In a blog post on his personal site Tuesday, Max Schireson, the CEO of the software company MongoDB, announced that he was leaving his position because he couldn't continue to properly run the company in New York and support his family in California. 
 
 "Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood," Schireson wrote, citing recent high profile interviews with the CEO of GM or the CEO of Pepsi. "Somehow, the same people don't ask me." 
 
 "As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO," Schireson added, explaining that he loves spending time with his kids but doesn't love what he's missing when he's away from them because of his job. He also discussed the amount of work his wife – herself a doctor and a professor – does when he's gone. 
 
 Schireson will remain with the company as Vice Chairman, supporting MongoDB's new CEO. In an interview with Forbes, he said that choosing to spend time with his family (which is often a code phrase people use when they've been forced out) "is not a euphemism." 
 
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 "I hope that me telling this story in my position will help others feel more comfortable in making similar choices," Schireson told The Today Show. "And help people in senior leadership roles be more public about it." 
 
 On his site, Schireson wrote that he's aware that this decision might put him out of the running "from some future CEO role": 
 
 Will that cost me tens of millions of dollars someday? Maybe. Life is about choices. Right now, I choose to spend more time with my family and am confident that I can continue to have an meaningful and rewarding work life while doing so. At first, it seemed like a hard choice, but the more I have sat with the choice the more certain I am that it is the right choice. 
 
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 The responses to his blog post are overwhelmingly positive; even his daughter wrote in to say, "I'm glad you will be able to spend more time with us at home. yayyyyy." 
 
 It's somewhat fascinating, however, to consider what the response would be if a woman did the same thing as Schireson; she'd probably be at the receiving end of concern from other women that she was giving up her career. (Though as Schireson touches on, women who focus too much on their careers are judged just as much. Women: they can't win.). But with regards to work-life balance, men and women are struggling to each be accepted for doing the thing the other one has traditionally done without notice or praise. Maybe eventually we'll meet in the middle. ||||| When Today Show host Matt Lauer sat down with General Motors’ (GM) CEO Mary Barra in late June, he asked the automaker’s first female leader: 
 
 You said in an interview not long ago that your kids said they’re going to hold you accountable for one job, and that is being a mom. Given the pressure at General Motors, can you do both well? 
 
 Barra graciously answered the question, telling Lauer that she has a great team, a wonderful family and a supportive husband. Notably, she didn’t turn that question back on Lauer to ask how he handles his demanding work schedule at NBC and still manages to be a good father. 
 
 Male executives almost never hear that question. MongoDB’s now-former CEO Max Schireson can attest to that. 
 
 The head of the database company decided to step down Tuesday after asking himself how he can balance the dual demands of fatherhood and running a company. 
 
 “As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO,” wrote Schireson in a blog post explaining why he decided to step down as the chief executive for MongoDB. 
 
 Women are still the focus of the “having it all” debate and questions of whether or not they can be wildly successful at both a high-powered job and day-to-day parenting. Now their male counterparts are asking the same question of themselves. 
 
 Schireson, who helped grow the database company into a billion-dollar business, is on pace to fly 300,000 miles this year between the normal CEO travel duties and commuting from his home in Palo Alto, Calif. to the company’s New York City office. 
 
 All that time on the road adds up to many hours and days away from his family, including three kids. 
 
 “During that travel, I have missed a lot of family fun, perhaps, more importantly, I was not with my kids when our puppy was hit by a car, or when my son had (minor and successful, and of course unexpected) emergency surgery.” 
 
 He credits his wife for helping to pick up the slack when he was away. Not an easy task considering her high-pressure role as a doctor and Stanford professor. 
 
 “Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood,” Schireson wrote. “Somehow, the same people don’t ask me.” 
 
 Questions like these have gnawed at women, who openly debate the value of work and family. Sheryl Sandberg has encouraged women to “lean in.” Cover articles in national magazines have delved into the minutiae of making the right choice as a mom and a professional, not to mention the countless blog posts in response to both. 
 
 While it’s enviable that Schireson can step down as CEO to simply work “normal full time” as vice chairman, the fact that a male CEO is asking the same questions that a female CEO might ask is an important step towards leveling the playing field for top executives, regardless of their gender. 
 
