We’re not actually paranoid: everyone really is out to get us.
Last week at Science and Shopping, the UCL-based women in science networking group, we had a special guest presentation from Virginia Valian, Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Linguistics, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center, and a visiting Fellow at UCL.
Professor Valian might be familiar to some of you as the author, a few years back, of a shocker of a book entitled Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women. Our host, Professor Uta Frith FRS, had invited her to present the highlights of her book as they pertained specifically to women in science, along with more recent results from the literature.
After our usual lunch in the Royal Society canteen, we all climbed the grand marble staircase to the Library (past the names of all the Presidents of the Royal Society since its inception – not a female among them) and – with a few self-conscious chuckles – pulled the masculine rows of chairs into a nurturing circle on the plush carpets. And then Valian gave us the lowdown.
None of it came as a great surprise, but we felt a little stunned nonetheless. The general idea is that we all hold gender “schemas” (perceptions or stereotypes) that lead to subtle overvaluations of men and undervaluations of women – by both men and women, even those who want to be egalitarian and meritocratic. These small imbalances eventually accumulate until men tend to have the advantage. This isn’t just in science, but according to Valian, the scientific profession harbors an inbuilt exacerbation of this problem, as the schema for a scientist (“capable”, “independent”, “can-do”) overlaps much better with the schema we hold for men than for women (“communal”, “nurturing”).
I’ll give you some of Valian’s examples of how these schemas play out (see her book for the references). When lacking sufficient information about competence, say when viewing a fictional CV with a man’s or woman’s name on top, both men and women tend to rate the male as more competent. This tendency would obviously put women at a disadvantage during hiring and other competitive situations.
The good news is that when given enough information that both are stellar, both men and women do believe that the pair are equally competent; the bad news is that in the absence of any information about their personalities, both genders rate the woman as “less likeable” – a penalty with proven concrete disadvantages when it comes to advancing in one’s career. So women have to overcome two hurdles if they want to succeed. Women with children have a third disadvantage, as studies show that this state definitely counts against you: interestingly, the more children you have, the higher the penalties. Valian presented a number of really fascinating studies – the one that made us laugh the most was the suggestion that women could offset their inherent “unlikeable” tag by conceding on small things, such as making the tea. (Valian, however, confessed that this was one indignity to which she herself could never submit.) There isn’t space here to do her metastudies justice, but if you live in or near London, I would highly recommend going to her upcoming talk on 24 February at UCL’s Senate House
It wasn’t all doom and gloom: Uta also presented us with complimentary copies of a wonderful booklet produced by the York University plant geneticist Ottoline Leyser with the support of a prestigious Rosalind Franklin Award from Royal Society: Mothers in Science: 64 Ways to Have It All (cover pictured below). Within its pages are dozens of case stories about successful female scientists including a timeline of their scientific as well a familial successes. As I understand it, it’s not yet available for general release. But I suspect that in the face of the uphill battle that many women still face in the lab, it could be very inspiring.
Hm. My PhD supervisor is a mother of three, and after
getting rid ofgraduating me, subsequently went on to Chair a department to which she was recruited, and which was tailor made for her.A rare case I suppose, but an inspiring one. Bios here and here.
So what are the answers? Your post brought to mind Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, which I think you recommended to me? He recounted how the numbers of female players in orchestras rose dramatically once auditions were done behind screens to conceal the identity of the player and thereby neutralise the prejudices of the, invariably male, selectors. We need a similar kind of blinding for academic appointments, but the practicalities of that are beyond me.
Richard: If you can find a percentage of women who seem to have succeeded, it does not negate the data I’m discussing. Besides, your PhD supervisor did not have a control male version: would ‘he’ have got to the top faster or with more ease? It’s relative advantages we’re talking about: the point is that in general, on average, the tendency for all of us to undervalue women and overvalue men has been proved by a large variety of very respectable studies. And interestingly, it doesn’t seem to be getting much better with time, according to Valian’s assessment over a long time period.
Stephen: there are a lot of solutions in Valian’s book. One of the simplest thing leaders (such as yourself) can do is to endorse female colleagues. There were some great studies done where actors of both genders posed as lecturers, and they were introduced to a test audience either neutrally by a professor, or introduced by the same professor with specific examples of how that person was successful (e.g. a list of bogus awards). In those cases, the differences in perceived competence between the male actors and the female actors vanished (these actors weren’t required to actually speak – the subjects were asked about their impressions just after the introduction). So someone competent endorsing a woman’s competence helps shatter the schema.
Valian also thought it was useful, in committee meetings where lists were being drawn up for candidates, and no or few women’s names were coming up, to have someone say: just for a moment, can we pause and think if there are any women that might fit the bill that we’re just not automatically thinking of? She calls is “cognitive adjustment”: men naturally spring to mind when we imagine competence, so we need to actively open our minds to the other half. This is NOT to say that she endorses special treatment or quotas or positive discrimination: rather, a period in which women can at least be remembered. If they’re not good enough, they won’t be added to the list. But she has found that often such exercises do lead to overlooked people being considered.
…..past the names of all the Presidents of the Royal Society since its inception – not a female among them.
I am sorry, I have been there before so many times, I just can’t get beyond that point. It is outrageous and shocking and disgraceful.
I’ve written and read so much on this topic, and participated in other discussions, that I can’t bear to do it again. I feel the need to storm a Bastille with a very sharp axe or two.
I very much admire everyone who is keeping on plugging on at it, whether here (and in the events described), on blogs eg Female Science Professor, and everywhere. And I will, I know, continue my own feeble efforts in this regard and will not really use the axes. But, for today, I’m just fed up to read those Royal Society data, heavily suppressed somwhere in my mind, so will retire hurt for now.
Maxine, it’s enough to know you’d like to axe something, and are supportive of other’s efforts. I’m still surprisingly cheerful after all these years. I did get a bit cross a few months ago when I found out the number of women who had ever given Christmas Lectures at the RI. I’ve repressed most of that conversation, but I think the number was two — the last quite a few years ago now. Apparently the long list is drawn up initially by “learned societies” — so you can probably imagine that not a huge number of women are thought of automatically by those august bodies, with few so specimens around the table to jog their memories!
Maxine, will you allow me to make the tea for you and sharpen your axes?
Thanks for that Jenny – those are certainly useful strategies, though I think you may be over-estimating my ‘leadership’!
I sympathise with your disenchantment, Maxine, and hope you will soon feel able to rejoin the battle. It is vital that we men continue to hear the message. Many of us are slow learners.
Valian reckons that chatting about these issues with both male and female members of the lab certainly couldn’t hurt.
Now that I’m more awake than I was a couple of hours ago, I should note that responding with counter-examples (pace, Richard) might be counter-productive (as well as not disproving the hypothesis).
‘Oh,’ people might say, ‘look at this person who did all right. There isn’t a problem.’
The problem is real, and I should tell you about the group leader in our building who, in a grant review, was referred to as having a ’handicap’—because she has children. sigh
I have experienced similar reactions when I muse aloud about how few women seem to be in rock bands. Only to be told there is no problem, because this band or that band has a woman bassist or lead singer, doesn’t it?
In defense of Richard W., it is always good for us women to hear about the success stories. Hence the timeliness of “64 Ways”.
Minor pedantic point — Senate House isn’t part of UCL — yet. It’s the University of London administrative HQ and central library. The talk sounds interesting though.
Ha ha. Thanks, Andrew. I walk by it everyday, and sometimes dine in it, and all I can think is Jeeves and Wooster, third series.
It’s good to hear about the successes, yes, and I hope I haven’t bruised RW too much ;)
But a lot of these success stories—the ones I hear anyway—you look a little closer and find that the woman can afford nannies and housekeeping and whatnot (or who has various grandparents living in the same town), which makes it a little discouraging for the less privileged folk who really do find it a struggle. You rarely hear about people such as my colleague with her ‘handicap’ who, despite the ignorant bastards who do their best to keep her down, succeeds.
Well, there is obviously something going on given how few women are professors, FRS, PRS etc. I’m quite sure that being affluent helps ease the pain. But I have a very successful female colleague who has both a cleaner and a nanny to take the kids to school, and she spends a hell of a lot of time on the phone “coordinating the three ring circus” — her words — while her husband can go about his work unmolested.
That’s key, isn’t it? I mean quite apart from the old school tie network. I wonder how many men would be ‘successful’ if they didn’t have a partner running around in the background? I used to work with someone whose husband now runs a group (and she’s the technician in that group, despite being smart enough to head up her own lab): and it was she who went to pick up the kids when they were sick. Every time.
(and I’m not saying these things to say ‘gosh, isn’t that terrible; aren’t we so progressive not being like that?’ I’m hoping that by pointing out specific examples people reading this might actually see how seemingly small things, little prejudices — such as it’s mum’s job to look after the kids when they’re sick — are disproportionately harmful. Which I suppose fits in with what Valian was saying).
Gosh. That was a long parenthesis.
If what you’re saying is true, then the perceived penalty is probably fair enough. If a woman has to stay home every time a kid is ill, then it’s no wonder people view her as less optimal.
The solution to this problem is obvious, but probably wouldn’t be very popular.
It would take quite a sea change in opinion, sure. I was thinking on the way to work this morning that when successful male scientists are profiled, no mention is made of their children or the struggles they’ve had (usually because they haven’t had such struggles!).
Food for thought, Jenny, as always.
Apparently day care facilities famously don’t let sick children in. If I ever failed at science and writing, I could probably make a small fortune opening up London’s first creche for sick kids!
Thinking slightly more on-topic than my last comment, part of any solution must be getting more women into science in the first place. I’m sure recruitment biases play a role, but then I would be surprised if the ratio of applicants for most science jobs was even close to 50:50…
You need to be more specific, Andrew: getting them into science at what point?
In most countries there are more women than men, for example, in the life sciences at PhD level and it’s about equal at post-doc level – so are you referring to the lectureship/assistant prof level? Clarify and then we can carry on.
Interesting perspective from a FTM transgendered (HT to Claudia ).
Thanks for the post, Jenny! The two things I find most difficult are:
There are women who help keep women down
One interesting thing that Valian told us was that after having finished her book, she lost most of her anger on this topic. Somehow having studied the evidence that all of these schemas are innate (and shared between men and women) made her realize that very little of this is personal or intentional. Stephen mentioned Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, above: there is a lovely passage when he recounts his own shame that he ended up rating black images as less trustworthy in one of these tests (he is black himself). Even today if a friend says they’ve gone to see their doctor or lawyer, the first thing I think of is ‘he’.
I think girls need to be taught that the decks are benignly stacked so they too can know it’s not personal and know the things they need to do to compete. Valian was very careful to stress that she wasn’t advocating “fixing the woman”, but if there are tricks (in the same genre as the tea thing, above, or being careful to introduce fellow females with a stamp of endorsement) it would be good to know what that is. (If I didn’t make it clear, leader figures of either gender are effective at eliminating the differences between junior men and women’s perceived competence by endorsement.)
I would love that book, Mothers in science: 64 … please let us know if/when it accessible for the “public”.
Somehow having studied the evidence that all of these schemas are innate (and shared between men and women) made her realize that very little of this is personal or intentional.
This is exactly why I get angry/frustrated when I hear “there is no difference in how I view/is being viewed” and “we are all individuals and measured accordingly”.
There are women who help keep women down
Why not though? If nothing else, you want to “keep the famous standards” …. otherwise you yourself is undermined?! The main problem though is that we all make these “assumptions” since most of us think we are “unaffected” and “objective”.
I furthermore remember a discussion on FSP about “how you are introduced when giving talks etc” and the differences (by the commenters as well as by FSP) that can make or break the speaker “this is a lovely woman with two kids and work in the lab” in contrast to “Dr X has published in N and S and have been a long friend of the subject”. One form is more commonly used with specific people…
Valian says the simplest and best cure for a crap introduction at the podium is to email a short biography in advance to the person who will introduce you. Most people are very lazy and welcome the opportunity not to have to create one of these themselves, so you can then make sure everything that you want mentioned makes it into the intro. If you’ve won an award or had another achievement, mention it.
Why not though? If nothing else, you want to “keep the famous standards”
Yes, I think you are right. Women don’t want to see other women letting the side down. And to be fair to the woman in Steffi’s example, it could be that she had no control over the meeting having to be so late (US clients sometimes dictate late-starting teleconference meetings) — and the daycare facilities that won’t keep children longer are also to blame.
this is good advice for anyone, isn’t it?
By the way, you’re right about daycare not taking sick children, and I kind of understand why: the thing is of course by the time the child is symptomatic (and the paracetamol isn’t keeping the temperature down any more cough) they’ve already infected every other kid in the place…
If you really want to make a small fortune, open a daycare centre that stays open to about 9 at night. You could open at 2, say, and organize transport from the conventional places, and that way parents don’t have to stress about leaving work at five to get to daycare by six before being stung $25/minute.
oh! Something else I forgot. It’s all the rage now for new-father scientists to put lovely photos of their babies into their PowerPoint presentation – something which carries no penalty. Women are strongly advised not to do this, for obvious reasons.
I know it’s just one more example but I have just attended a most excellent seminar by Prof Tracey Palmer (University of Dundee) on transport of folded proteins across membranes in bacteria. Am happy to report that she was introduced with strong endorsement by one of my professorial colleagues – who mentioned her important contributions to overturning dogma in the membrane transport field.
Excellent! Did you feel yourself feeling more confident about her competence as a result? (Once you know about things like this, it’s sort of fun to do experiments on yourself…)
Now that I’m more awake than I was a couple of hours ago, I should note that responding with counter-examples (pace, Richard) might be counter-productive (as well as not disproving the hypothesis).
Now, now, you lot, stop reading more into my comment than was there. Did I say that I believed there was no problem? “A rare case”, I believe I said.
Somewhat related to this – some years ago, new legislation was passed here in which those being paid with public funds, and making >$100k annually, have their salaries publicly disclosed. The first incarnation of that list turned quite a lot of heads around here… as an example, there was a two-fold difference in total compensation between a couple of senior professors. The first, a woman with >20 years of service, was the lower. The second, a man (although admittedly of somewhat higher international profile) had been around half as long. This was just one of many, many similar examples in various institutions around these parts. So blatant as to be disgusting.
Particularly interesting data set, since essentially all colleges and universities were included on these lists. Of course, salaries that are paid from non-public funding sources, like charitable foundations, escape this scrutiny.
You can look at all of this, if you like, right here. Fascinating stuff if you know who the players are.
@Jenny – I’m not sure that it really altered my perception. My main prejudices when it comes to speakers are to do with crap presentation and that was certainly not the case this lunchtime.
Richard, I read an article recently that showed that on average women earn less than men for doing the same job worldwide, across pretty much all professions. So no surprise there.
Richard W: I think part of the reason that women get paid less is that they don’t ask for more – men do this more easily (I’m sure this has been said a million times before). The other part, of course, is that employers are likely to pay less if they can get away with it.
So I think the important thing – to somewhat answer my own question – is to stop telling young girls that they can be whatever they want, that the world is equitable and fair, and to start teaching them that no, it’s not fair, so you should be prepared for it and we’ll help you with that, so you can make your way regardless.
I know it’s only anecdotal, but…
My PhD lab was predominantly female the entire time I was there (6.5 years) to the point that we complained about it to our supervisor (also female) who hadn’t even noticed that she’d been hiring only women. The highest female to male ratio in the lab was 12:1 one year, and the lowest was when I left, when it was about 7:4. My supervisory committee was 2F, 1M and my final exam committee was 4F, 2M.
Of my total of five MSc project supervisors in chemistry/pharmacology, two were female. One supervised my literature thesis while she was on maternity leave. It went fine. The thesis won an award, so I clearly didn’t lack any supervision there.
Apparently I was lucky or spoiled, and these are all outlier situations, but to me this has been the norm, and it’s always so odd to see people complaining about gender ratios. I barely notice male:female ratio unless it’s extremely skewed (like our lab full of women, or when I visited the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and suddenly realized there were barely any women)
Hear, hear. I agree completely, Steffi, on your second point.
And there’s an interesting result that might relate to your first point about men asking for more money; they also believe they are worth more even when they aren’t. Valian told us about a fascinating study in which male and female subjects were brought in and instructed to do some work as quickly and to the best of their ability as possible. (She didn’t specify what sort of a task it was.) Afterwards, the subjects were asked to rate themselves on how they thought they did. Again and again, the women finished the task on average more quickly than the men, and also more accurately/better. However, women consistently rated their work lower than the men rated their own (on average inferior) efforts.
So you have to believe you’re worth that salary, before you can ask for it convincingly. Men tend to think they’re worth it even when they aren’t.
And how about the upper echelons of the Dept, Eva?
I just counted on the dept website, and overall about 25% of professors are female. It varies between subdisciplines, with most women in cell biology and fewest in structural/bioinformatics.
There are said to be a lot more female postdocs and PhDs than males in biology labs in most countries, apparently. It’s certainly the case in our institute. This situation is definitely not mirrored in the lab heads.
Men tend to think they’re worth it even when they aren’t.
ahem generalization. Just thought I’d point that out.
Richard, I was referring specifically to the studies summarized in Valian’s talk, not expressing a personal opinion. The use of the phrase ‘tend to’ was reflecting the language ‘on average’ in my previous paragraph. The results were statistically significant and published in peer-reviewed journals.
Richard, would you say that statistics are ’generalization’s?
Oh, all right, I surrender. Also, it took me several reads to get my head around RPG’s punctuation in that last comment.
However, and this is interesting, if I’m permitted to be anecdotal again – I was recently in a meeting where the five most powerful people in the room were all women (the CEO, Chief of Research, CTO and two VP’s of the hospital where I work). Which is an unfortunately uncommon situation I suspect, but I at least now have hopes that there will be long-term sustainability in the gender balance in senior positions in this institution. The optimist in me (shut up, Grant) believes that maybe, in this one place, the mold has been broken.
I was thinking over Steffi’s comment:
stop telling young girls that they can be whatever they want, that the world is equitable and fair, and to start teaching them that no, it’s not fair, so you should be prepared for it
My initial reaction was something like “Wait! That’s defeatist!”, when I realized that I’ve used this line, as almost every parent probably has, on my kids. “Awwww, but daddy, that’s not fair!”. To which the hackneyed response is, “Life isn’t fair”. I guess that’s doing exactly the same thing, just not in a gender-specific way. So maybe Steffi’s approach is the right one. Or “a” right one, anyway.
It’s not defeatist, it’s realistic.
I tell my girls they can do anything they put their mind to — but I’m also trying to instill the knowledge that they might have to fight for it.
Jenny, I’d recommend Rona Rapoport and Lotte Bailyn’s Beyond Work-Family Balance. It’s a summary of consulting projects undertaken to bring gender equity to a variety of professional workplaces. One of the conclusions has stayed with me: “Support work”, though crucial and often complex, is consistently both female-dominated and undervalued. The researchers, as I recall, found that when they tried to elevate the social status of support work within the groups — and it wasn’t easy — very interesting new dynamics ensued. It all had to be consistently reinforced from outside, though, or everyone went right back to the old patterns.
