It's been a little over 10 years since Larry Summers, then president of Harvard University, made a speech at a conference called "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and their S&E Careers." Reportedly, Summers intended his remarks to be inflammatory. They were given off the record and without notes. Word got out, though, and Summers was internationally vilified. He resigned in the speech’s aftermath. The entire speech can be found here, but I'd like to focus on just one aspect. Specifically, this:

…the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near-total commitments to their work. They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect—and this is harder to measure — but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That's not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that … the choices that people make [are] contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe.

In the last decade, "work-life balance" has become a key women's issue. Although high-profile scientists have demonstrated that having a family doesn't necessarily run counter to having a prestigious career, and the gender balance numbers are better than they were, much of the Summers quote still rings true. It's worth reflecting on how far we've really come. Unfinished Business, a new book by Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of the New America Foundation and former Princeton dean, argues that we still haven't come far enough.

I was a graduate student back in 2005, the only woman in my class of a dozen biophysicists. The Summers speech infuriated me. In retrospect, though, it's striking how willing I was to accept his premise. Like his description of prestigious work, my definition of "scientific success" was perniciously narrow and inflexible. I wanted a tenure-track position at an elite university. Experience showed that those positions usually require at least one first-author Cell, Science, or Nature paper, often more than one. Achieving that level of mastery required ultimate dedication: any thought, energy, and effort that wasn't directed at research was "wasted." My single-minded drive toward that objective had personal consequences. I put off having children. My partner and I occupied separate orbits. I was distracted during painful family medical decisions that deserved my full attention.

This faceoff between the professional and the personal is easy to recognize, but as Slaughter demonstrates, it's indicative of a deeper poison at work. Unfinished Business argues that our society pits competition against care in a fight that should not exist. It forces unfair and unnecessary choices, forges self-defeating alliances. For example, in placing competition at the center of my career, I was tacitly agreeing with Larry Summers. I was fiercely loyal to his rules. Those rules do tend to be unfair to women, but as Slaughter recognizes, they're deeply unfair to anyone who values care. They're also unwise.

In the hypercompetitive world of research science, we need to rewrite these rules. To my mind, this suggestion is in absolute accordance with the meritocratic ideals of science. Anyone who's spent time watching David Attenborough knows that extreme competition can have bizarre consequences. A favorite example is Bowerbirds: The Art of Seduction. Watch that documentary, and you'll see traits like single-mindedness exaggerated to absurdity. Perhaps tellingly, a lifetime's success or failure can be determined by one mating season. It's worth considering which evolutionary tradeoffs these behaviors have required, and to what end.

My point: in isolation, competition cannot be trusted to select for "the best."

I suggest that many of biology's thorniest issues today—the reproducibility crisis, debates about publication and peer review, the abandonment of trainees—are the systemic consequences of valuing competition over care. In focusing on one type of success, we see individual agency rather than the collective good, we sacrifice the long term for the short term, and we narrow our understanding of what progress means.

As an alternative, Slaughter argues that competition and care deserve equal value and equal weight. This picture isn't static, though: a person may vacillate between the two over the course of his or her career, giving one more time and energy than the other, then switching, as external circumstances require. Competition and care are complementary, not mutually exclusive. True, durable success demands and facilitates both.

In this framework, women's issues become universal. Poignantly, Slaughter argues that, just as women have fought for their right to compete as equals in the workplace, men should have the equal right to focus on care, both in the workplace and at home. Correctly, I think, she observes that women's rights have outpaced men's, and that is not right. "The next phase of the women's movement," she observes, "is a men's movement." Our personhoods, families, workplaces, professional fields, and society would be better for it.

So in that spirit, our Female Scientist column says thank you to those with the courage to strike a balance between competition and care. Thanks to the dads who have seized the family reins as the lead parent (in Slaughter's illustrative parlance). Thanks to the group of junior female professors at TU Delft in the Netherlands, who had the foresight to include fathers in their petition for tenure track reform. Thanks to faculty members who wrestle honestly with the ethics of relying on trainee work during lean times. And thanks to everyone within the scientific community who works with care in mind.

Your daughters and sons, students and colleagues will ultimately thank you, too.