 It’s time for the “having it all” debate to move beyond gender. The math is the same, as Schireson concludes, whether you’re male or female: ||||| Earlier this summer, Matt Lauer asked Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, whether she could balance the demands of being a mom and being a CEO. The Atlantic asked similar questions of PepsiCo’s female CEO Indra Nooyi. As a male CEO, I have been asked what kind of car I drive and what type of music I like, but never how I balance the demands of being both a dad and a CEO. 
 
 While the press haven’t asked me, it is a question that I often ask myself. Here is my situation: 
 
 * I have 3 wonderful kids at home, aged 14, 12 and 9, and I love spending time with them: skiing, cooking, playing backgammon, swimming, watching movies or Warriors or Giants games, talking, whatever. 
 
 * I am on pace to fly 300,000 miles this year, all the normal CEO travel plus commuting between Palo Alto and New York every 2-3 weeks. During that travel, I have missed a lot of family fun, perhaps more importantly, I was not with my kids when our puppy was hit by a car or when my son had (minor and successful, and of course unexpected) emergency surgery. 
 
 * I have an amazing wife who also has an important career; she is a doctor and professor at Stanford where, in addition to her clinical duties, she runs their training program for high risk obstetricians and conducts research on on prematurity, surgical techniques, and other topics. She is a fantastic mom, brilliant, beautiful, and infinitely patient with me. I love her, I am forever in her debt for finding a way to keep the family working despite my crazy travel. I should not continue abusing that patience. 
 
 Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood. Somehow, the same people don’t ask me. 
 
 A few months ago, I decided the only way to balance was by stepping back from my job. MongoDB is a special company. In my nearly 4 years at the company, we have raised $220 million, grown the team 15x and grown sales 30x. We have amazing customers, a great product which gets better with every release, the strongest team I have ever worked with, and incredible momentum in the market. The future is bright and MongoDB deserves a leader who can be “all-in” and make the most of the opportunity. 
 
 Unfortunately, I cannot be that leader given the geography of the majority of the company in New York and my family in California. 
 
 I recognize that by writing this I may be disqualifying myself from some future CEO role. Will that cost me tens of millions of dollars someday? Maybe. Life is about choices. Right now, I choose to spend more time with my family and am confident that I can continue to have an meaningful and rewarding work life while doing so. At first, it seemed like a hard choice, but the more I have sat with the choice the more certain I am that it is the right choice. 
 
 In one month, I will hand the CEO role to an incredibly capable leader in Dev Ittycheria. He will have the task of leading the company through its next phase of growth (though thankfully not of commuting across the country while doing it!). I know the company will be in great hands; his skills fit our next phase of growth better than mine do. And I will be there to help (full time, but “normal full time” and not “crazy full time”) in whatever areas he needs help. More about the announcement can be found in today’s press release. 
 
 I hope I will be able to find a way to craft a role at MongoDB which is engaging, impactful, and compatible with the most important responsibilities in my life. As great as this job has been, I look forward to creating one which is even better. 
 
 — Max ||||| When Phil Graves, a father of three young girls, worked for Deloitte, his days looked a lot like those of many working professionals. He left before the kids were up to commute to work in San Francisco. He raced through his day, and dashed home to make the bedtime crush: bath, bedtime stories, a few sweet snuggles before lights out for the kids, dinner with his wife and a flurry of emails before bed. 
 
 “All my quality time with my daughters was on weekends,” he said. 
 
 And that was a good version of what most working parents in the US experience. Deloitte has some of the most family-friendly benefits in corporate America. For 17 years it has featured on Fortune’s “Top 100 Companies to work for” and was recently named a top company by Working Mother magazine. Its benefits include paid maternity and paternity leave, and flexible work arrangements. 
 
 Graves is now head of Patagonia’s venture fund and everything about his day is different. For one, he sees his children a lot. 
 
 For 33 years Patagonia has had an on-site child care center that bears little resemblance to what anyone might imagine corporate on-site child care looks like. It is run by teachers, some of whom are bilingual and trained in child development. Learning takes place outdoors as much as in. Parents often eat lunch with their kids, take them to the farmer’s market or pick vegetables with them in the “secret” garden. Patagonia buses school-aged kids back to the company’s headquarters, allowing parents to connect with them after school over chocolate milk. Graves stays connected to his kids throughout the day. “It lets you be the kind of parent you want to be,” he said. 
 
 The child care program was not put in place to fight the war for talent, or because its executives wanted to fix the leaky pipeline of women leaving before reaching senior management levels. When Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia’s iconic founder, and his wife Malinda started the company, their employees were friends and family and they wanted to support them as they worked, and started their families. “It lets you be the kind of parent you want to be.” The solution was not to fix a problem, but to respond to what humans need, including a place to nurse newborns, and later, to provide safe and stimulating child care. 
 
