Anne-Marie Slaughter strides backstage after her latest TED talk, fast-talking and hungry – she hasn't had time for breakfast yet, and it's well past midday. A little over a year ago, Slaughter was a highly respected but relatively anonymous academic. Her life changed last June, when her article for The Atlantic, Why Women Still Can't Have It All, became the most read in the magazine's history. Almost 220,000 people shared it on Facebook.

The speech she has just given, entitled Real Equality, considers what it would take for those twin pillars of human life – caregiving and breadwinning, as she terms them – to be given equal value, and for men and women to reach proper parity, at work and at home. The article and subsequent talk followed her decision to leave her job as the first female director of policy planning at the US state department, after a two-year stint working under Hillary Clinton. She left after concluding that "juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible".

She had been commuting from New Jersey to Washington each week, leaving the house at 4.20am on Monday and arriving back late on Friday, and her 14-year-old son was having problems at school – failing to do homework and disrupting classes. She decided enough was enough.

The article prompted a firestorm. Many read the title as simply saying women could never have it all (ignoring the "still" that Slaughter had insisted upon) and assumed it was yet another piece concluding women should give up and get back to the kitchen. Others recognised it was arguing for social change, but pointed out that work/family balance is also very difficult for men to achieve. Then there were criticisms based on class. Slaughter was writing about the kind of structural change it might take for elite women to become leaders, but the problems she tackled – punishingly long work hours, and inadequate or non-existent childcare provision – affect those on low incomes too.

"I didn't anticipate the whole thing would go so viral," says Slaughter, now 54. "I became a poster child, certainly in the media, for 'women can't have it all', when my whole life stands for the opposite proposition ... It never dawned on me that people would read the 'still' as 'never'. I thought people would read it as: "It's coming – but it's not there yet, and here's what we have to do'." Not long after her piece was published, she announced she'd never use the term "having it all" again, having realised it failed to resonate in the same way with younger women as older ones. She had simply meant "a career and a family too", while some people see it as shorthand for the notion that unless women are perfectly satisfied in every aspect of their lives, feminism can be said to have failed.

On meeting Slaughter, it's quite hard to imagine how anyone could see her as anti-feminist. There can be few people who have thought more energetically about the issues obstructing women's progress, and she has a brilliantly enthusiastic manner. She is currently writing a book, due out next year, also (provisionally) entitled Real Equality.

In the US, issues of work/family balance are especially pressing. It is one of only four countries in the world that doesn't have mandatory paid maternity leave – the others are Lesotho, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea. The US is also the only advanced industrial economy that doesn't guarantee workers paid holiday time. I ask why Americans aren't out marching on these issues, and she replies "it's a cult of work ... I honestly think so many Americans are scrambling so fast just to keep up that: a) they're not aware of what they're missing; b) they don't have time to agitate." When Slaughter worked in government, she knew women who had saved up all their vacation and personal days throughout their career so they could take maternity leave. "Then they'd say, 'Well, I saved enough to have one child, but I don't know how I'm going to have a second.'" In her speech, she points out that countries such as Norway and Sweden which "provide universal childcare [and] support for caregivers at home" are also ranked among the world's 15 most competitive economies: "These societies show that breadwinning and care-giving reinforce one another".

The structural problems are corporate as well as governmental. Earlier this year, Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, advised women to "Lean in" to their careers – to be ambitious, to sit at the top table; the other side, says Slaughter, is that people need to "lean on corporations", to push them to improve their policies. One measure that could help parents is scheduling all meetings in school hours, and she says that the really innovative corporations, "are the results-only workforces ... This can be done at different levels, but the basic idea is here's your work, here's your deadline, and then I don't care where you get it done. So it gets rid of the culture of face-time."

Sandberg is one of various women Slaughter has been accused of having a "catfight" with – another is her former boss, Clinton. Both charges seem ridiculous. Both Sandberg and Slaughter are interested in women's success: while Sandberg has focused on individual paths to achieving this, Slaughter is interested in the governmental, corporate, cultural changes that might help. In the case of Clinton, the charge stems from a quote Clinton gave to Marie Claire magazine – "I can't stand whining" – which some read as a swipe at her former colleague. A state department spokesperson quickly denied that it was. "There was an hour there where the bottom dropped out of my stomach," says Slaughter, and "all my friends, including Secretary Clinton, immediately reached out to me and said 'this was totally skewed'." She thinks the "catfight" narrative is a result of how rare it is to find women in the public eye – those who are visible are keenly scrutinised.

Women have made considerable inroads in the workplace over the last half century, while men have arguably made less impact in the home. The US Bureau of Labour Statistics says that on an average day, 48% of women and 20% of men do housework such as cleaning or laundry; when it comes to married people with children, both working full-time, 72.1% of women say that on an average day they care for and help their children, while 55.1% of men do the same. Childcare remains resolutely low-status, and Slaughter thinks this is partly due to the attitude, "'well, it's women's work', and since we denigrate women, we denigrate caregiving."

But that's not to say men aren't concerned about these issues. In 2008, 60% of American men reported feeling a conflict between their work and family life. "I really think we need a men's movement," says Slaughter, "and you're starting to see it. Guys are starting to speak up for themselves about masculinity, about care-giving. You know, women are hypocrites this way, because we would go crazy if men treated us in the workforce the way we typically treat them at home – if a guy in the workforce assumed he was more competent than you are, and told you what to do – but that's the way most women treat men in the household."

There's a growing body of research suggesting men who prioritise family are stigmatised in the workplace – viewed as weak, more likely to be harassed. This relates to a point made in Slaughter's initial article, in which she wrote that gravitas and parenthood aren't traditionally correlated. I ask how quickly she thinks this might change, and she's upbeat as ever; she emphasises how much more visible fathers now are in the public eye, from Brad Pitt to Barack Obama.One useful shift, she says, would be for "working dads" to be as normal a phrase as "working mums", but the change she would most like to see is this: "Any time a man says: 'We're expecting a child' or, 'We're adopting a child,' somebody says to him: 'How are you going to manage that?' Because that single thing – the fact that nobody says it – sends the signal [to his partner]: 'This baby is all yours.'"