Ill-child care is a serious problem for students with kids as well. And so’s night care. I don’t imagine I’ll do lab work again outside courses until my daughter’s in her teens; how else could I leave to go run an experiment at night? Really, that’s the least of it in hard times; work’s frozen up completely around here, so I’m calling the Census office tomorrow, see if I can get a job counting heads. Will have to tell them though I can’t do night/weekend work.
Women are notorious for stomping on mothers’ fingers as they grip the career ledge. Not surprising; they don’t want to be associated with the various shambles that come with doing the bulk of childcare.
Richard, your girls may be able to do anything they put their minds to, but it’ll be one hell of a lot easier if they don’t have children, and they should know that too. And at some point “easier” comes to mean “more probable”. That little 6-day trip you saw me on was the product of four months’ Normandy-scale planning before and considerable emergency childcare-arranging work during; I’ve had to pull out of conference panels on short notice when childcare’s fallen through. Money and time wasted, reputation harmed. I’ve got a grant to do some research in California this summer, and most of the planning has to do with what to do with my daughter during the trip. I’ll likely end up taking her with, putting her in day camp for a few weeks, and rabbitting around doing the research between dropoff and pickup. I won’t likely be able to do much socializing, though it’s important, because in the evenings I’ll be Mom. My grant, of course, covers my travel but not hers, so there’s family fundraising to do. All this takes time and is precarious, and a poorly-timed illness can undo months’ worth of planning.
I wish I could say my circumstance was unusual, but neither divorces nor selfish husbands are rare. I’ve seen many female, middle-aged writers torpedoed this way, and the usual progression is that the woman just vanishes from the scene; a year or so later you see her again and ask about the book, which has long since been dropped. She’s working some genteel administrative job for peanuts because it’s got good benefits and lets her pick the kids up from school; a few years later you see her again and she’s writing ferociously on the side, meaning at 3 am. A few years later she’s got a book with a co-author and it too vanishes, in part because she’s not free to do publicity; the children have recitals and rehearsals and practices, the girl’s not where she should be academically, it’s necessary to volunteer at the girl’s school. Eventually everyone grows up, yes, but what I see is that there’s not quite the creative rebirth and freedom you’d expect after a decade or so of single parenting, legally or in fact; the woman is very tired and poor. This is a portrait of progress in a relatively forgiving career.
The women in academia I talk to who carry most or all of the childrearing in their families have a very, very tough go of it, largely because they’re so often invisible at work, and resented for it when they’re remembered. No, they can’t be at the 5:30 meeting. Ever. No, they can’t teach the 7 pm class. No, they can’t come to the party. Result, they wind up at community colleges part- or fulltime, which may be fine if they’d really been in it for the teaching, but not if they’d had real promise in research.
Are there exceptions, yes. The standout in my mind is Alice Munro, though of course her grown daughters wouldn’t claim to be happy with her at all. Apparently she shed them whenever possible so she could write and never really was present, which I imagine is a painful thing when there’s no other parent around to wander off to.
What it comes down to is that unfortunately there really is no way to know ahead of time which men will keep egalitarian promises. Which is why I say that if they really, really want non-mothering careers, they’d stand a good chance of helping themselves by depriving you of grandchildren.
Amy, thank you for that dose of tough love. I wish it didn’t have such a ring of truth about it. Might send you my copy of 64 Ways and see what you make of it!
Richard W., that’s a good anecdote. Thanks for sharing.
Jennifer, re. your message from Sunday — interesting, I didn’t know those statistics for the life sciences. I’m a computer scientist really (although I work among molecular biologists now) and I’m more used to seeing the recruitment process for computational jobs which does indicate (in my non-rigourous subjective recollection!) a male applicant bias.
These days I’m in a (probably slightly unusual) group where a female professor has around a dozen staff/PhD students under her, all but two of whom are male…
Oh…. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this until Amy’s story, but I’m so trained to only consider scientist stories when it comes to this. My own mother quit her job (as a nurse, in the middle of a very upward-moving career) at age 32 to take care of me when I was born. She was a single mom at the time, and she looked into child care, but there was no child care to match the ridiculous schedule of a nurse and she would only be working to pay for someone else to look after me while she worked, so she stayed home instead. She married when I was seven, but then we moved abroad, and then my sister was born, and by the time we moved back she had been out of work too long to get back in.
What’s worse than all this is that she didn’t even want to be a nurse, but even though she was in the top 3 of her class, she never got to go to the high school that led to university, because she was a girl. Since she was smart, she could go to college and be a teacher or a nurse, but anything else was just never presented as an option. That mentality towards girls has changed, fortunately. (Maybe that’s why I tend to get less angry about things than I should be. I know very well that if I was born a few decades earlier I would not even have been allowed to go to university, let alone study science. Yes, things still suck, but there is an upward trend. I’m optimistic that things will level out within the next generation.)
My mother is an excellent cook. Her passion for cookery started in her earliest years. She wanted to make a career at it.
No, she was told, because if she wanted to do cookery she had to also excel at needlework, which she was crap at because she was left-handed and was forced to do everything right-handed.
So then she thought she might try chemistry, because that’s like cookery, only you can’t eat the products.
No, she was told, because to do chemistry you had to do maths, which she was crap at.
She ended up being a lawyer.
In her forties she re-trained and is now a qualified chef. And, I might add, a very fine needlewoman.
Being a woman is hard enough – but being a left-handed woman? Forget it.
I’m slogging my way through Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works”, in which he makes a great deal of noise about the evolutionary adaption that leads to gender bias. interesting stuff. Essentially, it’s all your fault for having immobile gametes. Or something like that…
I’ve always been fascinated by famous chefs, who are almost always men. You’d think that cooking would be the one thing that women would be allowed to, if not dominate, than at least be equal. When women do it, it’s s chore; when men do it, it’s an art.
I’ve wondered about that myself. Women are cooks, men are chefs. Eh?
Jenny, did Valian say where these innate schemas come from? They may not be personal, but I worry that by saying that they’re ‘innate’, we use that as an excuse to do nothing about it.
The study showing women undervaluing their work more than men is telling and not surprising to me. I’ve heard it said that women grad students seem to suffer more from ‘the imposter syndrome’ than men (the feeling that they don’t deserve to be in that top-notch school/lab and that they got in by accident somehow). This low self-esteem seems to me to be one of the big problems, if not THE fundamental issue underlying all this. Because if women don’t even believe in themselves, how can they expect to succeed?
I start taking an unfortunately sociobiological view at this point, Corie. Do you remember those studies that came out ten years ago or so talking about how women don’t negotiate and that’s why they get paid crap? Well, it’s baloney. I’ve just spent two years watching 3- and 4-year-olds, who self-segregate ferociously by sex. The little girls do almost nothing but negotiate, sometimes quite brutally; it’s just that they do it in a different manner than the boys do and with different aims. The girls play truly vicious experimental games of exclusion and manipulation (“you can’t play with us” “you can play with us but you have to be the baby” “but I’m always the baby” etc.), and in those games, claims about what you can and can’t do are zealously scrutinized. (“Well, I should be the princess because the princess dress fits me.” “No it doesn’t, you’re not big enough, see? She lied, she said she could wear the princess dress.” “I don’t think she should play with us then because we don’t play with liars.”) while the boys play king of the mountain, making outrageous claims for themselves. The boys understand that these are grabs/threats and showboating and they don’t bother scrutinizing claims; they just jockey and knock each other off the top of the mountain if they can. I wound up thinking of sperm.
So I don’t know that it’s that the women don’t believe in themselves; it may be that the ordinary negotiating structure is just very male, so if you don’t get in there and self-promote the way men learn to from just out of babyhood, you look unsure of yourself and are out of the game.
Corie, it’s a good question. I’m going to email her and ask!
I’m with Amy on this, especially after seeing what Gee Minima is going through in the school playground right now. This low-self-esteem business is a feeble excuse. Men have it just as badly as women. They just don’t go on about ot quite as much.
And at some point one must face facts. Men are men, and women are women. Different, see? Women have, as Ian puts it, less mobile gametes.
(ducks)
I don’t think anyone was claiming men and women aren’t different, Henry (and Jenny made that point in her ‘Science & Shopping’ (heh) entry).
But the scientific world is heavily male-steered, making it difficult for anyone who is ‘different’ to succeed.
Being a woman is hard enough – but being a left-handed woman? Forget it.
Thanks Henry for giving me so much
truthhope…… [the left-handed female scientist said]You’d think that cooking would be the one thing that women would be allowed to, if not dominate, than at least be equal. When women do it, it’s s chore; when men do it, it’s an art.
Jenny; it is kind of a similar thing if you look at horse riding and jumping. The majority of people involved in younger years (non competitive) are female, the top riders mostly men. MY old teacher once told me that this (chefs and men) had to do with that it was like any “competitive job” and having to be [totally focused and not caring about a family] able to be very self centered and focused…. and this is the main thing standing between the top 5 and it being “equal in gender”.
end of my rant.
@ Richard; Difficult for anyone to succeed? Why, then, are Jews so disproportionately represented in science, given that they constitute a tiny percentage of the population, and continue to be systematically persecuted, especially by left-leaning academia, especially in the UK? And yet you rarely hear Jews moaning about their own misfortunes in the hope of being patronized? Women constitue half the population and everybody is at least batting for the same side here. I promised Jenny I wouldn’t rant about this here, but I think I’ve heard more than enough. People who are unhappy with their lot should stop kvetching and do something more constructive.
I don’t think anyone here is actually kvetching, Henry: unless that word means “identifying problems and figuring out a way of dealing with them”.
Hang on. Just spotted the logical … thing here:
If Jews are truly disproportionately represented (by which I take it you mean there are more than expected) despite persecution then well done them. Seriously. Sounds like you should be proud of what you’ve been able to achieve in spite of the difficulties.
But women are still underrepresented in science, especially in the higher echelons, despite years of fighting for equality. Are you saying they should just suck it up? Because that’s what it sounds like.
My purpose in writing this blog was most definitively not to “moan”, but to identify an interesting cause, one I’d not before considered, for a phenomena that has bothered me all my life, and the generate some discussion about that particular topic. So, in fact, I thought I actually was “doing something constructive”, in that a few simple solutions are evident once you see the problem more clearly. I don’t see how this is any way a negative thing, and I’m certainly not going to stop lobbying for a cause I believe in simply because it irritates people on the more privileged side of the fence — i.e., men in science.
Well, after all this discussion, I tend to agree with Maxine who wrote, many comments ago, that
I’ve written and read so much on this topic, and participated in other discussions, that I can’t bear to do it again. I feel the need to storm a Bastille with a very sharp axe or two.
Therefore the time has come to consider that we might actually need to raise the bar of what we consider is ‘doing something constructive’ about gender inequality, beyond simply talking, yet again, about how
we’re going to overthrow the Romansdreadful it is, and that somebody should do something about it.As I’ve said before (and no doubt many others have, with greater eloquence) the only way to make progress towards gender equality in the workplace – all workplaces – is to create a system in which fathers get the same paternity rights as mothers have maternity rights. I’m going to stop talking about that now, and write to my MP, Stormin’ Norman , (Lib. Dem., Feet Firmly Planted In Mid-Air, North Norfolk).
Norman Lamb, MP. Yesterday. He’s the one on the left.
My point about the Jews was to show that if a tiny and threatened group can succeed mightily in science despite quite obvious discrimination, then a much larger group ought really to be able to succeed without having to look for the (by comparison) subtle (though no doubt real) signs of discrimination discussed by Virginia Valian. The time might come for people to see the
giraffegerbilelephant in the room and admit that there is a great deal of biology in this which no amount of political grandstanding can overcome.Bollocks.
Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system.
the only way to make progress towards gender equality in the workplace – all workplaces – is to create a system in which fathers get the same paternity rights as mothers have maternity rights.
I disagree. These imbalances occur even with women who don’t have children. All the flexible creches and family-friendly systems in the world won’t help me overcome biases in promotion when I don’t have kids. If I work the same number of hours as a male colleague and achieve the same successes, I want to be treated equally, both consciously and subconsciously. I want to get the same pay and I want the same opportunities. This, I think, is not too much to ask, even ina background of “biological” difference (which obviously no one here is implying). If you can prove my gender makes me a worse scientist, then that’s a different story. Still, I trust my publication record and grant-winning successes speak for themselves.
beyond simply talking, yet again,
If you don’t want to talk about it, then by all means, don’t. However, this is my blog and I’m quite happy to blog about whatever I please. As others seemed interested in the discussion, I assume that I’m not alone. So do please carry on, those that want to, and those that don’t are free to go elsewhere.
I disagree. These imbalances occur even with women who don’t have children. … I want to get the same pay and I want the same opportunities
Yes, I agree. But where does one start? The fact that women have children and men do not is the single biggest difference between men and women, as seen by an employer, irrespective of any iother talents or attributes they might have. I suggest that, from an employer’s perspective, the fact that a woman might have children, even if she doesn’t already, provides a disincentive to employment, if there are male candidates ready to employ. I suspect that this single factor reduces the status of women in general in the eyes of employers, irrespective of whether they (the women, that is) actually have children or not.
Now, some employers are quite happy to bear the considerable costs of keeping a job open for a new mother, while recruiting maternity-leave cover and so on, when a new father has to be granted only a few extra days of leave, and that’s it. But many employers are not, and – sadly – these are themploywers whose views are routinely supported by employers’ organizations such as the Confederation of British Industry who have consistenmtly dragged their feet over legislation that would reduce the impacty of the biological differences between men and women on employment practice.
Another factor that feeds into this is the employment status of women who go back to work after having taken a career break to raise children. Having been out of the loop for a while, they might find that returning to work an enormous hurdle, and this (I suggests) leads to a lack of self-esteem in such women who will therefore be more willing to take lower-status jobs – and this perception feeds through the entire economy.
Legislation that equalizes maternity/paternity provision for both parents would remove this single hurdle at one stroke, and improve prospects for everyone, overall.
If you don’t want to talk about it, then by all means, don’t.
It’s not a question of whether one talks about it or not – but once one’s done talking, what then? Talking amongst ourselves isn’t going to make any material difference.
If you don’t want to talk about it, then by all means, don’t. However, this is my blog and I’m quite happy to blog about whatever I please. As others seemed interested in the discussion, I assume that I’m not alone. So do please carry on, those that want to, and those that don’t are free to go elsewhere.
This really isn’t very helpful. Sure, it’s your blog, but do you want a discussion on how best to proceed, given that we’re all agreed that there is a problem – or not? As you say, it’s your blog. It’s up to you.
When I have drafted a letter to my MP I shall post it here, if you don’t mind, soliciting suggestions for edits and improvements from you and your readers, before sending it off.
If you can prove my gender makes me a worse scientist, then that’s a different story.
I sought to make no such imputation, as you know very well. I might repeat the word used by esteemed colleague Dr R. P. G. of Sydney, but I prefer rational argument and debate, and don’t mind if people jopin in who might be offer a different perspective from that offered by everyone else.
Sorry for the typos – I am cross, that’s all. It’s funny how a bunch of reasonable people who claim to be open to all kinds of ideas and hypotheses become very unreasonable, sweary, and start to take things personally, when someone offers a view that differs from their own. Harumph.
Going back a few comments about the issue of self-esteem. I agree, men and women probably both suffer equally at times from low self-esteem. But I think women talk about it more, or let it show more in other ways (or let it ‘get to them’ more) than men do. And that perhaps is seen as a sign of weakness or a sign of being less capable in a male-dominated world. What do you think about that?
I think we should acknowledge that we are all really really generalizing here.
Henry, you need a pet picture right now:
@ Corie: I think we should acknowledge that we are all really really generalizing here.
Of course, but practical public policy – which is what this boils down to – can do nothing else.
@ Eva: Your pet is upside-down.
…but they’re male Jews, Henry…
Yes, Ian, you’re probably right, but that wasn’t really the point I was making, because recent antisemitism in academia is gender-neutral.
I suspect that the gender ratio between male and female academics of Jewish origin (and specifically in this context Ashkenazi Jewish origin) is about the same as that between male and female academics in the population at large.
the fact that a woman might have children, even if she doesn’t already, provides a disincentive to employment
This is obviously true, but I know plenty of female scientists beyond the child-bearing age, with no children, who are having these troubles. Therefore, children or fecundity is not relevant to all discrimination, and the main point of my blog post was about the reactions we have to gender itself, not to fecundity. That’s a separate issue, which I alluded to but was not the main point of the post. I’m happy if people want to talk about that as well, but I think it’s misleading to imply that that’s the only factor.
Henry, I was merely objecting to your suggestion that since you personally had had enough of the topic, then it wasn’t worth talking about any more. Since I have not joined in with you on these exhaustive debates you say you’ve had, then let me have my time to talk. The data Valian discussed was entirely new to me, and I was interested enough in it to write about it. Several people thanked me for the practical solutions that came up, so I’m pleased about that. It’s ridiculous, as you well know, for you to accuse you of not wanting to hear your opinions, which I respect. But you can’t blame me for disagreeing with you that the time for rational debate and discussion is over – especially in my own salon.
From Ian, way up there:
I’m slogging my way through Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works”, in which he makes a great deal of noise about the evolutionary adaption that leads to gender bias.
Henry, didn’t you just talk about this… have we stopped evolving then?.. I would like to think that we haven’t and that we can learn when we see a problem. And I still don’t get your point, by the way. Are you saying it’s all biological and we should just give up?
P.S. I just started thinking whether it’s a coincidence that the two scientists in the Nature piece that didn’t get their grant applications through are women. Yay, I found the link. Or is that getting paranoid at this point?
Heh, I just looked at the very first sentence of your post again, Jenny..
Actually Henry I suspect the balance among Jews is more towards women than it is in the gen pop of scientists, for the same reasons that you’ll find that feminist organisations are stuffed with Jewish women. My guess is it’s got to do with the relatively high status of women in Judaism over centuries — not that the men treat us beautifully, behind the mechitza etc., but the girls are taught to read, the women run businesses and households simultaneously, the women control household money, etc. so that the men can go study. Also we haven’t got the imitation complexes or disdain for lucre. Also whenever there’s money the girls are pushed to get whatever education they can — I recall an old boyfriend’s father, a Romanian Jew of about 70 at the time, getting spitting mad because I’d stopped with a master’s degree and not gone on for a doctorate. All the single Jewish mothers around here have bachelor’s degrees at least.
As for why Jews have done so remarkably well in academia, I don’t think it’s a great surprise, though I do wonder why the concentration in sciences. You take a shtetl culture in which scholarship is highly prized, with all the little boys trained to it and the pinnacle to be a genius, and set that down in a society in which Jews are allowed to assimilate, and it’s a tremendous head start. There’s been some high-pressure culling over the years, too.