 The results three decades later are not surprising: 100% of the women who have had children at Patagonia over the past five years have returned to work, significantly higher than the 79% average in the US. About 50% of managers are women, and 50% of the company’s senior leaders are women. 
 
 “It’s a natural outcome of providing this kind of support, not just to working moms but to working dads too,” Rose Marcario, CEO of Patagonia said. 
 
 Marcario has worked for all sorts of conventional, not-exactly-progressive companies. She was an executive vice president in charge of mergers and acquisitions and private placements for Capital Advisors, a private equity company in Los Angeles. She was also chief financial officer at General Magic, a spin-off from Apple. The focus there, she said, was never on how to support mothers who just had a baby or needed child care or fathers who wanted to be part of their kids lives, but on managing the “problem” of pregnancy, and its outcome: demanding babies, needy children, teenagers who need time and attention. 
 
 “We wonder why in corporate America women are absent at these levels,” she said. But the answer is really not that difficult, or expensive she says. “You have to value care-giving.” 
 
 Care-giving is not America’s strong point 
 
 According to the OECD, out of 41 countries, the US is the only one that does not mandate any paid leave for new parents. The Family Medical Leave Act ensures that women cannot lose their jobs for 12 weeks after having a baby, provided the company they work for has more than 50 employees. It does not concern itself with how to cover the mother’s lost earnings. Only about 16% of employers offer fully-paid maternity. 
 
 Things don’t get easier after the babies are born. According to a report from Care.com, the majority of low, or middle-income families spend more than 10% of their household income on child care and one-fifth spends 20%. One study actually found that in 23 states full-time preschool for four-year-olds was more expensive that in-state public college tuition. 
 
 Those policy choices have consequences. Only 69% of women return to work a year after giving birth, down from a peak of 74% in 1999. Patagonia’s retention rate among moms is 100%.“It’s a natural outcome of providing this kind of support, not just to working moms but to working dads too,” says Marcario. The US is one of the only developed countries in which that figure is falling; in Britain, France and Germany, the numbers have increased dramatically. 
 
 Patagonia’s Ventura child care center, called the Great Pacific Child Development Center (GPCDC) costs about $1 million a year to run, not including tuition fees, or the costs parents pay. It employs 28 staff , and another five at a customer service and distribution plant in Reno. The two sites serve 80 kids. The Ventura site recoups 91% of the cost ($500,000 through tax breaks, 30% through the value of retention, and 11% in employee engagement). As a percentage of all selling, general and administrative costs, it is .005%. This does not feel prohibitive. 
 
 “Can businesses have the imagination to figure this out?” said Marcario. “I was a public company CFO and we could always find .005%.” 
 
 The two child care centers are not free: employees pay. Tuition is based on market rates, so Ventura, for example, is more expensive than Reno (and two kids are more expensive than one, and there are differences based on age). The median cost of full-time infant child care in Ventura in 2016 is $1,400; the maximum cost per month for infants aged 8 weeks to 2 years at Patagonia’s Ventura site is $1,275, and the company subsidizes the cost based on household income. 
 
 This is not rocket science 
 
 In 2014, the British parliament decided to review the research on the social, emotional and academic benefits of early childhood programs. The evidence was so overwhelming that it decided they should pay for 3 years olds (as of Sept. 1) to have 15 hours a week of free child care or preschool for 38 weeks a year, or 570 hours total. Children start school at 4. 
 
 In France, women can take their babies to a crèche, or high-quality day care center, from about six weeks. Kids in France start school at age 2.5, meaning they have three years of preschool and a year of kindergarten. It’s all free. 
 
 On supporting families, the US is “just lame” Marcario says. 
 
 Yet corporate America spends endless amounts of time struggling to understand why the share of women, who represent 50% of post-college or graduate school intake, shrinks so dramatically after that. They need to pay attention to Patagonia, whose 100% of mothers-return-to-work figure really stands out. 
 
 “I wish it was 97.5% because 100% just doesn’t sound accurate,” says Dean Carter, head of human resources, and the former head of human resources for Sears. 
 
 Carter worked at Sears for almost five years, where child care was offered off-site. He did not think about it much until he joined Patagonia, and saw how much it meant to people. When his former chief of staff from Sears joined him at Patagonia, he got to know the manager’s two sons. 
 
