze, plan, predict, organize, optimize and solve problems. It’s one of the reasons so many women have built extraordinary careers while raising families.

Relationships, however, ask something different of us. They require relational intelligence: the capacity to stay engaged with reality as it is, especially when it’s uncertain, uncomfortable or different from what we expected, so we can choose responses that align with our values and the relationship we’re trying to build.

This changes the question. Instead of asking, How can I possibly get everything done? we begin asking, What does this moment require of me?

Sometimes the answer will be strategic. Solve the childcare problem, delegate the task, move the meeting, ask your partner to take something over, say no to the thing that simply does not matter enough.

But sometimes the answer is relational. Stay with your child when they’re disappointed that you’re leaving for work instead of trying to convince them not to be sad. Notice your own guilt without allowing it to make your decisions for you. Come home from a demanding day and actually arrive. Repair after the morning when you were distracted and impatient. Let your child have feelings about your choices without immediately interpreting those feelings as evidence that you’ve made the wrong ones.

And perhaps most importantly, stay connected to yourself while all of this is happening. Because the goal was never to successfully complete every task available to a modern woman. That sounds miserable.

The goal is to build a life in which you can continue becoming the woman you want to be while building the relationships you want to have.

There will still be tradeoffs, of course. There will be missed meetings and missed bedtimes, seasons when work needs more from you and seasons when your family does. There will be moments when you wonder whether you’re getting any of it right. Fluency doesn’t mean eliminating those moments. It means developing the capacity to recognize what kind of intelligence a moment requires and moving between the two.

Some moments need solving. Others need staying.

When we stop measuring women by how successfully they can “do it all,” we make room for a much more meaningful possibility.

A woman can love her work without loving her children less. She can be ambitious and deeply relational. She can pursue excellence without making productivity the measure of her worth. She can build something extraordinary in the world while building something extraordinary with her children.

The goal isn’t to do it all, it’s to be the version of ourselves that we want to be while engaging in the things that are most important to us.

The goal is to build a life where our ambition and our relationships can both thrive.