As for why women don’t manage it better with half the population, the ability to withhold sex, and access to guns — I’ve been impressed by the alacrity with which groups of women shoot themselves in the foot. It’s so routine that I begin to wonder whether there isn’t some tremendous advantage to not succeeding. Outliers like the women here will not of course be happy with that but I can say with confidence that every time I’ve proposed, to a large group of women, something that would leave us richer or more powerful, it’s been a total flop. My favorite failure was suggesting to a huge forum of breastfeeding women that, since the US govt was undertaking a huge push for breasfteeding as a cost-saving measure (less govt outlay for formula, pediatrician bills), we ought to go get a cut of the savings. It’s a bit of work, breastfeeding, and it’s not like we can’t use the money. Yeah, well, that didn’t go over well. Outrage to do with love, etc.
Richard is vaguely disappointed that his joke flew waaay over Henry’s head.
Still, Henry, if you seriously believe that the only way to make things better for women in this industry is to do something for men, then, sadly, you’re part of the problem, not its solution.
What joke?
And I’d like to make things better for everyone. So there.
Ha ha ha! “Bollocks”: I didn’t get it either.
One-nil.
nil-one: I’m playing away.
Surely that should be nil-two?
Shot once, scored twice?
Yup, on account of playing with two ba…
OK, I’ll stop
Hee hee.
Thank you, Cath.
men and women probably both suffer equally at times from low self-esteem. But I think women talk about it more, or let it show more in other ways (or let it ‘get to them’ more) than men do. And that perhaps is seen as a sign of weakness or a sign of being less capable in a male-dominated world. What do you think about that
There is probably something in that, Corie. I’ve noticed that younger women often downplay their results in public talks, as if they don’t quite believe them. There was a (completely unscientific) article in the Guardian about this and other reasons why women might leave a science career recently (although it cited two scientific studies).
I thought Richard’s joke was the one about kvetching? Not a joke per se, more a sardonic comment.
I’ve just seen an announcement of a new edition of the The Atlas of Women in the World – due on 24th Feb.
This is obviously true, but I know plenty of female scientists beyond the child-bearing age, with no children, who are having these troubles. Therefore, children or fecundity is not relevant to all discrimination, and the main point of my blog post was about the reactions we have to gender itself, not to fecundity
Jenny, I think we’re talking here about two different, but related, non-popular items at work: being female (and thus possibly incompetent/giggly/distracting), and having caregiving responsibilities. Caregiving’s regarded as feminine, which I think is part of why men run into trouble when they start vanishing from the office to take care of aging parents — they’re good sons, of course, but aren’t they a little soft, doing all that sponging and fetching, and why haven’t they got a woman in to do it? A wife, a sister, someone paid? Care too much for their own good, they do. I think there’s an emasculating effect in the end, in the perception. Result is maybe similar to what the women find — they’re not around the office so much, people are a bit surprised to see them, they aren’t regarded, quite, as being part of the team. They’re the invisible presence and then not much of a presence at all. It happens pretty fast, too — I watched it happening once to an editor who was out for a month caring for his dying mother. Work piled up, then flowed around the hole he left, and there was faint irritation all around.
Well Frank, I avoided making a sardonic comment about “It’s funny how a bunch of reasonable people who claim to be open to all kinds of ideas and hypotheses become very unreasonable, sweary, and start to take things personally, when someone offers a view that differs from their own” but was very tempted—
Oh, damn.
@ Steffi: Henry, didn’t you just talk about this
Yes.
have we stopped evolving then?
No.
I would like to think that we haven’t and that we can learn when we see a problem.
Precisely.
And I still don’t get your point, by the way. Are you saying it’s all biological and we should just give up?
I think a lot more of this is biological than people care to admit. Of course we shouldn’t just ‘give up’, but solutions to the problem will be easier if we acknowledge this rather than by trying to pretend that it doesn’t exist.
@ Jenny: This is obviously true, but I know plenty of female scientists beyond the child-bearing age, with no children, who are having these troubles. Therefore, children or fecundity is not relevant to all discrimination, and the main point of my blog post was about the reactions we have to gender itself, not to fecundity.
I see your point. It’s good to separate the gender issue from that of fecundity, at least for the purposes of discussion, and this highlights an important distinction. Legislation against gender discrimination exists, but is not adequately enforced; Legislation against fecundity discrimination, however, needs further work.
One of the things that made me angry was a couple of articles I read in the Observer Sunday supplement by childless women, railing against what they saw as a pernicious ‘cult’ of motherhood, in which it is now trendy to extravagantly parade one’s own fecundity. The tone of the articles shocked me (
my member was activeI was an active member of the National Childbirth Trust) and it occurred to me that had the writeo expressed the same things abaout parading one’s ethnicity or sexuality, they’d have been (rightly) censured.@ Amy: your analysis of gender equality among Jews is extremely interesting. What strikes me particularly is (if I hadn’t misunderstood it) the fact that Jewish women have advanced because of precisely defined gender roles in Jewish life, rather than despite them.
This very precise codification might allow a certain security such that Judaism is not nearly as hung up about sex as Christianity seems to be. While Christians obsess about female clergy and homosexual bishops, we Liberal Jews feel shocked if our rabbi is not a lesbian.
If it is the case that security of traditional roles imbues a society with confidence, I have a feeling that the rise of feminism might have had its costs as well as its benefits. (And before I get flamed, I do not think that women should be shut up indoors chained to the kitchen sink, OK?)
I avoided making a sardonic comment … but was very tempted
Richard, I’m not sure I want to talk to you any more.
kisses
One of the things that made me angry was a couple of articles I read in the Observer Sunday supplement by childless women, railing against what they saw as a pernicious ‘cult’ of motherhood, in which it is now trendy to extravagantly parade one’s own fecundity.
Really? I thought that the problem (at least in Europe) was that not enough people were having kids, and the population was aging too quick. Has it become trendy to be a mother again? Or is it that the snobs have found yet another way to show how their lifestyle is WAY better than the rest of the mortals?
I have a feeling that the rise of feminism might have had its costs as well as its benefits
@Henry: well, of course. There is seldom only good things that happen when you change things.
For example, crime rates and alcoholism are increasing in women – compared to before… one might say that since women now can purchase alcohol themselves, you have a few who can’t control it (as with men).
I am not really sure I think it is strange per se. Then again, I might be happy when “women can be promoted and being mediocre as well as men can” …. in my cynical world. Sure, it would be nice to move from society A with gender bias to Society X with no gender bias and all is well – but I don’t see that happening. Actually, I think that thought might be one of my pet peeves, as with all new legislation and the cries for “don’t forget the P-group, or the H-group, or the E-group just because you want to change it to be non discriminatory for women”. When that happens, most times it ends with non changing at all – sorry to say.
I’ve been impressed by the alacrity with which groups of women shoot themselves in the foot. It’s so routine that I begin to wonder whether there isn’t some tremendous advantage to not succeeding.
@Amy> I think it is that old thing "when all fails, you can always strive to be a Good Mother and then you are – for many people – sanctified and respected. And being a Good Mother (as many things) takes time and effort and… well, you know – “I can actually take care of my children without monetary means since I love my children and they are not a means to an end.” and we all know what happens when the emotional (ad hominem) argument enters a perfectly economical discussion… There is something about the idea that money is for those of us who don’t like our ‘job’ and of course, all the CEOs hate their jobs and therefore have to have all this money in compensation for the hard work they are doing. Mothers (and the others) are doing it out of love and care “because it is in their nature” and therefore don’t have the same need to get compensated.
I’m not saying it is necessary wrong, but it has flaws that are big.
Asa’s comments about change are very true. Perhaps it would be interesting to think of our attitudes to sex/gender as needing to evolve. The quest becomes then to find a way to ensure that appropriate selective pressures are in place. I know this begs a whole lot of questions but wonder if it is a helpful way to think about the problem?
You may have a point, Frank. In fact, one might refine your idea further and say that gender issues such as these might be addressable in the language of the evolution of altruism and cooperation. This is why Richard’s point
Henry, if you seriously believe that the only way to make things better for women in this industry is to do something for men, then, sadly, you’re part of the problem, not its solution
is unhelpful. Co-operation is improved if there is something in it for the participants – enlightened self-interest, as it were.
The study of the evolution of altruism and cooperation has come along way from simple game theory, and now involves studies of such things as the politics of punishment, the calibration of one’s perceived status in a group, and so on.
Another thing that may help is if science becomes more regularized as a profession. From looking around this institute, compared to how academia was when I was younger (admittedly this was in a different country, but I’ve heard the old-timer Brit PIs complaining about it too), this is already happening. The PhD students in this building, of both genders, are not working the 80-hour weeks that I and my colleagues were expected to endure; it’s fairly quiet at night and the weekends, and people take their holidays. European law is on their side, so there is nothing the lab heads can do about it except bitch in the staff bar.
Silently, I applaud these kids. The old-timers say that this generation of scientists is lazy, doesn’t have that hunger, isn’t willing to sacrifice its life for the cause — but I think the move is a healthy one. My own experience shows that one can be successful working 40-50 hours a week provided you are quick, organized, efficient and don’t spend hours drinking tea and surfing the internet.
A more regularized profession will make it easier for parents, I suspect.
@Jenny – alas I don’t see the same sanity creeping in here. Åsa, Brooks, Steffi? I do see universities bending verrrry creakily towards more year-off/tenure-clock-stopping policies for faculty (not staff) who have babies, but my impression is that there’s some cost to actually taking the offers. I don’t know whether there’s some implicit expectation that you’ll get research done, or grants written, or students supervised during the time off (which of course means it isn’t really time off).
About ten years ago some of the uniony medical residents in the US won a rule limiting their working hours to 80/wk on average, which promptly infuriated many other medical residents, who maintained that their training would be hurt and they wouldn’t be able to care for their patients properly.
@Henry> Well, we haven’t the whole flesh/spirit hangup. Which doesn’t mean women don’t get plenty of eee-vil attributed to them; think of some of the turn-of-century (the last one) Yiddish writers. All these terrifying dybbuk/woman creatures and they only want one thing. Which is to distract the men from Torah and their wives, of course. But sure, of course the shakeup’s caused big problems. It’s been terrible for women who’d been protected under the old system but haven’t the octane for competing in money jobs, or who’d really wanted to have children and be taken care of. As far as I can make out, it’s now freaked out three generations of Jewish men, leading to highly annoying displays of macho over what the rabbi’s allowed to do and who gets on synagogue committees. This nonsense doesn’t go on so much here, but that’s because we’ve got a Jewish community largely abandoned by the men and run by a matriarchy of ER physicians and musicians. (We save the lesbian for the high holiday services.)
As for me, I cringe at the lesbian-rabbi thing because invariably it means guitars and strained, guitar-thumping renditions of “Israeli folk music”, unnaturally short services, and spirituality. And I just can’t get next to that. However, I lurve second-wave feminism, since it was made by and for the likes of me. I even nearly went to Wellesley and started a headband/Doc Martens collection, but then decided I’d rather to go school with boys (failing to notice proximity to Cambridge or the meaning of same)(no map-reading remarks are necessary; it hadn’t occurred to me to find Wellesley on a map as I had supreme confidence that I would be borne by some combination of trains and cabs and kind strangers to wherever it was). Which is not to say I haven’t been screwed by the changes, in some regards; were it not for a feminist overlay to deeply sexist divorce laws (favors the mother heavily, but only if she’s an object of alms-begging, self-denying pity), I’d have had alimony and more freedom to move where I pleased with my daughter.
Right, I have the feeling I’ve wandered off the point. I think I need to go back to bed.
Oh, wait, cult of motherhood — yes, we had the backlash here 10-15 years ago when everyone was racing to have a quiverfull of towheaded children. Prompted many minivan sales. Point was fairly made that people who chose not to spawn were expected to pick up others’ work for free, got cut out of tax goodies, were generally on the receiving end of much smugness and condescension, and were even left out of promotions because they hadn’t families to support. (I still see plenty of that, btw. And was startled, though not completely surprised, at the huge promotion my ex got shortly after we married. Marriage, homeownership, intention to procreate imply stability, maturity, membership in the club.) The backlash died like a …gee, several unsavory similes come to mind. Died, anyway. If you ask me, cult of motherhood’s mostly sucked for the women, who then go in for competitive childrearing, career death, and suburban desperation. Been nice for the kiddies, though. Till the divorces, anyway.
The only people I argue much with on this are the academics, whose livelihood and racket depend on other people’s voluntarily raising vast quantities of fresh meat for them year after year. Must throw more 18-year-olds into gaping university maws. So I get a bit sharp with them and say they can tolerate and accommodate the fact of colleagues’ children slightly better than they do.
@Jenny – alas I don’t see the same sanity creeping in here.
Yeah, well, the EU turns out to be good for more than just skiing. It’s been fun for me watching the UK get dragged kicking and screaming into concepts like anti-age discrimination (it’s now illegal to request someone’s date of birth for recruitment) and the work week limits. As an American, I already thought the UK was lax before all this – 25 days of vacation in your first year?? – but it’s been steadily improving in favor of the worker. I do wonder how labs would respond if suddenly it wasn’t allowed to treat workers like slaves. I suspect that good science would continue to go on, but people might be less grumpy.
“and don’t spend hours drinking tea and surfing the internet”
But, but, but….internet! And tea!
Henry, as someone who is voluntarily child free myself, I completely understand the backlash you are talking about. It is extremely tiresome to have friends, family, colleagues and random strangers constantly assume that I haven’t thought it through / don’t know what I want / will change my mind as I get older / have something wrong with me. Last month I had 3 female colleagues in one evening say “oh, you really should have children you know”. How is that acceptable, but I can’t say “oh, you have kids? You really shouldn’t have done that, you know”?
Cath, I get the same thing, and it’s very tiresome. It’s intrusive, inappropriate, and at times borderline eugenics-creepy in tone. It’s difficult for me not to resent such intrusions, because I think I have an “it takes a village” approach, in action and in attitude, and I don’t complain about adjusting schedules or making accommodations for colleagues who do have children. With this issue, and the broader one of gender disparities, what irritates me most is the tacit assumption that one has to experience the difficulties and situations in order to understand the perspectives of the targets of oppression or discrimination. What the f$#% is empathy for, then?
“at times borderline eugenics-creepy in tone.”
I haven’t had much of that myself, luckily, but I do know exactly what you mean.
sigh
Look, people like Henry can bleat all they want about rights for men in response to women being discriminated against, and say ’let’s make life easier for men by legislating for them and there’ll be a trickle-through effect’, but that shows not only a blindness to the entire feminist world-view but a disturbing lack of understanding of human nature.
Enact the legislation — YES — because I want those rights. But I want them for me and other men, not because they will help women. And when it is OK for men to take time off and share in childcare, then those men who would have done it anyway will be happy, and their partners will be happy, but the 83% of men who are complete Neanderthals will continue on their merry way being discriminatory and reactionary: and they will view the other 17% (the numbers are made up, all right?) as weak and, dare I say, effeminate.
The problem is that it is a man’s world and you have to change that. But you’re trying to topple people from a position of power. So we need some better tactics. What to do?
The first thing is to allow conversations like this and to admit there is a problem, and yes, we need to do something about it, and no, we don’t hijack the conversation by saying “you think you’ve got it bad” or “stop whining: look at me, I’m doing all right and I had to walk uphill against the wind in the snow both ways”.
The second thing is for men who ‘get it’ to act accordingly. If that means positive discrimination, so be it. This does not mean stroking your male ego by being ‘protective’ of women, it means clearing the way so that they can succeed on their merits. You have to change grass-roots attitudes, and a discussion of how to do that would be more constructive, I think. )And I will come down like a heavy thing on any of male colleagues I find being disrespectful of anyone based on their sex—and I hope they do the same for me. )
Yeah. When someone says “look, there’s a problem” and someone else says “Oh, but I’ve got this problem” it makes me cross. You can probably tell.
The Nazis gave eugenics a bad name.
“I haven’t had much of that myself, luckily”
That’s just ’cause Kristi has better genes than you.
Just kidding, of course.
More seriously, though, people say those things to you, about “needing” kids, because you apparently fit into the vision of what someone’s life should be like to have kids. Married, stable job, house.
I never get anyone telling me I should have kids, even though I actually really want to raise a kid, but I live with my cat in a tiny one bedroom apartment, am in the middle of career uncertainties, and I have odd nomadic tendencies that involve getting stranded on a broken Greyhound bus in the middle of a desert while backpacking alone. Nobody ever tells me I should have a kid. It’s silly.
Eva: have a kid.
Thanks! I will, someday.
During my nomadic postdoctoral years (which was an extended, and on the whole very happy, period of my life), many fewer people suggested to me that I should have children.
we don’t hijack the conversation by saying “you think you’ve got it bad” or “stop whining: look at me, I’m doing all right and I had to walk uphill against the wind in the snow both ways”
What would be novel in this conversation, at least in the context of the blogosphere, would be to see more (any?) admissions of success due (at least in large part) to privilege, whether gender-based, socioeconomic, or otherwise. For example, I grew up in a stable, middle-class, book- and art supply-filled home with two college/graduate school-educated parents, in a large and culturally diverse US city; I’ve had jobs since I was old enough to work, I’ve never been homeless, I’ve never gone hungry, and I’ve always had some form of health care coverage. All of these privileges have allowed me to become a tenured basic sciences faculty member at a university. Surely I’m not the only scientist-bloggeur who has benefited from such a background.
Meh. I used to get that. The crowning event’s when some cooing maternal child ten years your junior tells you you’ll change your mind. The maddening thing is that I did change my mind. Am in a profoundly pro-children part of the world, of course; I had snarling-yet-responsible guitar/filmboy who worked for me telling me I’d be an awesome mom and should have kids, though he didn’t at all approve of the man or the suburban house.
Richard, the thing is that we women have all the power we could possibly want to get this done. I truly think that while legislation might make things easier, the will is really lacking on the part of women-in-the-aggregate. I wasn’t joking when I was talking about sex/babymaking gatekeeping and guns. Not to mention the fact that on the whole the young women are better-educated than the young men in America. If we wanted the power, we’d have it today.
And really that’s the problem. Feminism never reached most women, so when we’re talking about, say, women who are scientists and academics, we’re talking about a very small percentage of women overall. I can tell you that my circumstance as a single mother is extremely unusual — the ordinary story is that a girl married her highschool sweetheart young, had multiple kids and no career, no idea that the guy was treating her miserably and/or thought it was her own fault, and divorced either after his infidelity, his longterm drug abuse/drinking and child endangerment, or her slow discovery that she’s a grownup with a mind of her own (sometimes aided by another man). They come out of marriage wholly unequipped to raise kids on their own, and after some years — maybe a decade — toughening up on and off the system, they’re still poor, but don’t doubt themselves anymore. And even then they don’t take for granted the privileges of feminism — it just doesn’t occur to them. Totally different world.
You could argue that one reason women don’t take the power is that most of us have no idea what it tastes like and so don’t want it bad enough. And you can see some of that in power dynamics among women in middle management — they don’t play like the boys, which can be preserving, but which can also make things exceptionally bloody as girls don’t grow up having to establish rules of war, and show up in cubicles w/o a good sense of how to fight without playing Siege of Atlanta. There’s just not enough experience with power.