 “I now know them personally. I know what they like to eat,” he said. Everyone is more connected, and people generally behave better knowing kids are around. “After years of working in human resources, I would have never guessed the impact it does have.” 
 
 How to scale it 
 
 Here’s a list of what Patagonia offers: new mothers get 16 weeks fully paid maternity leave and fathers and adoptive mothers get 12 weeks of fully paid leave (that kicks in 9 months after you start, which was intentional: if you get pregnant on your first day of work, you are eligible). The child care is run by very well-trained teachers (who subscribe to things like the idea that effort matters more than raw ability). Fields trips to the beach, library and horse rescue center are common, as is cooking in the “messy kitchen” and building things in the yard. “After years of working in human resources, I would have never guessed the impact it does have.” All employees get 12 weeks of full pay for any serious medical condition, or a serious medical condition of a spouse, domestic partner, child or parent arises. It offers 12 weeks for an employee’s active military duty, and 12 weeks to care for a member of the military. 
 
 Parents who need to travel for work can bring a nanny or partner with them—Patagonia foots the bill. If a partner can’t come, one of the teachers can. Mothers have full access to their infants, and nursing in meetings is fine, though plenty of women opt to just go next door and do it. 
 
 Other companies are catching on. Some offer on-site care (often outsourced to a specialist child-care provider like Bright Horizons). Home Depot’s corporate campus offers 66,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor space, with three playgrounds, a basketball court and a water park, according to the Wall Street Journal. 
 
 Tech companies have started competing over parental leave benefits. Netflix offers unlimited paid parental leave for a year following the birth or adoption of a child, besting Facebook, which was the parental leave champion, with four months of paid parental leave. At Alphabet-owned Google and YouTube, birth mothers get 18 weeks of paid leave (during which their stock shares vest). Families also get $500 in baby bonding bucks. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation offers 52 weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave. 
 
 Even finance companies are getting in on the action. KKR has expanded its offering to include paying to fly a nanny with employees on business trips. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of the key reasons for the change was to “to attract and keep more talented women, who make up 18% of the firm’s 510 investment professionals and about 31% of its staff, and to encourage more fathers to take meaningful parental leave.” The story then goes on to say with all these benefits, moms can continue working 70-hour-weeks. 
 
 While many companies are making an effort these days, it’s all too easy for these benefits to look more like an attempt to boost recruitment and retention of women and dress up those numbers, than an honest effort to make work-life balance for all parents possible. 
 
 Some might say those jobs aren’t for people who want balance. But that view doesn’t go over well with millennials, who will make up 75% of the workforce within a decade. They want meaning in their work, and respect for a life beyond work. Carter says that they are putting off kids and families to later, but not forever. 
 
 “If this group were so insistent about bringing their pets to work, you don’t think they will be as insistent about bringing their kids to work?” Carter said. 
 
 Of course, Patagonia is not a “typical” company. It is a famously lefty, tree-hugging, care-about-the-world kind of company. In 2005, Chouinard wrote a book called Let my People Go Surfing, a sort of cult bible among some, imploring his employees to have a rich life beyond work, and to care about more than profits (the company’s mission statement: “Make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”) 
 
 It once took out an ad encouraging people not to buy a jacket, since it would cause damage to the environment to make it. (Executives later said it was simply reminding customers to consider whether they needed it, and to use Patagonia’s lifetime guarantee on its products). It just developed a non-neoprene wetsuit because neoprene is a non-renewable, petroleum-based product which requires a lot of energy to make—and plans to share the formula with competitors to help reduce petroleum-product consumption. 
 
 These are not things that most companies do. And this makes it all too easy for others to say they can’t do it too. Indeed, only 4% of companies offer child care on site, or very nearby, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. 
 
 Carter says the issue is not money, but priorities. “It’s so easy to come up with an excuse—we are too big, or too small, or too space-constrained. That will become more difficult in the very near future.” 
 
 But Patagonia does offer a template for what benefits look like when you think about what people need, versus what you need to do to stay competitive. According to Carter, in its early days, Yvon Chouinard decided that the company should make decisions as if it was going to be in business for 100 years, and everyone in it would be employed for their whole career. There are now a handful of employees who came through the child care system, and even one grandchild. 
 
