Around The Corner

• Share

(6 of 6)

MARTINEZ: Consulting, any number of opportunities. I think that as a society, economic necessity dictates that you're going to want to employ the most talented members of society. And I think you have a generation of women who have attained great success, and I don't see how you put that genie back in the bottle. And I think men too want partners in life who are getting fulfillment, not just from their home.

JOHNSON: The other thing is longevity. We're hitting a point where well-to-do women are hitting 85. A lot of women reasonably expect to live to 90. I'm not going to say how old she is [laughter], but my mom is at this age where the kids have all gone to college and her career is at full throttle, and she's quite reasonably expecting to have another decade when she's just at the top of her game.

CUBAN: As an entrepreneur, I only hope that I have to compete against companies that are sexist because they're gonna fail.

TIME: Where do you think this gender revolution is going?

FLANAGAN: What I write about, what I care most about is family life, and that's really understated in the difference between what we say we want and what we do. We really want this deep, meaningful time together in the haven of our homes. But when people actually get home, everybody races off. Mom's got something on the DVD, the daughter's on Myspace.com the son's got his video game, Dad's checking ESPN and his work e-mails, and everyone's compartmentalized within the household. I think there's deep yearning for--I know this makes me sound conservative, but I am--true community, and I think it's not good for families if we each do what we want to do. I think it's good for families if we have a sense of obligation and commitment to our family and maybe not to doing the things we each want to do but to being [instead] in service to one another.

MARTINEZ: What you just said about everyone running to do their own thing and what you said earlier, in the context of video games, about how our kids have become addicted to electronic gadgets and media--I think the same is true for adults. I think we're getting smarter, to go to your point, Steve, but I wonder if we're getting wiser.

FLANAGAN: Yes.

MARTINEZ: I realized the other day--I'm going to share this with the group--I'm taking longer showers. It dawned on me that I'm taking longer showers because that's the last bastion where I can think. A disproportionate amount of my thoughts now are in the shower, because it's the one place where I'm not hounded by my BlackBerry, my cell phone, the 24/7 news on TV.