Do you fix things through affirmative action? (sigh) Again, I’m a tremendous beneficiary of this and I delight in it. But on the whole, no, I don’t think it’s made much of a dent — or at least the changes that have come about, like the notion that girls don’t break if they play sports, have been far from the real power and hedged about with new forms of discrimination. I think you’d need a major war that cleared out the men and left the women to run things on their own before they noticed how capable they are, and that’d last maybe a generation after the men came back. I’d guess it’s because the women mostly do want babies, for whatever reason, and I suspect that’s why because I notice a tremendous dropoff in single women’s being anxious to catch men after age 40 or so.
Does that mean stop pushing for the laws and stop using them, once enacted? No, I don’t think so. Small percentages still involve a great many people.
Amy, it took two goes for me to get that: are you suggesting that women withhold sex? Until what? What would be your ultimatum’s goal?
I’m all ears.
Eva, so next time someone tells me I should have a baby, can I tell them that some nomadic Dutch girl is having one for me, possibly on a Greyhound?
(We really need nested comments around here, so we can separate the silly stuff from the serious points that people are making. Sorry, everyone).
Feminism never reached most women,
that might, actually, be key.
ponder
Jenny, sure. Look, if you’re playing for power, use what you’ve got. What’s the goal? Christ, I could set out a raft of them, but I doubt they’d be popular with most women. You’d need some sort of accord. But there again you run into what I’m thinking more & more is the biology. Women will not work with other women if it means ceding any ability to have and protect children, which is why you see second-wives groups springing up to support father’s groups in attacking child support obligations. The rhetoric is something monograph-worthy. If you could determine some goal that did not involve doing some large segment of the female population out of a perceived ability to have/raise kids, you could pull off whatever trick you wanted. Of course, you’d need to have teenaged girls in agreement, too. Down to like age 12 or 13. The men would go there otherwise and compete for the 13-year-old girls, who’d suddenly be crazy-powerful because of that. You see how sci-fi this all sounds, and I think it’s because women in general don’t want the power to make legislation, have the money, do the picking/choosing for anything besides babymaking, etc. that bad. Why don’t they want it, that’s something else.
You’re assuming there would be no violent reaction to such a scenario.
“can I tell them that some nomadic Dutch girl is having one for me, possibly on a Greyhound?”
Of course!
Re parenting: A friend of mine ended up a single parent after a separation. When I tell this to mutual acquaintances, their initial reaction is often “Why??”. If that seems like a weird reaction, you must have assumed that “friend of mine” and “single parent” referred to a woman… For some reason, hearing about single dads taking care of their kid invokes a “Why?” and I’m expected to come up with some explanation. I don’t know, to be honest. It never occurred to me to ask why he takes care of his kid! Why wouldn’t he? What kind of question is that? And the people asking all think they’re generally open-minded, and when it comes to their explicit opinions they really are, but this is the backdrop against which we’re having these discussions. Ideas about how the world should be are rooted very deep.
You’re assuming there would be no violent reaction to such a scenario.
That’d be what the guns are for.
_For some reason, hearing about single dads taking care of their kid invokes a “Why?” and I’m expected to come up with some explanation. _
As local representative of singlemotherland I can tell you that most single fathers don’t in fact want the job, and when they do sign up legally, tend to slough it off onto the nearest available and willing woman (girlfriend, mother, grandma). I see a lot of men fighting for custody as a means of a) reducing child support obligations; b) scaring the mother into letting them off the hook for child support
- with the advent of presumptive joint custody that’s become standard father-representing lawyer practice. Are there exceptions, certainly. My dad had custody of my brother after my parents’ divorce (though, come to think of it, he did move another woman in relatively quick and hoped that domestic peace would ensue, with my brother taking orders from the girlfriend. Did not work well with my teenaged bro, and luckily my father picked up on that after only a few months of domestic misery, police calls, juvenile detention, etc. Also the woman was sensible enough not to want the stepmother job, really). Ahem. Bad example maybe. Yes, there are exceptions, though just now I’m having trouble thinking of any. -There’s the married father at my synagogue who lets on like he’s singleand the single guy whose wife died and he can’t get a date, is morbidly obese and has Tourette’s; he really does take care of his boys. No, can’t think of any others of my acquaintance, online or irl.Crap. Sorry:
You’re assuming there would be no violent reaction to such a scenario.
That’d be what the guns are for.
For some reason, hearing about single dads taking care of their kid invokes a “Why?” and I’m expected to come up with some explanation.
As local representative of singlemotherland I can tell you that most single fathers don’t in fact want the job, and when they do sign up legally, tend to slough it off onto the nearest available and willing woman (girlfriend, mother, grandma). I see a lot of men fighting for custody as a means of a) reducing child support obligations; b) scaring the mother into letting them off the hook for child support. With the advent of presumptive joint custody that’s become standard father-representing lawyer practice. Are there exceptions, certainly. My dad had custody of my brother after my parents’ divorce (though, come to think of it, he did move another woman in relatively quick and hoped that domestic peace would ensue, with my brother taking orders from the girlfriend. Did not work well with my teenaged bro, and luckily my father picked up on that after only a few months of domestic misery, police calls, juvenile detention, etc. Also the woman was sensible enough not to want the stepmother job, really). Ahem. Bad example maybe. Yes, there are exceptions, though just now I’m having trouble thinking of any.
There’s the married father at my synagogue who lets on like he’s singleand the single guy whose wife died and he can’t get a date, is morbidly obese and has Tourette’s; he really does take care of his boys. No, can’t think of any others of my acquaintance, online or irl.[meanwhile, from the person who slept when the discussion was raging…. and have one short comment to and old thing]
Alas I don’t see the same sanity creeping in here.
nah, I don’t see it here in the States. Why? My answer would be what Jenny eluded to in the UK scenario – US legislation doesn’t say anything about “workers’ rights” as much as Europe. US is more to the point “work hard, maybe play hard, but most of all – be glad you have a job and work with it”. [my view anyway] And of course, as long as there are people are willing to work superhours, for whatever salary, in hope of a bright future – why would it change? they can always replace a lazy person who does not work weekends…. (not sure if it is getting more to this “replacement” style nowadays)
Furthermore, and this might be rantings and misconceptions, but it might have something to do with how post docs are viewed in US vs Europe, as in and “post graduate trainees” and “independent researchers” words…
To return to the very interesting discussion/posts from Amy.
I think it’s because women in general don’t want the power to make legislation, have the money, do the picking/choosing for anything besides babymaking, etc. that bad. Why don’t they want it, that’s something else.
Well, this is one of the reasons (?) that the right to vote for women was voted down (by women too) in Switzerland in the 1980s in one of the cantons…
And again, I will wonder why indeed would you go for power and risk critique/violence/taken away when you can be powerful in your own motherhood where noone [apart from a younger version of you] can threaten you?!?
The motherhood/women withholding sex was an interesting idea indeed, need to think about that (and not just in a Greek drama). I think that what was discussed earlier with “you can do anything you want” [as told to girls] is one of the things we see now when aging [academic] women are wondering why it is not as “easy” and “normal” as we were told…
and at least in Sweden, the highly educated seem to get no kids or more than 3…. strenght in numbers and all that.?!
I don’t quite get how the idea of withholding sex can bring support to the feminist cause (except in the context of a Greek drama, of course). See, I was under the impression that women enjoy sex as much as we men do, so wouldn’t that kind of measure bring only frustration and suffering to BOTH women and men? Or am I being hopelessly naive, and I should assume instead that they are really throwing us a bone each time it happens? (and if so, that would be in recompense of what exactly?)
Also, I could in principle agree with:
I can tell you that most single fathers don’t in fact want the job, and when they do sign up legally, tend to slough it off onto the nearest available and willing woman (girlfriend, mother, grandma)
but wouldn’t that leave the door open for an employer facing the dilemma of hiring a woman or a man for a particular position to reason more or less like this: “I can tell that most women in fact really want to become mothers, and when they are hired they tend to become pregnant and take long and paid-for maternity leaves. I’d better go for the guy”?
That’s what happens already, Cristian…
Yeah, precisely, but my point is that we’re trying to prevent it from happening because we see it as unfair and based on prejudice. But I guess that if we can make that sort of assumptions about single fathers too…is it justified in the end?
Just went out with a group of scientists for lunch, one of the men of which had just had a new baby. Someone asked him: “How is your wife is going to arrange things when maternity leave is over — will she go part time?” He replied in the affirmative — three days a week, the other two she leaves early to pick up the baby at the creche. And I was bemused (after having been participating in this discussion) to note that it was all discussed as if there was no other option. The question is not “which of you will work part-time”. It’s simply not part of our — schema, I suppose. The default seems to be that the woman takes the career hit.
Richard’s right (and I raised quite a ruckus in a freshman econ lecture when the Likud-lovin’ prof advanced the argument as justification for paying women less; the debate turned meanspirited in a hurry, leading to a) the bewilderment and discomfort of 300 freshmen; b) the prof’s trying so persistently to date me that I had to threaten to call the police).
Cristian, the goal here was equal opportunity, not eradication of prejudice. All affirmative-action laws are prejudicial, which is why you get stupidities like graduate programs lavishing minority-scholarship money on wealthy melanin-advantaged students with degrees from Harvard. In fact, btw, increasingly the prejudice is being done away with in family courts here. In presumptive-joint-custody states, if the guy says he wants equally shared custody, the woman has to prove he’s not capable. Since “capable”, in family-court language, essentially means “has a long record of cooking up meth and asking the kid to stir and inflicts acts of hideous torture on the child, and/or has recently tried to kill himself in front of the child,” it’s a very difficult standard to meet. Courts are not much interested in “but he always gives the kid to his mom and takes off.” (Which leads to the women inserting clauses that say they get first right of refusal for babysitting; a few ten-thousand dollars in legal fees later, the dad and grandma may relent on custody.) Which, interestingly, does not have much to do with interest in ridding the divorce courts of prejudice. The judges are well aware that the dads are handing over the kids and taking off. So long as there’s no child abuse involved, though, they’re understandably inclined to stay out of it.
And again, I will wonder why indeed would you go for power and risk critique/violence/taken away when you can be powerful in your own motherhood where noone [apart from a younger version of you] can threaten you?!?
Because it works only if the average female lifespan is about 35-40, and only at tremendous cost. If you have a few kids and haven’t worked for a while at anything that makes substantial money, you’re entirely dependent on the goodwill and good behavior of one guy. If he’s rotten, your choices are to stay and suck it up, or leave and risk poverty, the loss of the children, and the certain prospect of having to hand your children over for visits during which you can’t protect them. If your warranty expires and he goes for a younger model, you face the same problem, as well as the humiliating prospect of being dumped anyway. (If you want a picture of peppy misery, watch 30something exhausted single mothers dolling up for dates. They don’t have time for all the nonsense, they’re aware of competing with much younger women, and unless their exes have the kids overnight, they’re worrying throughout about getting home in time to let the sitter off. They’ve got work in the morning and no personal days because they save those for when the kids are sick. Despite all this they’re supposed to be fun. You know, it’s a very vulnerable spot, that power-of-motherhood spot.) But at some point early on there’s a decision that goes “the fairytale must work, I will make it work” rather than “maybe I’d better collect some money/tenure/degrees/cv lines/prenups/legislation/friendly judges first.”
Add to that the fact that most women don’t have money for top lawyers, and will spend vast energy attempting to negotiate in loving fashion with a guy who regards himself as being under attack and at war, and the “rest in the power of motherhood” thing starts looking quite expensive. Women are expected to come out of divorce poor, welfare-bound, laundry-folding, and grateful to have their children. (I had to argue with my own, deeply feminist lawyer, in a town with powerful women, to stop her from giving away money and other assets in exchange for custody; she didn’t think it was worth the risk to fight for them. And you should’ve seen her face when I insisted on proposing that my ex be responsible for part of our daughter’s college costs by giving me money to invest for her throughout her childhood.)
Also, I think that in the US motherhood carries positive power and respect only so long as you can pay for it, or can find someone to pay for it, and so long as there’s a man attached. Mothers on the dole come in for a lot of reviling, as do, more mutedly, mothers who pull a Murphy Brown and are open about not wanting or needing a man. Recent story in the NYT about a group of single mothers who rely on each other, live more or less as extended family, and have given up bothering with men. Mostly lawyers and doctors, some blue-collar types, but all able to support their children. Even the reporter’s supposition was that they must all be unnatural celibates.
Which reminds me, Cristian, I think the women’s-sex-drive thing has been considerably overblown, largely out of convenience for men. Note vast market for products to hot your woman up. I know very few women who describe sex in terms of agonizing need, as men so often do, except now and then. I might add that women do not actually need men in order to have sex.
“can’t think of any others of my acquaintance, online or irl.”
I actually know two, but in the other case the mother was simply completely incompetent as a parent (and unwilling to be one), so that case didn’t make anyone ask “why”…
I admit to have played the devil’s advocate a bit/wanting to know what other people thought were the disadvantage with the premiss, with the “why indeed go for power”. I think that many pwomen do think in those terms though – since the disadvantage isn’t really in your face and sometimes I do think that the idea that “everyone pays for something all the time, being a mother or a CEO” is not as present in the mind.
I would personally not like to be depending on a man – however it seems like several people [women in particular] see that as partly a token of love and affection. (One other way is to look at it as a sweet life where someone else is paying the bill but of course there is a price to pay – nothing is ever free.)
I think the women’s-sex-drive thing has been considerably overblown, largely out of convenience for men. Note vast market for products to hot your woman up. I know very few women who describe sex in terms of agonizing need, as men so often do, except now and then. I might add that women do not actually need men in order to have sex.
I am not sure I can address this eloquently and non vulgar so I will refrain to say “I think there might be more complex things in order to ‘make the women’ happy and comfortable/content than maybe please a man”. Then again, I am not really liking the generalisations and I do have a few more thoughts on the matter in reference to “power, sex and ability to express needs and wants in comparison to other things”.
Amy, I really like the idea of your single-mother collective. I’ve wondered if that sort of thing would work (e.g. you have at least five mothers and each can work a four-day week, taking one day off to look after all the kids). But I’ve never heard of a real-life example, so that’s really interesting. Can you give me enough info so I can find that NYT article online?
Sorry, I was completely out of it – very distracted and busy.. even though I have my house-husband at home at the moment, who spent about six hours to clean the apartment today, went shopping, and dropped off our son at daycare (yes, he’s man enough – well, it’s kind of temporary). He’s taking off for two months again in a bit over a week, which will be a massive shock to the system. I’m getting used to the comforts..
Amy, I haven’t been in academia since 2003, and that was in the UK. I’d say it was about half/half concerning who worked weekends and evenings – which was nice, all quiet when everyone’s gone :) Here in Germany, outside of academia, I have to make two observations: yes, there are a lot more pro-employee laws than in the US (I started with 25 days vacation and… get this: when my son gets sick, I can get a doctor’s note and stay home without using up my holidays). However… at the same time, I am still completely shocked at the lack of full-time daycare facilities. My son’s daycare has main hours between 8 and 4, and an hour outside of that at both ends – but I already get scowled at (by other women: daycare employees and mothers..) when I use that! Not to mention that there’s almost nothing for school children, so I’ll have to figure out what to do there when he starts later this year.
Anyway, I think what I am trying to say is that of course you need legislation to help women along. But we also need to change perceptions and attitudes. And I do have to work on that myself: just in the last two weeks I’ve been finding myself doing the female thing of backing off on an issue at work that is important for me because I didn’t want to upset people. (Of course, all that this achieves is that I am upset and unsatisfied myself, while everyone else is ok..)
finding myself doing the female thing of backing off on an issue at work that is important for me because I didn’t want to upset people.
Steffi, this is a difficult one, but I’ve found that if you disagree with people confidently and calmly — showing that there is nothing personal in your issue — then people take things surprisingly well. I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this yet, but Valian presented data showing that when men or women get angry in the work place, the women are penalized massively compared with the men. Same issue, same anger, same delivery, same words, but both men and women view the woman much more negatively afterwards. So if you keep your calm and just be assertive, things will probably be fine. But by all means don’t lose your temper if you can help it.
There are so many comments here I have got confused and am losing track. I came here to respond to one comment way up there, to say yes, parents are exhausted. Tonight, Friday 2130 hours, my partner has just gone to bed and I am about to go to. Burdened by too many years of dual career and parenthood. Burdened by the prospect of, not a restful weekend but a 0415 start to take one of them to the airport for a school trip. Burnout. That is what is in store after 18 years of it. I curse the “superwoman” mentality! I was bought up to believe that a woman’s place is NOT to darn a man’s socks (because my own mother was bought up that way and rebelled against it). But “having it all” is too much – a satisfying job and a family is actually too much for most people if they take life (ie the job and the family) seriously. I am a living (just about) testament to that and so is my partner. And as for any “life” outside those two “main events” of work and family, forget it. More than 18 years ago, I saw a film and a play every week regularly, went out with friends after work, and the rest of it. In the past 18 years, such events barely register. No wonder blogging (a solitary activity that can be fitted in between in the little cracks of time that open up) was a revelation to me and great self-therapy. But now, even that seems like yet another demand, after 3 plus years of it.
Jenny, it’s here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/magazine/01Moms-t.html
Not a formal collective, just women who rely on each other. Not really very different from what I’ve got here, similar in demographics too, except that most of my mother friends are stay-home or work part time, which means that they carry most of the family/home work. We still have bumpy patches where I have to remind them that I can’t do X because I have to go make a living, but they’ve got more kids than I have, plus husband maintenance, and most of them did support themselves before marrying, so things even out and my life’s not a complete mystery to them.
The ones I never see except for a hurried hi/bye are actually more like Maxine — two high-powered careers, multiple kids. If they do need a break, just making the time to maintain the necessary relationships and to reach out seems like it’d be burdensome, and I think there isn’t the same incentive to seek adult company, support, and help with the kids outside home. We know a wonderful family like that I’d love to spend more time with; fortunately they like to entertain on a large scale a few times a year, or we’d never see them. I think we’ve been meaning to spend a Saturday afternoon together for about three years now.
Oh good grief Maxine and Amy, all of that sounds so familiar. It can be so bloody lonely to try and pull it all off!
if you disagree with people confidently and calmly — showing that there is nothing personal in your issue
(Warning: generalization!!) Jenny, that’s it, I think: women tend to take things personally. Must work on switching that off.
parents are exhausted
Never a truer word like what she was spoke.
How are you this morning, Henry?
I’m fine, Steffi, thanks for asking.
I’m being the Single Parent today as Mrs Gee has gone on an all-day first-aid training course. We’ve just taken Heidi to the vet (minor skin infection) and are now catching up with things before venturing forth once more to see if I can get a wireless modem for my new secondhand iMac. And going to MacDonalds
with all the other weekend Dadsas a treat.Although exhaustion is a major side-effect, I enjoy being a Dad very much, especially now that Gees Minor and Minima are old enough to fetch small objects unsupervised. I have to say, though, that in my experience of kids – my kids’ friends and so on – children who are raised by two parents are happy, healthier and more at peace with the world than those raised by single parents. The job is just too taxing to do singly, with no help at all. I’m just sayin’.