 A little help here 
 
 The child care center is not just about care, but about Patagonia’s philosophy of life. Kids learn to compost, they spend a lot of time outside—and they’re challenged to figure things out, to take responsibility. 
 
 Tessa Byars, who had her daughter less than a year after joining Patagonia, has used a lot of the company’s benefits. She took 12 weeks paid maternity leave. Her daughter is in the child care center. When she went on a business trip to New York, she took Lila, and Lila’s primary teacher, all on the company’s dime. 
 
 But the things Byars raves about most is how the teachers are teaching her to be a mom, something many new moms would welcome as we face life with a child for the first time (but few would expect to find in their workplace). 
 
 “They have a philosophy that being frustrated and working through problems as simple as spending an extra minute in your crib when you don’t want to be there, or getting a toy that’s out of reach, is okay,” Byars said. The motto? “Struggle is essential to becoming a competent human being.” 
 
 If the intuition of a modern-day parent is to make it better right away, the teachers’ is to wait it out, offering support. 
 
 Providing the village. (Kyle Sparks) 
 
 Byars watched a one-year-old teach her eight-month-old daughter to go down a ramp without face-planting, and was amazed to see a group of toddlers eating a meal together with no tantrums or food throwing. (The French way has made it to America, albeit a very small part of it). When it’s time to eat, they wash their hands, and put on their bibs and get their blueberries. They feed themselves—and dump water on themselves. 
 
 “They have the space to do that,” says Byars. And now, she’s doing a lot of that at home. 
 
 What work-life balance can look like 
 
 Here’s what Graves day now looks like. He takes most of his family with him to work in the morning. Ruby, 4, goes to the child care center, and he walks Lily, 7, to the bus stop to go to school. 
 
 Patagonia buses Lily back to HQ after school, where Graves meets her for a snack. He shared strawberry milk with Ruby after her first day of school and was able to check in with Lily after she had a series of eye surgeries. He’s read to them at nap time, rubbed their backs until they fell asleep, watched their plays about Earth Day, and fall harvest, and taken them to Patagonia farmer’s market. 
 
 “These are parts of their day I never got to be part of before,” he said. 
 
 Graves is more connected to his kids, and his co-workers are connected to his kids too, which makes him more connected to them. “Everyone at Patagonia knows that Ruby “isn’t scared of anything” and that she has three superpowers: 1) she can see in the dark 2) she can see underwater 3) she is fast as a rocket, i.e. Ruby Rocket,” he said. 
 
 Listening to Graves describe his day made me profoundly sad about the millions of moments that I had missed with my girls. It is the ultimate cliché of parenting, but for a reason. Though it goes by slowly at first, suddenly, the early years are over and you can’t get them back. They are probably fine about that. Us, not so much. 
 
 What Graves described is many working parents’ utopia: A chance to connect with your kids at key moments in their day without feeling like you are cutting out of work, or skimping on work while others barrel forward. There was no zero sum equation here. Graves did not have to give up his job or do it less well to be there for his daughters. 
 
 Of course, most parents in America don’t even have the basic human right to paid time off with a baby, and affordable child care. Patagonia is doing its bit to fix that. It decided to take its child care story to the press because it wants to encourage other companies to follow suit. 
 
 Before joining Patagonia, Graves thought of himself as a very hands-on dad. He backpacked with his kids, knew their favorite books, put in the evening hours bathing and reading to them. He was no 1950s slacker. But what he gets to do now is fundamentally different. He sees them in their life, on their plane, doing their things, as they are. His relationship with his daughters is richer he says, the natural outcome of just being around more. If it takes a village to raise a child, Graves found his village. Too bad it’s so damn small. ||||| Juliette Kayyem, who several years ago left the Department of Homeland Security soon after her husband, David Barron, left a high position in the Justice Department, says their joint decision to leave Washington and return to Boston sprang from their desire to work on the “happiness project,” meaning quality time with their three children. (She borrowed the term from her friend Gretchen Rubin, who wrote a best-selling book and now runs a blog with that name.) 
 
 It’s time to embrace a national happiness project. As a daughter of Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson and the university he founded, I grew up with the Declaration of Independence in my blood. Last I checked, he did not declare American independence in the name of life, liberty, and professional success. Let us rediscover the pursuit of happiness, and let us start at home. 
 
