“I want a society that opens the possibility for every one of us to have a fulfilling career, or simply a good job with good wages if that’s what we choose, along with a personal life that allows for the satisfactions of loving and caring for others.”

Ann-Marie Slaughter lit a fire with her publication of ‘Why Women Can’t Still Can’t Have It All’ in the Atlantic, arguing that women who manage to be mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. She suggested that there are limits – in time, energy, fertility, and desire – that are unavoidable, and that no one can do everything. She speaks from experience: she gave up a high-powered job under Hillary Clinton as secretary of state to return to a less demanding (though still very impressive) job as a professor at Princeton.

In her forthcoming book, she extends this argument, suggesting that though there are some unavoidable limits on humans, society also imposes a lot of artificial ones. She argues that most jobs can be sorted into caring or competitive roles: investment banking might be competitive, but sectors like healthcare and education are more about caring. Society underrates caring jobs, she argues, and those jobs have also traditionally been the responsibility of women. If we are to achieve a better society, we need to increase the value we place on those caring jobs, whether it is childcare or senior care, and also make the workforce more flexible to accomodate more mixing of options, allowing part-time work, more parental leave, and other arrangements. Society, she says, has unfinished business when it comes to workplace arrangements and to social norms.

It’s a solid point, and I quite like her almost Buddhist discussion of limits. Her analysis of the psychology of caring vs. competitive jobs can sometimes feel a bit trite, though: it’s well out of her area of expertise, and isn’t as strong as the similar discussion in Friend and Foe, for example. Still, she’s engaging with an important issue, and one that in the U.S. in particular is often dismissed. Things like parental leave programs can help give children that crucial good early start, and most countries could do with thinking it over a little more. In a sense, it’s a nice complement to Sandberg’s Lean In: Lean In describes how to do well in the world as is, whereas Unfinished Business seeks to suggest how the world should change.

Disclosure: I read Unfinished Business as an advance reader copy. You can read more reviews, or pre-order the book, on amazon: Unfinished Business. It is released September 29th.