I do not necessarily sympathise with singletons who adopt that view so aggressively that they react spitefully to those of us who are parents. However, I agree that proselytization is an unlovely trait, and it is IMHO best to take a firm, rational view that one is not going to have children, rather than drift into parenthood (whether by peer pressure or by acident or because one just fancies the prospect in some idle way) and find it’s all too much.
It’s amazing that our scientists undergo all that exhaustive training just so they can use a pipette and work machines that go ping for a few years, whereas parenthood is the hardest job of all and requires no qualifications whatsoever.
Sorry, Steffi – how impolite of me – how are you?
While you ponder that, here’s a photo I took today in Cromer which, I feel, has particular resonances for this discussion.
Ha ha! What is its function?
Thanks Henry – I’d say today is an above-average day.
Let’s guess what that sign is for. Is there an old priory in Cromer, and the sign is at the entrance to a men only area? Or is it at the top of a staircase leading to a male nude beach?
I just think you ought to know this, but I’ve just returned from PC World with miles and miles of ethernet cable, so this is the first comment I’ve typed using my brand new secondhand iMac. What was the question?
@ Jenny – no idea! I found this in a great little roadside store just outside Cromer that sells
atonal apples and amplified heatold road and railway signage, lamp standards, telephone boxes and so on. I took the picture while waiting for the salesman to source me a fibre-glass pig as a Valentine’s present for Penny (sshhh…. she doesn’t know this yet) to replace the one shattered by some horrible little boy who jumped on it. So, the sign was out of context.@ Steffi – my guess would be similar to your last one.
Another “miles up there” comment from Jenny about the social event in which it is assumed that childcare for 18 years is “the woman’s concern”. Too right. Some men are like Henry and others, who are co-parents. But where I work – an intelligent, professional and pleasant place – it is invariably the women who are in at the crack of dawn, rushing off early, trying to fit in competing demands. Men, on the other hand, have a baby, come back a week or two later and are immediately off to the pub after work with colleagues, flying to conferences etc. I exaggerate slightly for effect, but not by too much. Once, a Nature Editorial even promoted the view that childcare is a women’s concern. This drew the Wrath of Maxine – I was told, in what I regared to be deeply patronising fashion, that two women editors in our US office had read a draft of the editorial and thought it was a reasonable view. I asked if either of these colleagues have children. Silence. QED. When men realise that they are co-parents, and don’t do it as a favour, then the world will change.
I agree that giving fathers a year’s paternity leave is not the answer. Women on maternity leave do not by any means get paid fully or even much during most of that time, the basic benefit is for their job to be held open for them (and they don’t lose eg pension benefits while away). I have no objection to men having the right to longer paternity leave than they enjoy currently (2 weeks in Europe), but I can assure Henry that the two issues are not related. Giving men more paternity leave will not affect general attitudes – plenty of them would spend it down the pub, watching football etc (said she meanly). I do like men and many of them are absolutely civilised in this and all other regards. But the prevailing culture we live in, in the wider world, is that childcare is “women’s work” and careers for professional women are “optional hobbies”. Of course, it is a very different story for the vast majority of women, who don’t have a higher education and are living very difficult lives (and in many cases their husbands and partners).
I have to say, though, that in my experience of kids – my kids’ friends and so on – children who are raised by two parents are happy, healthier and more at peace with the world than those raised by single parents. The job is just too taxing to do singly, with no help at all. I’m just sayin’.
Normally, Henry, this has to do with the fact that the single parents are poor. In the US, that’s quite often because the noncustodial parent — generally the man — doesn’t bother with paying even half the costs of raising the children reasonably, much less with paying the woman for doing his share of the parenting work and thus knocking herself out of many jobs, schedulewise, which do pay reasonably. Again in the US, not more than 3 million of 13 million single-mother households make it solidly into the middle class, by income.
Children are normally aware of the strain when the parents are poor; there can be health and nutrition consequences; the children don’t take various lessons and aren’t on sports teams, as all that costs money. They’re also aware of being in competition with children whose parents may not be around much, but at least get to do and have fun stuff.
I think if we set child support at a reasonable level and then developed work farms for the charming parents who couldn’t see their way clear to supporting their children, you’d see far fewer single-parent children looking at-risky.
The other main factor in kids-of-divorce being miserable is the parents’ miserable behavior — continued violence, endless custody battles, etc. In that case you get miserable kid and parents attempting to raise the kids not just without help, but while under attack from the other parent. Not solvable unless the parents decide to behave like grownups.
The only trouble I see with the situations of the women in that Times story, for instance, is that they haven’t got adequate backup when something goes really wrong. Not wrong for a couple of days, but wrong for months or permanently. If you go gaily off to have a child on your own, and you’re a lawyer, and then it turns out that the child’s severely autistic, you’re going to have some very serious problems — no money, dead career, no physical backup. Bad combo. Of course, you could say that’s true of many two-parent families — they can’t afford to have someone out of work, one of the parents doesn’t handle the autism well and starts behaving childishly & unhelpfully (or just leaves).
I do not necessarily sympathise with singletons who adopt that view so aggressively that they react spitefully to those of us who are parents. However, I agree that proselytization is an unlovely trait, and it is IMHO best to take a firm, rational view that one is not going to have children, rather than drift into parenthood (whether by peer pressure or by acident or because one just fancies the prospect in some idle way) and find it’s all too much.
Agree wholeheartedly. Never really understood the “accident” business among people who can read. Fairly well-explicated chain of events leading to child.
Once, a Nature Editorial even promoted the view that childcare is a women’s concern. This drew the Wrath of Maxine – I was told, in what I regared to be deeply patronising fashion, that two women editors in our US office had read a draft of the editorial and thought it was a reasonable view. I asked if either of these colleagues have children. Silence. QED.
This is a problem, I think, in every non-woman-dominated profession. The category “woman” is presumed to be monolithic, when there are huge divisions, workwise, between “honorary man” and “mother”, and between “perky” and “saggy”. They show up nicely in pay gaps, hiring, admissions to competitive programs. And we seldom get to the mother/single-mother distinction. I’m remembering a piece in CHE written by a woman, assistant professor somewhere, who’d gotten a Fulbright to go to China. Had four kids, single mother, had gotten her doctorate while a single mother, conquered all. Off she went, tally-ho, bringing the kids along (who else would they stay with?). They lasted a matter of weeks. The kids needed a non-working spouse or nanny (not covered by fellowship) to help them acclimate, were miserable and scared, and then when one of them got sick it was really game over.
Again, I think the caregiving thing will start getting more attention as more men find themselves caring for old/fragile parents. And they will, because it’s one thing for the wife to take care of the kids, mostly, but she’s working and it’s his mother, and the wife hasn’t got time or inclination. But I think the solutions that come out of that will be made for eldercare, not care of children, and I can hear the jockeying now in the meetings, ending in something to do with “remembering what our focus is in this particular, um, effort, which is not to say we can’t address other needs as appropriate, but right now, um, yes, Mitch.”
When men realise that they are co-parents, and don’t do it as a favour, then the world will change.
Again, I cannot help thinking of other species and the trouble to which mothers are put in order to make sure that the males do not eat the babies. I know several wonderful fathers who do considerably more than the usual parenting, but I suspect these are some serious outliers. As I recall too, the Swedes tried to push the daddies into pickup up the childcare by making one month of the first-year stipend contingent on the dad’s being the one to stay home, and it was no roaring success.
Giving men more paternity leave will not affect general attitudes – plenty of them would spend it down the pub, watching football etc (said she meanly).
I’m not on a quest to defend men but I do feel the urge to point out that even if the situation is not super good in the Scandinavian countries the general attitiude has changed a bit from that of “dads need not to stay home” as seem to be the reality in many countries as we talk about now (UKandUS). But the child care/maternity and paternity leave is vastly different with paid leave and ear marked days for the dads. (There are of course bad things and problems associated with it and it is not by any means a “done deal” and it is not heaven but in context of this discussion I do think that some kind of paid leave for both parents or at least allowing the father to take more than 2 weeks of paternity leave would make a difference in the future.)
I hope, as Amy points out, that this will be the case with the care giving of aging parents (who btw, willbe much more demanding than the present “grandparents” imho) and “what do we do now”?!?! My fear is however that we will move back to the “one job per family and one parent at home… and I wonder if it wouldnät be easier to allow history to repeat itself”. Then again, I might be a cynic…..and a slight pessimist.
Furthermore, as said before…. the problem might be with some mothers as much as men who don’t want to be home with children. There are quite a few women who do not wish to share hte “upbrining and caring of children” and these women are undermining the whole “own choice” since their wants are somehow percieved to be more important than the father figure… imho.
Laws are not perfect but sometimes I feel that they can help facilitate a bit of the “difficult changes” that may or may not happen anyway but maybe the legislation moves the process along a bit quicker?!
@Amy: on males eating babies. Nice idea, but I couldn’t eat a whole one.
Sticklebacks are OK on that front, though. (Males not eating babies.)
And sea horses, of course.
Part of the problem is probably that as men earn on average more than women, when it comes time to choose who stays home (if there is any choice to be bandied about), it makes the most financial sense for the bigger earner to keep earning.
If the pervasive pay-gap problem could be legislated out of existence, it might help more women be able to say to her male partner — actually, my job is as valuable as yours, and perhaps you might want to let me carry on while you stay home? I am sure there are fathers who would like too, but at the moment, the family can’t afford it.
@Henry: possibly you’ve been using the wrong sauce.
@Jenny: What I’ve seen is that there are a clump of issues stuck together on that. The two big ones are that women still don’t choose careers with an eye to supporting a family (I call this the “rainbows and unicorns college career”); and women who do make more money come in for intense scrutiny & judgment if they leave the kids with the dad or in daycare, and risk custody if there’s a divorce (infuriating, but yes, the idea is still that the woman should “care more for her children than for her career”).
I found it unbelievably difficult to maintain my own work time as the parent who wasn’t making the dough. Before I married, I made it plain as day to prospective hubby that I do not work fulltime for money. I don’t and won’t. If I work fulltime, I have no time for writing, and I’d lived happily as a single person for 15 years arranging my life so that I could afford to get by working part time.
I think he heard: “Blah blah blah look at my tits.”
While I was pregnant, we talked often about how he’d leave the office at five, tell them he was done with the eternal on-call, find another job if necessary. Yes yes yes.
I think his side of the conversation was actually: “Do not argue with scary pregnant lady.”
After the child was born, he found himself trapped between me and his bosses. And when I wouldn’t yield and become the 24×7 mommytron the bosses expected, he ran into real trouble at work, and took it out on me. Did it contribute to his breakdown and the divorce, possibly. Most women in this sitation yield and give up their own work. But I’d actually meant what I’d said, and even as a single mother I arrange things so that I can do my own work.
I have a poor writer friend I’ve been warning about this — her fiance’s the son of a famous writer who lives nearby, and currently he supports my friend and helps his mom out a lot, drives her around, etc. No babies yet, but they want children. The guy’s also in a pretty good band, and they tour. Who’s the obvious candidate for taking care of the child on weekdays, evenings, weekends? Where’s the time for writing? And if you want demoralizing pressure, try writing stuff that won’t bring in money worth counting while your husband pays for childcare for the baby. Not only is there hurry, there’s an overwhelming sense of selfishness and childishness. This is not, as you might imagine, her favorite kind of conversation, and I hope things work out gorgeously for her & that I’m all wrong. But, um.
Amy, just so you know: I’m turning into a big fan.
Useful in summer, I guess.
Heh!
Amy often has this effect on people. Join the mosh-pit.
@ Amy possibly you’ve been using the wrong sauce
Could be. Memo to self – add more ginger.
@ Jenny: Part of the problem is probably that as men earn on average more than women, when it comes time to choose who stays home (if there is any choice to be bandied about), it makes the most financial sense for the bigger earner to keep earning.
@ Amy: What I’ve seen is that there are a clump of issues stuck together on that.
As I approach my prime (I’ll be 47 next birthday) I find that my diary is getting so complicated, with work, work trips, writing, other activities such as CIBS09 and so on, that my reaction to it all is to run away and hide. What I need is a secretary. Mrs Gee has volunteered … but the fact is that I couldn’t pay her and we bneed both our incomes to support our family and large menagerie.
A solution presents itself. Send the family to work in the horseradish mines of Norfolk and eat the menagerie.
Or the other way round, I guess.
Some of the male guinea pigs are heading for the pot. Or they would, if I had my way chez Gee, which I don’t (unless you let Penny on our Little Secret, of course).
I think I’ll have to write another book. A non-fiction one. Mrs Gee says that it’s time I wrote one on sience and faith. I always said I wouldn’t even start such a book as I valued my marriage and my sanity more. But I have the uxorial approval, and as my sanity was always in question…
Don’t you bloody dare.
I’ll take that as a green light, then …?
Has there ever been a well received S&F1 book?
1 S&F: Science and faith. A bit like D&D, but more geeky and considerably less realistic. Also, generally less pictures than My First S&M book.
Did you rectify that deficiency in your second S&M book, Mike?
Oo. Rectify. And was it in verse? Oh please. (Damn it. Now I’ll be hearing “Masochism Tango” all afternoon.)
Steffi, Jenny also knows I don’t know how to respond graciously to praise so I will make a face and look awkward. But thank you.
Henry, here’s th’ thing. Most of the women I know who give up their promising careers for family — since they make less money than the man does — don’t go home and stay there, esp. after the first year or two. They do work; they do pull in money, because the family needs that, too. They just find work that fits around the guy’s work. They don’t go after the fantastic tenure-track job three states away, despite encouragement from people in that department; they adjunct at the local community college or find a local job in administration. They don’t take the VP-track job that involves 30% travel; they look for something with flex-time and a little lie about how they can always go back to the other job. They drop out of school and work in a daycare, so they can get paid, save daycare costs, and be with the child.
Meanwhile, the guy concentrates increasingly on his work (which benefits the family, of course, but also himself). As he gets more responsible there, the woman progressively shuts down her own work and take on more family work until the kids are teenagers and she goes berserk, then gets serious, relatively, about some career that’s friendly to middle-aged mothers (note the very small salary numbers attached, meaning the guy’s high-stakes work will still come before hers). I know exactly two women who haven’t made that trade even with the man still at his career. I always get the impression that there are more, but then it turns out that the MD/MPH hasn’t worked fulltime in over a decade, the university instructor with the grants has always adjuncted, etc.
To all that you get the cry, “Well, of course when you have a family, there are sacrifices.” True enough. For the women, though, the sacrifice is generally career and independence, and — in the US — retirement & healthcare security. You’ll see that yes, the guy does go for jobs that involve less travel. But you won’t often find him looking for junior-level, defined-hours work so that he can be more available at home.
Again, I gotta shrug, and say that in large measure we’re doing it to ourselves. You tell a woman, “So fight with him and mean it, go make yourself clear,” and, you know, it’s not going to happen. And, Henry, here I think there’s a cultural thing at work, and that Jewish women may be more likely to push and make an open fight, because it’s in the rhetoric. I thought of this when reading the long apologia in Judson’s book about Rosalind Franklin, and how he’d made a point of interviewing all the other living women who were at King’s with her, and they’d thought the women were treated just fine. But it seemed to me they also accepted that the game is played a certain way if you’re a girl, and that if you play it that way, you will indeed be treated well. If you refuse to accept the terms of the game and insist on a rough equality, you’re in trouble — not only that, the other women will draw away from you, so as not to be associated. Combine that with a sharp and complicated anti-Semitism and I don’t see isolation as unexpected. Maxine Singer wrote something to Judson to more or less the same effect, have a copy of the letter somewhere & will try to find it.
And now I’m going to go pay my overdue health insurance bill so they don’t shut it off and turn me into one of the cripples gimping across the prairie and clutching my Chapter 7 bankruptcy papers. Gimp, gimp, gimp. Why this isn’t a video game I don’t understand.
Well I have said many times over the years that any “working coparents with children” need a wife. I think a menage a trois is probably the answer, though I recognise that this would not be popular in certain quarters.
I’m with Maxine – two parents is nowhere near enough, especially when the kids are young.
That was a semi-serious point. More seriously, this has been a very illuminating discussion.
Oh, and Henry – please get on with that book…
Meant to link to this article in yesterday’s Observer – a discussion of the credit crunch by seven businesswomen. There certainly seems to be a strong case that a skills deficit due to the exclusion of women from higher posts in the city contributed to the runaway risk-taking that has landed us all in trouble.
Well, if upwards of 50% of the workforce is underachieving, it’s not surprising. Thanks for the link — looks fascinating.
Amy, yes, you’re right. It’s very difficult, and it’s ingrained. Mrs Gee had been working full time at the BBC when we wanted to have children, but the stress made it hard to even conceive and hold a baby more than a few weeks. Happily I was earning two salaries at the time – I had my job, and had clinched a lucrative book contract (Ah! those were the days) which mean we could afford for Penny to give up work for 3 years. When the time was up Penny wanted to go back to work part-time, but the BBC valued her skill set and pulled her in full-time, on a really demanding shift system. Luckily I could be flexible, too, but it did feel like we only ever met each other in the hall as one person arrived as the other left. Glueing it all together was a reliable childminder called Mrs Tiggywinkle (not her real name).
The crunch came from something brief and emotional. Penny made a super birthday cake for Gee Minima (then aged 3) who replied that she didn’t need it, thanks, as she’d already had one at Mrs Tiggywinkle’s. Now, if it were me, I’d have shrugged and got on with it, but to Mrs Gee this was very wounding. Mrs Gee gave up her full-time job and went freelance so she could work more flexibly. When the freelancing dried up she got another full-time job, initially commuting (the children were older then) but then renegotiating her position as a home worker. This was a postive choice – she told her employers that this was what she wanted, or she’d leave, and they were reluctant to lose her as she was (and is) in a relatively key position.
Did you ever think about staying at home instead? Just curious.
Stephen’s comment has induced me to make a serious contribution here (Jenny, I haven’t written any S&M books
yet, but the photos I could show you… yowza!I meant something more like My First Kitchen, or My First Purse).To get ahead in many careers, you need to develop a fierce and intimidating persona. Cutting throats, lying, cheating and neglecting familial responsibilities are all basic requirements for shinning up the greasy pole to “success”, for any gender.
Are these really traits we want to encourage in the whole population? If we’d had more females in the investment/banking industry, would the current financial situation have turned out in an appreciably different way? Or would women still have had to play by the same rules men have to play by to get to power positions?
Until we have a more societally wide change in employment approaches (e.g., Mrs Gee’s case where she could dictate her working conditions), then I’m not sure that equality in gender representation (or race, religion…) will necessarily lead directly to an increase in quality of life or production.
Your honour, I call Margaret Hilda Roberts
It’s very difficult, and it’s ingrained. Mrs Gee had been working full time at the BBC when we wanted to have children, but the stress made it hard to even conceive and hold a baby more than a few weeks.
Oh Christ, that’s rough. I’m sorry. The whole babymaking thing so often sounds like more of a beach party than it turns out to be.