 Innovation Nation 
 
 As I write this, I can hear the reaction of some readers to many of the proposals in this essay: It’s all fine and well for a tenured professor to write about flexible working hours, investment intervals, and family-comes-first management. But what about the real world? Most American women cannot demand these things, particularly in a bad economy, and their employers have little incentive to grant them voluntarily. Indeed, the most frequent reaction I get in putting forth these ideas is that when the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility, choosing the man will add more value to the company. 
 
 In fact, while many of these issues are hard to quantify and measure precisely, the statistics seem to tell a different story. A seminal study of 527 U.S. companies, published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2000, suggests that “organizations with more extensive work-family policies have higher perceived firm-level performance” among their industry peers. These findings accorded with a 2003 study conducted by Michelle Arthur at the University of New Mexico. Examining 130 announcements of family-friendly policies in The Wall Street Journal, Arthur found that the announcements alone significantly improved share prices. In 2011, a study on flexibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai, and Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed that increased flexibility correlates positively with job engagement, job satisfaction, employee retention, and employee health. 
 
 This is only a small sampling from a large and growing literature trying to pin down the relationship between family-friendly policies and economic performance. Other scholars have concluded that good family policies attract better talent, which in turn raises productivity, but that the policies themselves have no impact on productivity. Still others argue that results attributed to these policies are actually a function of good management overall. What is evident, however, is that many firms that recruit and train well-educated professional women are aware that when a woman leaves because of bad work-family balance, they are losing the money and time they invested in her. 
 
 Even the legal industry, built around the billable hour, is taking notice. Deborah Epstein Henry, a former big-firm litigator, is now the president of Flex-Time Lawyers, a national consulting firm focused partly on strategies for the retention of female attorneys. In her book Law and Reorder, published by the American Bar Association in 2010, she describes a legal profession “where the billable hour no longer works”; where attorneys, judges, recruiters, and academics all agree that this system of compensation has perverted the industry, leading to brutal work hours, massive inefficiency, and highly inflated costs. The answer—already being deployed in different corners of the industry—is a combination of alternative fee structures, virtual firms, women-owned firms, and the outsourcing of discrete legal jobs to other jurisdictions. Women, and Generation X and Y lawyers more generally, are pushing for these changes on the supply side; clients determined to reduce legal fees and increase flexible service are pulling on the demand side. Slowly, change is happening. 
 
 At the core of all this is self-interest. Losing smart and motivated women not only diminishes a company’s talent pool; it also reduces the return on its investment in training and mentoring. In trying to address these issues, some firms are finding out that women’s ways of working may just be better ways of working, for employees and clients alike. 
 
 Experts on creativity and innovation emphasize the value of encouraging nonlinear thinking and cultivating randomness by taking long walks or looking at your environment from unusual angles. In their new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, the innovation gurus John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas write, “We believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.” 
 
 Space for play and imagination is exactly what emerges when rigid work schedules and hierarchies loosen up. Skeptics should consider the “California effect.” California is the cradle of American innovation—in technology, entertainment, sports, food, and lifestyles. It is also a place where people take leisure as seriously as they take work; where companies like Google deliberately encourage play, with Ping-Pong tables, light sabers, and policies that require employees to spend one day a week working on whatever they wish. Charles Baudelaire wrote: “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google apparently has taken note. 
 
 No parent would mistake child care for childhood. Still, seeing the world anew through a child’s eyes can be a powerful source of stimulation. When the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling wrote The Strategy of Conflict, a classic text applying game theory to conflicts among nations, he frequently drew on child-rearing for examples of when deterrence might succeed or fail. “It may be easier to articulate the peculiar difficulty of constraining [a ruler] by the use of threats,” he wrote, “when one is fresh from a vain attempt at using threats to keep a small child from hurting a dog or a small dog from hurting a child.” 
 
 The books I’ve read with my children, the silly movies I’ve watched, the games I’ve played, questions I’ve answered, and people I’ve met while parenting have broadened my world. Another axiom of the literature on innovation is that the more often people with different perspectives come together, the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers the ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—whether they spend that time mothering or marathoning—will open the door to a much wider range of influences and ideas. 
 
 Enlisting Men 
 
 Perhaps the most encouraging news of all for achieving the sorts of changes that I have proposed is that men are joining the cause. In commenting on a draft of this article, Martha Minow, the dean of the Harvard Law School, wrote me that one change she has observed during 30 years of teaching law at Harvard is that today many young men are asking questions about how they can manage a work-life balance. And more systematic research on Generation Y confirms that many more men than in the past are asking questions about how they are going to integrate active parenthood with their professional lives. 
 