When the time was up Penny wanted to go back to work part-time, but the BBC valued her skill set and pulled her in full-time, on a really demanding shift system.
Yes, I think this happens a lot. I’d had a sweet part-time university job, but these things are rare and eventually they wanted me fulltime. I said no — couldn’t have just then anyway, no infant childcare available and the man not well enough to do the job.
The crunch came from something brief and emotional. Penny made a super birthday cake for Gee Minima (then aged 3) who replied that she didn’t need it, thanks, as she’d already had one at Mrs Tiggywinkle’s.
Ow. I do sympathize. Cake=dagger, it does.
I had a horrible moment once when Small Girl, explaining tearfully why she kept having fits (in the midst of a fit), told me it was because she didn’t see very much of me. So of course my heart stopped and I thought my God, I’ve scarred her already, I knew it, I knew I’ve been working too much. She then explained that she only saw my legs and belly, and hardly ever my face, because it was too far up, and so of course she forgot that I didn’t like fits, so I ought to bend down more and then she’d remember me and stop having fits.
That is heart-rendingly sweet and beautiful, Amy.
@ Jenny: Did you ever think about staying at home instead? Just curious
Yes, but the sums didn’t add up. The fact is that I was earning more than Mrs Gee, and, believe me, when you have small children, or indeed children of any age, giving up any reliable and pensionable source of income is not a credible strategy. We did talk about it many times – that Mrs Gee should go to work full time and climb the greasy pole and I’d stay at home and be a full-time house-husband, perhaps supplementing the family income with the
oddoccasional bestseller.It was I that instigated these discussions – I love being a Dad. It’s great. Not least among my thoughts at the time is that no man can call himself a real man unless he knows how to change a
nappydiaper.And, oh yes, if you’re a Dad carrying a small child on your back or pushing one in a stroller, you get the most adoring looks from the flocks of scrummy mummies with whom you’re forced to consort, and who outnumber scrummy daddies at least 20:1. I’d be a liar if I said that this doesn’t do wonders for the male ego.
But Mrs Gee refused to countenance it (for the perfectly sensible reason of £££, if not the scrummy mummies).
One thing I should add is that being a home-maker is not a soft option. It’s quite unbelievably exhausting, and the degree and nature is impossible to convey to anyone who’s not had a child. I reckon that failure to understand this is a prime cause of relationship break-up. Were I a full-time home-maker, I’d be too frigging tired to write anything, let alone a bestseller – I do most of my best writing on my commute – when I’m at home I’ll have my hands full with domestic duties.
Another thing that people don’t realize, especially younger and less-responsible fathers, is that being a Dad substantially improves your life skills. Apart from learning how to change diapers in a matter of seconds without getting both hands covered in shit, I am now a competent
and so on.
Being a Dad is also fun as it gives one licence to be a kid all over again and regress to the level of fart jokes, which is what all men really want.
Now, the offspring are respectively nearly 11 and nearly 9, and although they have got through what a house-husband I knew (who at the time had a 3-year-old and a 3-month-old) called the Period of Maximum Paraphernalia, the fun never stops. We both have good jobs, relatively flexible working regimes and no mortgage, but liottle in the way of spare cash. Because Mrs Gee works at home, some of our friends think they have licence to dump their kids on them while they go to work … but one thing should be clear – mixing work and child care is very difficult to do well.
What would your reaction be if I’d said ‘no’? Just curious.
If we’d had more females in the investment/banking industry, would the current financial situation have turned out in an appreciably different way?
Not if to get there in the first place, they had had to behave like, you know, men.
Actually, I don’t think that it is really related to the man/woman issue, but to corporate culture itself. If the lack of regulations clearly gave them opportunities to misbehave, and there’s a cutthroat competition between them, it would be unrealistic to expect that they don’t do it, regardless of their gender.
I agree with Christian. I have a feeling that if people had the disposition of golden retrievers, the world would be more chaotic but everyone would be much happier.
Woof.
I wanted to be a house-husband but I was forced out to work.
Bah.
@ Stephen – the Observer article was very interesting; thanks for the link. I looked up a review of the Margaret Atwood book Payback, which is mentioned in the article – has anyone here at NN read it? One of the quotes from the book is:
“All wealth,” declares Margaret Atwood, “comes from Nature.”
Except in the US, where it also comes from Science.
I caught the tail end of a NOVA program about the four-winged dinosaur Microraptor last night, in which an intricate model of the creature was being tested in a wind tunnel at an Extremely Prestigious Engineering University. As far as I could tell, all of the scientists present for this experiment were male. To a scientist whose tribe of developmental biologists and geneticists includes many other women, this seemed weird. Made me wish that a certain teenager, related to me by
bloodgenes, was not so determined to attend Extremely Prestigious Engineering University, and would at least consider my undergrad alma mater, Less Prestigious Engineering University with Gender Equality and Ethnic Diversity.But…that project about finding out how a four-winged dinosaur could actually fly sounds only slightly above a standard D&D session, and we all know what the average gender ratio on that kind of events is!
I wanted to be a house-husband but I was forced out to work
Indeed. And I don’t even have the option of bra-burning.
@ Cristian: Good point. Even the model-builders were male.
What would your reaction be if I’d said ‘no’? Just curious.
I would have assumed that it had something to do with money. But I wouldn’t have pried if you hadn’t been forthcoming. Thanks for the story.
I hope there are no women reading this thread who are undecided about having kids. It might understandably put them off for life.
Jenny: I am trying not to think too much about it at this time …. (half joke)
Seriously though, it seems to be one of those things…. It is intersting to read those SciFi books (or fantasy) that ever so often turn the society (as we know it) upside down and try and make “solutions” to our problems. Sometimes it is “making female more into our conception of male” and sometimes it is making all of us into Golden Retrievers.
If the lack of regulations clearly gave them opportunities to misbehave, and there’s a cutthroat competition between them, it would be unrealistic to expect that they don’t do it, regardless of their gender.
I think this is a major part of the Problem, since it is possible to “treat” people this way – it happens. Then we end up with the unequality “for the good of the company”…. I had hopes that we would see a difference but nowadays I am not sure (circle back to my first sentence)
I hope there are no women reading this thread who are undecided about having kids.
What about undecided men, eh? It takes two to have babies, and I’d contend that the marginalization of fatherhood over the past few decades, partly by the womens’ movement, is in part responsible for the drastic plummet in the respect for and status of fathers, and the decline in stndards of parenting. It might be OK to talk about such things in this refined salon, but hey, jut step outside and look around you…
Item: there have been a lot of reports in the past couple of days of a small boy, aged 13 but who looks no more than about 10, who is alleged to have fathered a child. His girlfriend is just 15, and appears to have been sleping around. The latest revelation is that the parents oif the children are milking and exploiting the story to gain newspaper coverage and publicity – the boy has the services of notorious publicits Max Clifford. What amazes me is that nowhere in the press coverage have I seen any mention of anyone being prosecuted for what is after all a criminal offence. Has moral relativism really become that sleazy?
Item: yesterday I saw a TV interview with a family that keeps having kids, and they are crammed into a tiny two bedroom flat. The story was how simply dreadful it was that the council wasn’t able to find better accommodation for them – accommodation paid for by the likes of you and me. Yet no-one in this story ever asked this family whether they’d heard of contraception. Why not? Have things come to pass that we’re expected to subsidize everyone’s way of life, never mind how self-destructive?
Being a responsible parent is difficult enough without being expected to fund all theses Gainsborovian proles who seem to think that manna will somehow rain down from heaven as if it is their right, when really they should learn to tie a knot in it.
The Golden Retriever analogy reminded me that there’s a personality type test (which originated with Gary Smalley) with strengths as follows:
Golden Retriever – Accommodating, calm, affirming
Lion – Goal-oriented, strong, direct
Otter – People person, open, positive
Beaver – High standards, order, respect
I thought this personality test was goofy, when I took it as part of a teaching excellence course, but that might have something to do with the fact that I was Not Happy about being identified as a Lion.
I’ve been thinking about this more and trying to calm down, but I respectfully suggest that Jenny’s phrase
I hope there are no women reading this thread who are undecided about having kids
reflects precisely the kind of discriminatory prejudice that she identified in her original post. Is it OK then to discriminate against men? No wonder that fathers in modern society are regarded as invisible and therefore dispensible. It’s as if women would rather get rid of men altogether and become parthenogens.
I’m cross now.
I guess that she meant that since the take-home message of the thread is that women always get the short end of the stick when it comes to child-rearing, they are the ones that (understandably) are going to be less inclined to take that step, after reading the whole thing.
But that begs the question (linked to Henry’s post above): why is this necessarily a bad thing? Is having kids inherently good? (for you? for society in general?). I say that if you make the informed decision not to have them, based on concluding that you’ll be happier with your life and career that way, then it’s perfectly alright not to have them.
the take-home message of the thread is that women always get the short end of the stick when it comes to child-rearing
I seem to be getting the message that, having decided to bring children into the world, some women seem to resent the fact that they are given more of an opportunity to stay at home and care for them that their male partners! Maybe I’m very naive and/or missing the point somewhere along the line, but surely women have the better deal in this regard – certainly in the UK, anyway?
(Takes a step back, cowers in a corner and awaits the onslaught…..!)
I hope there are no women reading this thread who are undecided about having kids
Dear Henry: This was meant to be a joke. It was not designed to be inflammatory, discriminatory, or any other kind of
Toryremark. I am sorry that you interpreted it as anything other than that. I am not sure how you then transited from that point to assuming that I advocate discrimination of men in any way, shape or form, but I can assure you it is a misrepresentation of my views.It is true that Christian’s interpretation (“I guess that she meant that since the take-home message of the thread is that women always get the short end of the stick when it comes to child-rearing, they are the ones that (understandably) are going to be less inclined to take that step, after reading the whole thing.”) does rather summarize my personal reaction to reading about Amy’s plight specifically. But that is an entirely personal opinion. I am sure, anyway, that the women reading this thread are hardly going to be derailed from their intentions by any of this — which is why I felt comfortable making a joke of it.
Is it OK then to discriminate against men? No wonder that fathers in modern society are regarded as invisible and therefore dispensible. It’s as if women would rather get rid of men altogether and become parthenogens.
Henry, here’s the tail end of what I wrote to Emily Bazelon re her NYT story on the single mothers:
“I would expect that your story will generate lots of outrage on the part of people who feel that men are being pushed out of the picture, being made useless… If the men want to be in the game, why, [t]hey’ll have to look after themselves, get competent in housekeeping and playdate-scheduling and playground politics, treat the womens’ work as they treat their own, yada, yada, yada. They’ll need to jump up and do for the women the way the women do for each other. That’s really what it comes down to.”
You and Mrs. Gee sound happy as clams, not to mention besotted, so this is terrific. The problem is that when people are not good and happy and besotted, and/or when the woman is not able to jump back in as Penny was, the woman winds up with serious trouble. The man may wind up very unhappy, yes, but generally he’s not worried about how he’s going to make a living when he’s got all these kids to take care of.
I mean look, I’m on this page after emailing my daughter’s school principal to set up a meeting about the endless after-school care/transport problem. After-school program has a long waiting list. We have a recession thingy here, freelance work is drying up, I have no salaried job, and I need to be able to work whole afternoons through at wage jobs if necessary. As I was driving away from the school this morning, I saw a van with the after-school program’s name on it, and drove home thinking, “WTF? Hire a fucking driver. Drop kids at daycares around town. Problem solved.” But because the expectation runs so deep that women will accommodate, avoid pushing, and give up whatever’s necessary to “be involved with the kids”, that there’s no will to do this. And in general it’s justified. The mommy pickup crew I see every afternoon is full of former journalists, doctors, psychologists, historians, translators. (It’s a nice neighborhood.) Everyone’s patiently waiting for the kids to get into the after-school program. I cannot — cannot — imagine a playground full of male medical students patiently tolerating this sort of thing.
I have a young friend who’s engaged; he works in Silicon Valley and makes big bucks. His fiance’s a librarian and makes little bucks; they met in grad school and have the same degree. He emailed me recently asking about how much kids cost, and we got into the whole “who gives up work” conversation, because they’re sitting at the top of the greased “man follows career/woman drops hers” slide, and it hadn’t occurred to him that this has the potential cause serious trouble for all of them down the line. So we had a nice conversation, but even so, I never brought up the obvious insurance policy: Set (lots of) money aside for the woman so she isn’t trapped, and — in event of divorce — make a prior commitment to support the kids reasonably and compensate her for the career hit, and do it in writing. That’s a remarkably difficult conversation to have, because it isn’t just about “she’s got to be free to do her work even if it doesn’t make money”. So much of it comes to, “Well, you might turn into a horse’s ass, and if that happens in the setup you propose, she’s the one who pays on a gigantic scale, and that’s hardly fair, is it.” And the even unhappier, “Well, she might decide to screw you, take the kids, and run off with someone else, but either she’s got the freedom to do that or you’ve got her in a gilded cage, which do you want?” This guy is one of my favorite people in the world, but I was really reluctant to start that conversation as he’s planning his wedding. (Which is a much better conversation involving a midwestern college friend taking a six-foot polenta pan on the subway.)
Actually, Jenny, Maxine, I want to hear more about what happens with women who insist on remaining scientists after becoming mothers. I know only two who work fulltime; one’s a research assistant who’s shifted projects so she can leave promptly at five and go pick up at daycare (her job), but I don’t know what kind of effect that had on her career. The other’s a chemist who waited for tenure, then had two kids; she took a year off and fielded a tremendous lot of bitching from students, had nannies up the wazoo, and has a husband who ferries kids to camp. But I don’t know what if any effect motherhood’s had on her lab (I should ask).
@Cristian: I agree completely. The problem is the inequities that arise from a) the presumption that women will have children; b) the fact that the kids/career agonizing is reserved to women.
I’m forgetting something (no!) but should go do some work.
Dear Jenny , I didn’t think you meant to be discriminatory, but your choice of words did to me reflect the kind of unconscious prejudice of which you complained in your post. But a joke? let’s turn that around , shall we? Men whose sexist jokes were criticized by feminists would respond that their ‘humor’ is ‘only a joke’ and that the complainant was being too sensitive. What’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.
Amy – happy as clams? Not always, mainly because we’re always so tired. How single parents manage without a support network I can’t imagine. My point, however, is that centering the discussion on women acts to devalue fatherhood; and given that the discussion about gender politics for the past 50 years has been all about women, it is no wonder that fathers have become invisible. This makes the problem worse because many fathers think they can simply get away with as little as possible. Fatherhood is seen as a belittling chore when it should be a source of pride.
Dorothy: for those women who want to stay at home, this would all sound great. Personally, I was going mad after the three months (in the US) I stayed at home after having my son. And I think this is what we are talking about here (having the option, not going mad – well…)
Amy, I have an anecdote you might be interested in with regards to a scientist-mother, but since it’s someone else’s story I won’t just publish it out in the very public eye of Jenny’s blog comments. Drop me a line at eva.amsen [at] gmail.com and I’ll tell you the story. (Anyone else can let me know if they want to be cc-ed. I won’t get around to typing it out until later tonight anyway.)
Sounds intriguing, Eva. I’m getting an idea. I know a few PIs who’s kids are a bit older now as well as some that just had kids. Should we try to get this all together? Maybe come up with a bunch of questions that we ask each of them? (There must be something like that our there already, surely?)
Henry, there’s also the environmental impact of large families. I’ve blogged about this before as it’s definitely one (of many) reasons why I don’t want kids, and why if I did change my mind, I’d prefer to adopt. It’s a very unpopular stance though. The BBC website has a similar article today
Oh for God’s sake Henry. It’s not all about you. It was a joke, I saw it was a joke, every reasonable person in the entire blasted Empire saw it as a joke because it was in the context of what Amy was saying about her experiences. Amy, who I’m pretty sure, is a woman.
Get. A. Life.
Amy, I can speak only for the life sciences, and only anecdotally of course. But there are a few women scientist lab heads I know, mostly fairly junior, who are having a rough time of it. They have to leave promptly at 4 or 4.30 (London transport being as unreliable as it is) and therefore cannot take time to do important career-building exercises such as attending seminars or sitting on committees (where, if you do your time, you are seen as a player who can be helped in future when the need arises) – and of course post-lecture dinner/network sessions are out of the question. Some work three- or four-day weeks. Their labs are all very small, one or two people, and I would say that they are fairly marginalized in the university. I think if you can survive the young group-leader stage, it probably becomes easier. It’s this early pre-tenure stage (which typically coincides with the last stretch of fertility) that I think scuppers most careers. In London at least, junior lab heads are expected to do a lot of wet work in addition to writing grants and supervising.
If I could only work 6 or 7 hour days, I think I would have problems getting any meaningful results, experimentally speaking. Somehow those extra couple of hours make all the difference. But I’d love to hear from female scientists with kids on this point — I can only see what I see from the outside perspective. And I suspect other fields — such as theoretical ones — might be a lot more flexible with regard to shorter hours.
Cath: if you don’t want kids, good for you. I remain deeply sceptical about the environmental argument, however, as those who make it tend to do so in an irritatingly holier-than-thou tone and also don’t have children themselves, so don’t know what it’s like. Even were I to concede your point, which I don’t, I’d ask what the next step would be : killing children to save the planet? Phooey.
By the way, Henry, I still don’t understand why joking that hearing anecdotes about how difficult women have it in science with kids might put women off taking the plunge is at all sexist. I was referring specifically to women in my joke, but I did not infer that only women would be put off. So am still completely baffled by your complaint.
200! yay!
Why should the tone of the argument invalidate the argument itself? (I do know what you mean though, and I tend to use the “because we’d rather have a boat” reason why we don’t want kids instead, in most situations).
I would also say that your “killing children to save the planet” argument is a straw man. Fewer children, later in life (to spread out the generations), and making adoption an easier option: how are those for “next steps”?
And by “fewer children” I obviously mean “people choosing to have fewer children by using contraception”, not reducing the number of currently existing children. Just in case anyone else thinks I’m advocating mass murder ;)
Yes Cath, be careful what you joke about, and how.
“Later in life” — does this do kids any favors? Or parents? I often wonder if procreating early (at PhD/early postdoc) stage might not cure a lot of the problems women have juggling families and a career in science. Then when you are coming up for tenure, at least you’re not dashing out at 4 to get to day care.
I respect people who forego having children because of the environmental impact they’d otherwise have. I know a couple who have made such a choice. It’s no big issue, and they certainly don’t preach about it. The only time we ever talk about it is when she tells me that yet another friend/colleague/maiden aunt is given them stick over it.
As for conceding the point, just ask the Chinese about it.
One could argue that PhD/early postdoc is still relatively late in life, on a global scale.
Heh. True, Cath. But the Western trend is to delay childbirth until the last possible moment, and I do believe this is a problem for scientists because of the timing of crucial career pressures.
From what I’ve read (i.e. various blogs by scientists who are parents), I believe you’re right. Earlier does seem to be better for scientists. I wonder how well that translates to other careers?