 Abstract aspirations are easier than concrete trade-offs, of course. These young men have not yet faced the question of whether they are prepared to give up that more prestigious clerkship or fellowship, decline a promotion, or delay their professional goals to spend more time with their children and to support their partner’s career. 
 
 Yet once work practices and work culture begin to evolve, those changes are likely to carry their own momentum. Kara Owen, the British foreign-service officer who worked a London job from Dublin, wrote me in an e-mail: 
 
 I think the culture on flexible working started to change the minute the Board of Management (who were all men at the time) started to work flexibly—quite a few of them started working one day a week from home. 
 
 Men have, of course, become much more involved parents over the past couple of decades, and that, too, suggests broad support for big changes in the way we balance work and family. It is noteworthy that both James Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, and William Lynn, deputy secretary of defense, stepped down two years into the Obama administration so that they could spend more time with their children (for real). 
 
 Going forward, women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men. After all, we have a new generation of young men who have been raised by full-time working mothers. Let us presume, as I do with my sons, that they will understand “supporting their families” to mean more than earning money. 
 
 I have been blessed to work with and be mentored by some extraordinary women. Watching Hillary Clinton in action makes me incredibly proud—of her intelligence, expertise, professionalism, charisma, and command of any audience. I get a similar rush when I see a front-page picture of Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, deep in conversation about some of the most important issues on the world stage; or of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, standing up forcefully for the Syrian people in the Security Council. 
 
 These women are extraordinary role models. If I had a daughter, I would encourage her to look to them, and I want a world in which they are extraordinary but not unusual. Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words, “to be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.” That means respecting, enabling, and indeed celebrating the full range of women’s choices. “Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in her speech at Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.” 
 
 I gave a speech at Vassar last November and arrived in time to wander the campus on a lovely fall afternoon. It is a place infused with a spirit of community and generosity, filled with benches, walkways, public art, and quiet places donated by alumnae seeking to encourage contemplation and connection. Turning the pages of the alumni magazine (Vassar is now coed), I was struck by the entries of older alumnae, who greeted their classmates with Salve (Latin for “hello”) and wrote witty remembrances sprinkled with literary allusions. Theirs was a world in which women wore their learning lightly; their news is mostly of their children’s accomplishments. Many of us look back on that earlier era as a time when it was fine to joke that women went to college to get an “M.R.S.” And many women of my generation abandoned the Seven Sisters as soon as the formerly all-male Ivy League universities became coed. I would never return to the world of segregated sexes and rampant discrimination. But now is the time to revisit the assumption that women must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our mothers and mentors warned us about. 
 
 I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. My husband agrees, but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more. If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us. 
 
 We’ll create a better society in the process, for all women. We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart. But when we do, we will stop talking about whether women can have it all. We will properly focus on how we can help all Americans have healthy, happy, productive lives, valuing the people they love as much as the success they seek. 
 
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– Until now, the public debate of work-vs-family has focused more on female workers than male ones. So Max Schireson's decision to demote himself at a major software company and move back home with his family is turning a few heads, Jezebel reports. "Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood," wrote Schireson in a blog post. "Somehow, the same people don't ask me." His 19-month stint at the helm of MongoDB in New York City has been successful—he helped turn it "into a billion-dollar business," Fortune notes—but the time away from his wife, children, and puppy in Palo Alto, Calif., has proved just too hard. Among his reasons: "I have 3 wonderful kids at home, aged 14, 12 and 9, and I love spending time with them." His "amazing wife" has "an important career" as a doctor and Stanford professor. "I love her, I am forever in her debt for finding a way to keep the family working despite my crazy travel. I should not continue abusing that patience." "On pace to fly 300,000 miles this year," he's missed a lot of family fun plus his son's minor surgery and the puppy being hit by a car. A turning point came when his plane made an emergency landing in Tucson and he slept through the whole thing, he tells Forbes: "In that moment, I realized, 'What am I doing?'" "Will that cost me tens of millions of dollars someday?" he writes. "Maybe. Life is about choices. " Reactions on his blog are mostly enthusiastic, but Jezebel notes that a woman couldn't do this without people getting concerned. On a positive note, Fortune says it may be a "step towards leveling the playing field for top executives, regardless of their gender." One reaction was definitely favorable—a blog comment from Schireson's daughter: "I'm glad you will be able to spend more time with us at home. yayyyyy."