I expect it’s easier to cope with the demands if you are younger, as well. My energy levels aren’t what they used to be. I work full-on for the 8 hours I’m in the lab, but by about 6, I’m toasted, mentally and physically.
Amy writes: Maxine, I want to hear more about what happens with women who insist on remaining scientists after becoming mothers.
Well, I am not one, but I have friends who are, including one who had a child and then twins very soon after, both times while on short-term postdocs. She’s now tenured and loves her job. She always paid for au pairs (she found pot-holers from Sweden for some reason – once she found one, each one kind of passed her on to a friend for the next year). The au pair would collect the children from day care/school and stick with them until 6 pm or so, until the father or mother could get home from work (they took it in turns to work late).
I am not a scientist but my partner is – even now, when our children are quite old, we coordinate diaries every Sunday, deciding who will get home around6 pm to cook tea, listen to school horror stories and support homework, and who will work later that night. By juggling the various late meetings, seminars etc that we both have to attend, and by arriving at work at 8 a.m., we manage it.
Amy, you write a lot about the single parent state. I know it is very hard to be in that situation, take it from me, I am not just saying this, I do actually know. My basic point is that a parent is in effect “married to the child” once he or she has a child. One can divorce or split up from a partner, but one cannot do that from one’s child. Even if one is not physically present, one can support the child by, eg, paying for childcare. I know it is not that easy and that tempers often run high in such situations, I have seen a lot of that, too. But in effect, if men and women parents regard their child, when born, as an “undivorcable marriage”, which it is, then all can follow from that, however hard financially and in other ways. And it is hard, I really know that. But can be done, with commitment to the child from both parties.
I would posit that this is only possible with sufficient money.
If you both work, one salary pays the rent, the other pays the childcare, until they start to go to school. This is sort of crazy, but you basically work to (1) keep your pension going; (2) remain skilled; (3) if you are like Steffi, me and others, to stop going mad with the brain rot. Some people are lucky and have parents who can help, or have well-paid jobs, but we are talking about scientists (and editors), right? ;-)
You have no money at all for some years, then gradually it eases up. Also you are too exhausted and have no time to spend it on anything else such as seeing a movie, or whatever.
Dot – I agree with you that in Europe we are quite lucky in our maternity provisions. However, many scientists (eg my friend) are on short-term postdocs in their fertile years, and can’t qualify for the benefits that permanent staff get. (The Royal Society tried to do something about this a few years back, but they got sued by men because of discrimination in their return to work programme. There, Henry, thought you might like that.) Also, Dot, in the US, maternity rights are nowhere near as good as in Europe.
It’s all tough, but one just has to decide on one’s path and stick to it, without moaning or being too sensitive about it. I missed both of my daughters’ first steps – I was distraught at the time, as in the case of Henry and Penny’s birthday cake, but I survived. There is no 100 per cent “good solution”, it is all about hard choices and then making the best of it.
Steffi: I think what I was trying to say is that my impression (possibly wrongly!) is that, at least in the UK, women have MORE options than men when it comes to combining parenthood and career. As I understand it, they have fairly generous maternity leave, the right to return to their previous job, and the right to request flexible working hours on their return (although the employer doesn’t have to grant such requests). Men, on the other hand, get 2 weeks paternity leave (only one of which is paid) – and, as far as I know, they don’t have the option to ask for flexible working hours. Mums therefore have the benefit of getting to stay at home with their new child for a significant period of time before returning to work – the dads lose out in this respect. The payoff for women seems to be that they have lower salaries in comparison to their male colleagues – which, as Jenny points out, seems unfair to those women who make a conscious decision not to have children.
As Henry points out above (apologies if I inadvertently misrepresent your views Henry!), given the ‘inequality’ in parents’ rights, it is perhaps not surprising then that women end up taking on most of the childcare responsibilities? Maternity laws that were established to benefit women who wish to return to work may in fact work against them in some respects – the absence of similar rights for men makes it more difficult for willing male partners to participate equally in childcare (and easier for unwilling partners to shirk their responsibilities)?
I think what saddens me a little about the overall discussion of parenthood here is that it leaves me with the impression that childcare is a burden that the dad doesn’t want to take responsibility for and that the mum resents being thrust upon her. But maybe I’m just over sensitive…. :)
Resentment possibly breeds in unjust environments. I will be honest: when I see pretty much all my male colleagues scarcely blinking when their partner has a child, and certainly not changing much if any of their behavior on returning from their two-week paternity leave — and then compare this to what happens to my female colleagues who have kids (granted, many end up deciding never to return, so I can’t actually see them), I feel a niggling sense that something is not quite right. And yes, this saddens me. I don’t know what the solution is, but to me it seems clear that there is a problem and I would argue that, on average, happy anecdotes to the contrary aside, it disproportionately disadvantages women who would like a scientific career.
I expect it’s easier to cope with the demands if you are younger, as well. My energy levels aren’t what they used to be. I work full-on for the 8 hours I’m in the lab, but by about 6, I’m toasted, mentally and physically.
This is a point I meant to make earlier, but it’s key, and I am glad you brought it up. Penny and I are ‘older parents’, starting our families in our thirties, and it’s knackering. We look at parents who are ten years younger than us who seem to cope a lot better. But these are usually people who didn’t get much of a higher education, and I can’t see how it would be much easier for women contemplating a career in science for whom childbearing at any age is likely to slow down one’s career progression.
I will be honest: when I see pretty much all my male colleagues scarcely blinking when their partner has a child, and certainly not changing much if any of their behavior on returning from their two-week paternity leave — and then compare this to what happens to my female colleagues who have kids (granted, many end up deciding never to return, so I can’t actually see them), I feel a niggling sense that something is not quite right.
You’re right, but being angry on the part of women is not the only solution. My feeling towards those male colleagues of yours is pity – they really do not know what they are missing, and it is an absolute tragedy that th inequality of parental rights pushes people into a situation where they havee no option, thus perpetuating these inequalities.
My parents were both lawyers. My mother gave it up to raise us kids, and my father put a huge number of hours building up his tiny practice into one that was big and successful. My mother complained that my father had never changed a diaper in his life. One day, when I was a student, my father confessed to me that he remembered me and my sister when we were very small, but then – whoosh – we were teenagers, and he had no memory of the intervening years. This hadn’t occurred to me, of course, I remember him being always there. But when he made that confession it made me feel very sad and I vowed then and there that should I have children I’d never be in that position.
I never said my anger was a solution. I only offer it as my human reaction to what I have experienced. Some things cannot be switched off.
I am sure there are solutions, but I honestly can’t see them in the morass. This thread has been a wonderful mix of experiences and ideas, though, for which I am grateful.
Sorry Maxine – I must have been posting at the same time as you! I agree that the short term nature of postdocs is a problem regarding maternity benefits – but, based on a friend’s recent experience, I think the situation now is that as long as you’re employed continuously for 3 years (which think is the length of most post-doc contracts nowadays?) by the same University you now qualify for full maternity benefits. And being a PhD student qualifies as ‘employment’ in this context.
It’s all tough, but one just has to decide on one’s path and stick to it, without moaning or being too sensitive about it. I missed both of my daughters’ first steps – I was distraught at the time, as in the case of Henry and Penny’s birthday cake, but I survived. There is no 100 per cent “good solution”, it is all about hard choices and then making the best of it.
Exactly!
Jenny: I think my experiences of parents in science must be very different to yours, and if I shared your experiences I might also harbour some resentment! But perhaps this reflects the fact that I have never worked in highly competitive institutes and most of my science friends are content to be highly competent ‘rank and file’ scientists rather than Nobel prize winners – which probably helps?! Out of curiosity, how many of your female colleagues actually wanted to return to work but didn’t? And do you know if your male colleagues’ partners actually wanted to return to work? Do you think if men had a legal entitlement to paternity benefits similar to current UK maternity benefits that it would give those women who wished to continue with a meaningful career more leverage and help change employers’ attitudes that women (especially those of child-bearing age) are less cost-effective (obviously women need sufficient time to recover from pregnancy and childbirth so I’m definitely not suggesting that benefits for dads should replace maternity leave – but perhaps dads could have 6 months leave after the mum, with the option to have a certain degree of overlap?).
I also wonder how happy most men are with the current situation (Henry clearly isn’t!). Surely there must be many men that work to earn money because their partner has chosen to stay at home – and not because they consider their career to be more important than their partner’s? I know that my partner would love to be a stay-at-home dad but would hate to feel that he was depriving me of the opportunity of being a stay-at-home mum (assuming that we could afford for one of us not to work!). Wonderful as (I think) my partner is, I doubt that he is unique in this view?
I never said my anger was a solution. I only offer it as my human reaction to what I have experienced
In the end we’re all of us only human (though I havee my doubts about Richard).
That’s something that bussiness managers and CEOs seem to forget.
Hahaha. True.
What, about me being human?
Damn right.
Inspired by all this I was going to write a blog about fatigue, but I’m too tired.
G’night Ma
G’night Pa
G’night Mary-Ellen
G’night John-Boy
G’night Mysterious Figure Lurkin’ In The Shadows With A Sawn-Off Shotgun.
I missed both of my daughters’ first steps
Maxine, I worried about that when I started working and my son was in daycare, but then quickly decided that it was still a ‘first’ when I saw him do something for the first time, and we had a little celebration on those occasions. Yesterday were two firsts: he sang in front of a (very small) audience with his choir.. and he told me about two other 5 yr-olds in his daycare group kissing (he stressed that he would hate to do that himself).
Cath, this is going to sound unfair, but.. the argument about the environmental impact of kids, especially talking about large families as in the BBC article you linked to, is tricky. When one has a child, the world changes. The new family has its own dynamic. Once you have one, chances are high you’ll want another.
We have (kind of) decided that we’ll stick with one, but I find it hard sometimes: my son being an ‘only child’ without the backup of a sibling etc. An older friend of mine who has three (now extremely successful) children once told me that she felt that, after every child, she and her husband thought that there couldn’t possibly be any more love in their family. Then, with the next child, love grew again, exponentially (mind you, I don’t know whether that stops after three, or four, or five children, when it just gets too much…).
Re: having a child at PhD/post doc stage or later.. I don’t know whether there’s a good time or not. If you have one between PhD and post doc, you face the choice of a) doing an underpaid post doc somewhere, scratching a living with all the added stress that brings while trying to do the best for your baby, all the while not being sure whether it’s all worth it and will lead to a proper career in science, or b) get a better paid job (plus, in the US, good health insurance…) and start building something ‘safe’ for your kid. I kind of defaulted into the second option with a vague feeling that anything else would have been selfish and somewhat irresponsible (well, option a) would have also involved moving and starting new somewhere else, which I had just done at that point).
Unless your partner makes a lot of money or you have other sources of dough, that is.
P.S. Thanks all for ignoring my comment up there.. duh. Mothers in Science: 64 ways to have it all (…)
you face the choice of a) doing an underpaid post doc somewhere, scratching a living with all the added stress that brings while trying to do the best for your baby, all the while not being sure whether it’s all worth it and will lead to a proper career in science, or b) get a better paid job (plus, in the US, good health insurance…) and start building something ‘safe’ for your kid.
If women take the second option, I would argue that they are highly likely never return to the bench.
@Steffi – when my wife was expecting our second child, the doctor warned us that “one is one and two is ten”. The arithmetic of child-care is extremely non-linear, especially when they are young. With one child you can always say “Can you take him for a bit” but with two your best option is “Wanna swap?” ;-)
BTW we have three now and are seriously trashing the environment!
A friend of mine who had just fathered his third found that two was OK, but three was much harder work than he expected. He summed it up thus: “you only have two eyes, but there are three of them.”
If we keep chatting amongst ourselves, do you think we can make it to 300? Comments that is, not children?
Maxine: There is no 100 per cent “good solution”, it is all about hard choices and then making the best of it.
I like this. The one thing I have noticed though (maybe it is being surrounded by control freaks?) is that it is harder to be a good mother than a good father and “making the best of it” is so loosely and hard to define that only “the Best” is an acceptable goal?!
Dorothy: _ Surely there must be many men that work to earn money because their partner has chosen to stay at home – and not because they consider their career to be more important than their partner’s?_
I think the thing here is that some women want to be at home with their children without having a dad to intervene so they have to go back to working. some men would like to make their on money and not stay home with their children. some women and men want to share…. the pivotal thing would be what you write above this excerpt “mothers need to stay home first after the birth” and after those initial weeks(months?!) it is hard to change what has happened (mother prime care taker) if you are in a country where parental leave/child care is very low; both in economic terms as well as in days. For it to be a true “choice”, there has to be real alternatives with realistic benefits/implications. Otherwise it all ends in the old “we all had a choice” although the choice was not th best for the child nor the parents but the viable one with money and time?!
@ Åsa Otherwise it all ends in the old “we all had a choice” although the choice was not th best for the child nor the parents but the viable one with money and time – completely agree
@ Steffi Cath, this is going to sound unfair, but.. the argument about the environmental impact of kids, especially talking about large families as in the BBC article you linked to, is tricky. When one has a child, the world changes. The new family has its own dynamic. Once you have one, chances are high you’ll want another.
Agreed. You put it a lot more delicately than I did – it may be all very well and logical for people without children to pronounce on those that do, but the fact is that people who haven’t got children have no idea what it’s like and so have less licence to pronounce on the subject. What I object to is not the environmental impact so much, as the welfare-dependency culture in which people have children and expect the state to support them.
The point Henry is that people who are making the environmental claim are not (the ones here, and the ones I know) pronouncing on those that do have children. They’re making a choice for themselves. They’re not condemning anyone else.
No, Richard. I have a book called something like Saving The Planet Without Costing The Earth by a bloke who has no children (he makes a point of this), and ‘having no children’ is part of his advice. He offers his services as a conssultant to people who want to have a green audit done. Now, whereas he might have elected to have no children, I question his self-imposed ‘right’ to tell other people what to do, and because he’s doing an audit according to his own criteria, judging such people. My question is, who the f%$% is this bloke to judge anyone?
What gives him the right?
Now, I have to go, cos Mrs Gee has gone to work today, and I have taken the day off as it’s half term to look after the Offspring and keep house. So please take your shoes off when you com in from the
swampgarden.This bloke also sayss one shouldn’t keep pets, either. What a wanker.
But we’re not talking about your book, are we? We’re talking about Cath and Audra and real people.
I’m glad we’re discussing this (and in the meantime, contributing to the epic proportions of this thread). I’m always discussing this with my wife, with me taking the position of “having kids is actually bad for the environment”, and therefore I’m particularly interested in finding out about what other people think about this “taboo” subject.
I think Richard is right, the issue here is not condemning people who have kids, but just pointing out that having kids has a significant impact on the environment, and suggesting that people should consider this at the time of making the (personal) decision of starting a family, now that (thanks to contraception) we actually have a say on that.
Exactly what is wrong with that? How is it different from pointing out that driving an electric car is better than a fuel-guzzling SUV, or that recycling plastic containers is better than just tossing them away?
@ Richard: But we’re not talking about your book, are we?
Why not? I thought we all wanted to get away from personal anecdotes and into the generalities of the subject? And why should I necessarily defer to what you think you want to talk about, anyway? Are my views less valid because they differ from yours? It’s a typical liberal tactic, which I have encountered many times – the stance that everyone’s view is equally valid provide it’s their own, and anyone who chooses to differ is isolated and vilified.
@ Christian: Sure, but the people who have such discussions (about recycling, SUVs, saving the planet) aren’t those that have the most children. These are the proles who seem to be ignorant of any aspect of family planning who expect everyone else to pay for their irresponssible behaviour.
Um, well—I was a little concerned that Cath seemed to be the recipient of some rather serious throat-jumping. It’s easy to castigate people who write books and pronounce what other people should and shouldn’t do, but when you come across a real person who holds those views—
Forget it. I’ve been called a liberal. Today is truly a momentous one.
Richard, I would tell you to go stuff yourself, but I’m too busy today being a house-husband.
Pass the sage and onion, I’ll do it myself.
We can look like turkeys together.
Sure, but the people who have such discussions (about recycling, SUVs, saving the planet) aren’t those that have the most children
Agree, but I don’t see how that should prevent them from bringing to the attention of the rest of the world the fact that now we have the means to regulate increases in the world population, that the amount of people on the planet actually affects the quality of life of each one of them, and that this is something to consider at the time of making the big decision.
I’ve seen that kind of argument regarding this subject several times (“but there’s people out there that have tons of kids, so why should I refrain myself from doing the same?”), but I don’t quite get the internal logic of it. Sure, you’ll always find people who choose not to give a damn, but does this relieve you from your moral obligations? I don’t think so.
Jenny: yes, that’s kind of what happened to me – although at the time, I still thought I could get back into it later. It would have been very difficult to make any other choice at the time, though.
I hope nobody thinks I’m jumping on anyone’s throat. I think there’s a distinction between having no children and restricting the number of children people have once they start… I admire people who are clear enough in their thoughts and emotions to say they don’t want children at all, period.
Jenny, I just remembered: in one of my many attempts to get back into science, I applied for a post doc/fellowship in 2007. I asked the senior member of the panel whether I should even bother (in those words), since I’d been out a few years. He said sure and was very encouraging.
When I didn’t get an interview, I wrote to him and asked why – so I could get ‘pointers’ for future applications. He said: ‘well, you haven’t published between 2003 and 2006. You should get your publication record up’. Which was a real ouch. So you are absolutely correct: mommy-years, even if they’re spent in a different job and not at home, don’t count. (Actually, I might have been able to publish more if I’d been at home and not working a different job).
I think the Chinese case is an interesting one — as far as I know, it’s not necessarily linked to environmental issues, but rather resources. The rule kicked in before the whole global warming thing really reached center stage, didn’t it?
I am personally against anyone dictating whether or not someone should have children, and if so how many. In the West at least, birth rates are reclining naturally, so perhaps it’s good that those that want to often have multiple offspring.
@Jenny: environmental issues and resources are in the end the same thing, aren’t they? If you need to clear vast expanses of rainforest to use the land (a resource) for raising crops to feed all the extra mouths, that ultimately has a big impact on the environment. Same about space for housing, same about freshwater sources (for human consumption AND irrigation), and so on…My point is that the more resources you need to use to maintain a growing human population, the more the environment becomes affected.
About birth rates declining in the West, maybe you mean developed countries? I’m from South America, “officially” part of the West, and, believe me, birth rates down there are NOT in decline. So even if you account for the declining rates here in Europe (and the US, or Australia), we end up with an estimate (according to the UN) of almost 9 billion people for 2050. That’s a LOT of people, or so it seems to me.
@ Christian: Sure, you’ll always find people who choose not to give a damn – the problem is, these people are in the majority.
@ Jenny: birth rates are reclining naturally – snort. When people ask me for my position on anything, I always say ‘missionary’. It would be a shame to miss such an opportunity.
@ Steffi: When I didn’t get an interview, I wrote to him and asked why – so I could get ‘pointers’ for future applications. He said: ‘well, you haven’t published between 2003 and 2006. You should get your publication record up’ – I think this is a poblem affecting many women coming back after a career break, irrespective of jobs. The problem with science is that things are advancing so fast that it’s hard to catrch up after one’s ben out of the loop for any length of time. When Penny went back to work she relied on old contacts who knew her from before, who rated her work.
@ Jenny – did you find that gap (in publishing) affecting your transition back to the lab?
Relevant article in today’s G2.
From what I understand from this thread, you may or may not agree with the opening line.
I enjoyed the article but noted a key feature – the London couple has a nanny. They have staff. In which case, how dare they complain about anything?
I think I commented above about a menage a trois being the best solution – two biological parents and a “wife/husband”. Stephen – definitely so when you have three! (As I have been in that situation for a good few years, I agree that a 1:1 adult:child ratio is the minimum acceptable ;-))
Steffi, Sorry, did not mean to ignore your comment but I hope you will understand that I cannot now go through all the above to try to find it! Apologies for missing it first time. That is tough about the publications, though.
@ Richard: “I was a little concerned that Cath seemed to be the recipient of some rather serious throat-jumping.”
Thanks! But it’s OK, I was expecting it. It’s good to talk about it in a “safe” place, there is a bit of a taboo around it.
Steffi, I don’t count 2 kids as a big family. That’s replacing yourselves, not increasing the population. The tragedy of the Chinese one child rule is that there is a whole generation growing up without siblings. I wouldn’t give up my sister for anything in the world… and that’s an excellent reason for not mandating anything with regards to family size. I just think people should be at least aware of the issue before they start having 3, or 4, or 5, or more kids.
As I’ve said on my other blog, obviously some people need to keep having kids – just, not everyone, and it’s ridiculous that people like me get pressure from family and friends to have kids, despite consistently saying that we don’t want any.
Jenny, what always gets me is that when birth rates start to decline in European countries, the government panics and tries to encourage people to have more kids. When in fact, attracting more working immigrants (i.e. economic migrants) is just as good of a solution for your tax base, and in some cases also relieves overpopulation in the emigrant’s country.
Henry: “the fact is that people who haven’t got children have no idea what it’s like and so have less licence to pronounce on the subject. "
On one level I agree with you. BUT I hear this argument a lot, about why I shouldn’t be talking about the education system, the lack of local child care (I now know of 4 couples who have left / are planning to leave Vancouver because of this, but oh no, I’m not supposed to complain about it), even why I don’t know what I’m talking about with respect to my own wish not to have children. Seriously, my in-laws have basically said, “you don’t know what you want, you don’t know what you’re talking about, just go and have a kid and you’ll see what we mean”. And, as you may have gathered, it rubs me the wrong way.
p.s. I love my in-laws, they’re awesome. But on this one issue, they frustrate me horribly.
Great article — thanks Erika, for bringing it to my attention. I {heart} G2.
Henry: my career gap set me back considerably, and has made the chances of becoming a lab head one day extremely unlikely. In addition to the four-year publication gap, I lost an additional year remembering which end of the Gilson is the pointy one. The way it is looking now, I still plan to try as hard as I can — but I am already ensuring that I have several back-up plans for three years’ hence.
Christian — my bad about the “reclining” (heh, good thing Dr Freud isn’t here) birthrates, sorry for that. I only am aware of the stats for my own country (the US) and my adopted homeland (Europe). But you can’t ask the US and Europe to stop procreating altogether to compensate for everyone else, surely? And my point about the Chinese was not that resources aren’t linked to the environment — my point was that I don’t think pollution was the main thing on the government’s mind when they set that policy. At least according to my Chinese colleague here.
what always gets me is that when birth rates start to decline in European countries, the government panics and tries to encourage people to have more kids. When in fact, attracting more working immigrants (i.e. economic migrants) is just as good of a solution for your tax base, and in some cases also relieves overpopulation in the emigrant’s country.
My thoughts EXACTLY. But every time I hear a counter-argument for that, I cannot help but noticing some racist undertones to it that sort of scare me. (something along the lines of "but immigrants and native population are not the same!)
Yeah, I know. More than one Canadian has complained about immigration / immigrants in front of me, and then, when I protested, said “oh, I didn’t mean YOU. You’re, well, you, um, speak English”.
Immigrants are the lifeblood of the economy. Any economy, ever. In my view, immigration to the UK should be free and unrestricted.
… I might draw the line at people called ‘Richard P. Grant’ though. A very dodgy character, I’ve heard.
Not really an immi-grant as such though, is he?
Maxine, I don’t know which of my comments you missed. So we’re even :)
Back to money. I think I made a comment somewhere that the successful women you see profiled around the place (and at the risk of sounding like Henry, it is only when women are profiled that you read such things) always, always always have a nanny, or live-in grandparents, or an au pair, or all of them.
We don’t even have a cleaner who comes to ‘do’.
Loath as I am to agree with Richard, I agree with his agreement. I once read a loathesome you-can-have-it-all profile with some sharp marketrix (I knew her – she had worked for our company some time earlier – this realization only made the loathesomeness more … er … loathesomely) in which she let it slip that she had a nanny, a gardener, a cleaner… my heart bleeds. Sure, you can have it all if you have money, and if you have enough money you can pay someone to have your babies for you.
I’d just like to point out that we’ve just passed 2^8 comments.
I find it hard to be happy with the idea that money can make the difference between having a child and not. It seems terribly unfair.
Very, Jenny.
Ah, but that’s life. The fact remains that having children and raising them is a very expensive business. Whether people do it all by themselves or rely on subsidy from the state, the money has to come from somewhere.
The fact remains that having children and raising them is a very expensive business
..which is why having children is the new status symbol in certain circles.
Yikes. Creepy. I hadn’t thought of that. You mean, like having a Porsche or a second home in the Hamptons? Trophy Children
How horrible.… presumably that means having a vasectomy is one step above having trophy children?
{ducks}
So mormons have been bragging about how rich they are all this time?
Hmmm. The odd thing is, there are lots of poor people all over the world having lots of children. It is only in certain cultures where lack of money would even be considered to be an obstacle. I find this sad too. It makes me wonder about priorities.
Well, having children is relatively unexpensive, particularly if you don’t care that much about how their childhood will turn out to be (if you’re particularly detached, you can even send them to work/beg as soon as they can stand on their feet, and they practically pay themselves!)
But if you’re worried about providing them with a nurturing environment for their development, the costs will go up steadily. And if on top of that, both partners still want to pursue their careers, you end up with a huge bill per kid. I think that’s what’s happenning to parents in the developed world nowadays
As in the less-developed world, so among the proles in the UK at the moment, where women just shed kids and expect the state (the taxpayer) to pick up the tab more or less from day one. An increasing complaint of kindergarten teachers these days is that the new intake arrive not being able to talk very much, not properly toilet trained and unable to use a knife and fork.
he fact remains that having children and raising them is a very expensive business
..which is why having children is the new status symbol in certain circles.
Like the new “more than three children among highly educated women who stopped working and now are at home with their offspring?” I am a bit partial but it is increasing.. an interesting thing and I am curous what will happend in the future.
think I made a comment somewhere that the successful women you see profiled around the place (and at the risk of sounding like Henry, it is only when women are profiled that you read such things) always, always always have a nanny, or live-in grandparents, or an au pair, or all of them
Richard, isnt this one of those things we talked about here or somewhere else (cant remember right now) about the idea that men (dads/husbands) might be supportive etc but usually the women who have both family and career need “another person” since it might not be as common for the husband/father to be a stay at home husband in the same extent as women might change their choices into stay-at-home-mothers?! Someone has to help out, wheather or not is it the father/mother/in-laws/paid nanny/someone…. It might be easier on the marriage/couple to have a “buy in service” with a nanny?! (I am guessing here but if someone does th cleaning and washing it might be easier for the relationship to thrive?)
I need a maid just for me =/
Stupid dishes/vacuuming/litterbox/cleaning/cooking/laundry… Why does stuff even get dirty when I’m never home, that’s what I’m wondering!
(We actually had staff at one point, growing up, when we spent a few years in Morocco, but not for child care, although our guard did walk me to school in the mornings. We both spoke just enough French to tell each other to wait or hurry up or watch out, but it took him quite a bit of effort (and two translators) to explain to my mom that I fed half of my lunch to a stray dog every morning on the way to school…)
There was a lottery competition here last year called “win your life back”. The winner would get a chauffeur, cleaner, maid, personal chef, personal trainer, nanny (if needed), even a personal masseuse, for one year.
The only problem is – how could you ever go back to doing everything for yourself?!
I have a cleaner. It makes a massive difference to my life, and I don’t even have kids. In my world, time is money, and it’s well worth the cash.
I just don’t clean very well. Not happy with that, but I’m also really unhappy about time wasted cleaning. My clothes and I are clean, though, and my cat and I are fed, and everything else just kind of gets done whenever I feel like it, or when I can’t find something, or run out of dishes.
We used to have a cleaner when we were in London. In Cromer, though, the place is in such a mess we’d have to clean the place before the cleaner arrived.
Eva, I’m starting to think that you may be my long-lost twin. Did your parents go anywhere near Newcastle in the late 1970s?
I clean brilliantly. Dishes and hoovering a speciality. Very reasonable rates.
You’re hired, Curry. When can you start?
Bromley only, alas. :-(
Hmmm… how long does it take you commute into central London from there?
Stephen- we can offer accommodation with the job. OK, it’s a shed, but, hey, times are tough.
Ah – that’s one of the benefits of a cleaner, the way it forces you to tidy beforehand (because if you don’t, the cleaner will improvise and you’ll never see anything again). Tuesday mornings in our household are always a mad rush.
I should point out to anyone thinking of getting one to make lab life easier, just three hours a week makes a huge difference, and it doesn’t cost more than a meal out in Central London.
I wonder if it’s a class thing?
I’m pretty much from Henry’s proletariat and we’d never have dreamed of having a cleaner when I was a kid. As long as I’ve been able to push a vacuum cleaner I’ve not seriously thought about getting one.
We tie a duster to Heidi’s tail and let her get on with it. Fred the cat is a handy duster, and in the winter we hire the guinea pigs to schools for use as blackboard erasers. And Gee Mimina is quite skinny with a lot of hair, so we turn her upside down and use her as a loo brush.
…and Beelzebub Demon Bunny of DOOM does double duty as a pencil sharpener.
Have we reached 300 yet? I could do with a well- toned Spartan.
Yes, I’ve noticed that British people seem a bit embarrassed about having a cleaner. I am completely baffled by this. You have no qualms hiring someone put up a fence or service your boiler or redecorate your kitchen. The rates we pay are more per hour than your average office temp/locum — it’s good money, and they want the work. What is the problem here?
I think, for people from my background anyway, it’s a pride thing. You do your own cleaning. Or it’s what rich/posh people do.
I have to say though I think it’s a bloody good idea: I’ve simply never really thought about it.
—let me expand on that.
My grandparents and my aunts and uncles would have certainly have never dreamed of getting a cleaner, because they were poor and also because it was something people from the other end of town did. My own parents wouldn’t have because (we were poor and) it was something that officers did, not non-comms. And at the time, my mother wasn’t doing paid work (at least I don’t think so: she may even have done a stint being a cleaner!). She (bringing this vaguely back on topic) gave up work when she had children, as even if the RAF had had its act together back then and provided reasonable childcare facilities, getting a joint posting was next to impossible.
Henry’s proletariat
M father was definitely in the proletariat. My mother was a stateless person and hadn’t even got as far as that. They both succeeded because of intitutions known as grammar schools which allowed bright children of poor backgrounds to aspire to greater things. But socialist mood after the WWII was
afraid that this would erode the working-class voter baseconvinced this was elitisst (putting aside the fact that socially mobile people pay more taxes and become net contributors to the conomy), with the result that social mobility after ten years of a labour government is at its lowest for geenerations, and we have an enormous welfare burden.Jenny’s right about cleaners, and one could say that hiring cleaners now is doing a service to our fellow
manhuman as well as the economy. As Hilaire Beelloc put itLord Finchley tried to change thee electric light
Himself. It struck him dead, and serve him right.
It is the duty of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
There is also the time-is-money argument. Jenny askss, in a word, how is one’s own time best spent? Earning money doing things you’re good at (writing, blogging, editing) and paying someone to do the chores; or earning money doing things you’re less good at and don’t enjoy (chores) and denying work to someone who needs it?
Henry, just exactly what did you think I was saying?
deep sigh
Apart from the time where we were in Morocco and everyone either had or was help, my family (like Richard’s) never considered it either.
The first time I went home with a new friend in high school, she told me as we walked in that the help was there that afternoon. I knew she was a latchkey kid , but I just imagined her coming home to an empty house every day. Mind still boggled by the mention of the help, I met her, and it turned out to be someone I knew as parent of a kid from my old school. That was weird and a little awkward.
More interesting stuff from The Observer – An article about Icelandic business women.
And I quote:
On the other hand, the paper also reports the shocking news tht not all women are perfect
Thing about help is that it’s, again, the women who tend to find money for, recruit, hire, and manage them. Which is work, and takes time. I had cleaners for about a year; I’d attempted to divvy housework, the husband never did his share, so eventually I said “do it yourself or pay”. He gave me money from his personal stash (we did his/hers/ours money), and rather than harry him into looking for cleaners, hiring, and supervising them, I did that end of it myself.
There’s a very boring feminist argument about rich women victimizing poor ones by hiring them as cleaners, but I won’t go there.
Anyway — what I’d meant to get on to about 200 posts ago — if you’re going to do something like commit to the woman’s retaining her career & financial independence even though she makes less money at the outset, I think this is something you have to work out ahead of time, and it’s not unlike deciding that you’ll voluntarily be poor in order to be an artist. That, or you have to decide you’ll wait X years so that the woman can get her salary up (though if she can’t you’re back to Plan A).
(Leaving to see what other things Jenny’s written.)
while I’m not disagreeing with you, Amy, I do wonder why that might be so. Is it, do you think, because these days most men have grown up with the house appearing magically clean, where the magician is their mother? So the attitude—that it’s women’s work even if the mother doesn’t do it herself?—is epigenetically inherited? Which means it will take at least a generation before anything changes.
I wonder what my girls will think when they have a shared household. I can just see them saying “no, vacuuming is your job. I’m going to fix the car”.
There’s an extra ‘?’ in that comment. Sorry.
There’s a very boring feminist argument about rich women victimizing poor ones by hiring them as cleaners
And inaccurate. There are definitely male cleaners about, I’ve employed them.
Not sure why giving a fellow member of the sisterhood a job is victimizing, either.
Most companies and organisations hire cleaners on contract – men and women amongst them. If you are a woman, and work, you probably have your place of worked cleaned by one of these men or women, who are paid by the hour at minimum wage, probably. (This includes if you are student or if you have children at school/daycare etc).
Sorry, “your place of work” not “worked”.
Last year we started to pay a cleaner to come in once every two weeks, and it does make a difference – the mad dash to tidy up is on Sunday nights at our place! Like Richard though I felt a certain shame at first, and I was embarrassed to tell my parents (they laughed at me). I never would have told my Nana in a million years…
Henry: “But socialist mood after the WWII was afraid that this would erode the working-class voter base convinced this was elitisst (putting aside the fact that socially mobile people pay more taxes and become net contributors to the conomy), with the result that social mobility after ten years of a labour government is at its lowest for geenerations, and we have an enormous welfare burden.”
I think your maths are a bit out there – did the other 50-odd years since WWII (much of it under Tory rule) not contribute at all? Bearing in mind that I have a certain bias that derives from my birth and early childhood in a mining town in Northumberland that was decimated by the Tories.
Oh dear. Please don’t push any more of Henry’s buttons.
300!
And most of it largely on topic! I salute you, one and all.
I wonder what my girls will think when they have a shared household. I can just see them saying “no, vacuuming is your job. I’m going to fix the car”.
I wish them luck (and the ability to take their parents’ advice) when it comes to choice of men, then! I’ve still found no way of divining which men will be relieved to have you diagnose the car and which will have hackles up for days (months, years) about it. The last guy got really grabby about my office shelves — wanted to pick out the boards & put them up himself. I’m happy to let others deal with tools that involve loss of limbs, but I can handle the drill, thanks.
Anyway. If you believe the sociologists, then in general it’s the things that need doing all the damn time that fall to the women, and the men do the big occasional jobs, like nearly falling off the roof and mowing patterns into the lawn. My guess is that this is because the men can get away with it. My solution is simple: If/when there’s another guy in my life, he lives somewhere else. Again, though, this isn’t something most women seem willing to do. (I think it sounds nice for all involved, actually.)
I have to say, I didn’t realize just how angry I was about the woman=maid presumption until sometime after my divorce, when my dad came to visit. He bought some running clothes while out here, and decided he’d keep them here for the next visit. Fine by me. On his last day, though, he showed up with a bag and handed it to me with instructions to “take care of it”. After he’d gone, I opened it and found it was full of sweaty running clothes. Now, I’m all for a bout of recreational anger now and then, but I was overcome by some of the least funny fury I’ve ever felt. I just stood there for a while holding the bag, and then I threw the clothes away unwashed. Not even my dad gets maid service anymore, it seems, so long as he can walk around unaided.
Have been knocking my head all day against the lack of after-school care/transport, the school principal, and the general presumption that women should just accept misery after having children, and poverty after divorce. It finally occurred to me to forget pleading with school administrators and go to the bus company, since the average bus route only costs the district $40K/yr. Put 25 kids on a private-contract after-school bus and you’re looking at maybe $170/mo per kid for transport, and of course the cost drops if you can fill the bus — you can get it as low as $100/mo. Then you can deliver the kids to daycare, after-school activities, home, whatever you want. I suspect the doctor and grad-school mothers would pay for it, and so would many of the single moms. Better to pay and be able to work or go to school.
And then I realized that if I tacked on a monthly admin fee to each subscription & made it fly, and did this at a few other schools, there’s my income problem solved. I’ve got a meeting set up with the bus company rep later in the week. Bonus: If it works, it’ll be absolutely maddening to the school administrators, but there won’t be anything they can do about it without pissing off dozens of influential parents, whom they ask regularly for money and volunteer hours.
(I also fail to understand — and this is veering wildly OT — why exactly we’re supposed to kiss and revere the public schoolteachers and admin. They chose the work, in general they actually get paid remarkably well if they stick around, and in general they do a lousy job. Or, rather, they do an OK job of doing all the asinine stuff they’re told to do. They’re busy now teaching the 5-year-olds about AIDS, since 1992 has reached them and AIDS must be destigmatized. So as not to explain about diseased sex organs, exactly, the curriculum enumerates all sorts of ways in which one cannot catch AIDS. Conspicuously absent: How one does catch AIDS. Also, all nifty immunology/virology. Take-home: Hug Ryan White.)
Amy, are you really setting up a profit-generating school run bus concern?
I am in awe.
Me too!
Question is—are you doing the driving, Amy?
I have enough trouble steering a bike, Richard. Bus, children, all the makings of a TV movie.
Jenny, it depends — I have a lot of assumptions in there. The bus co may not be willing to contract privately at the district rate (though considering the coming budget cuts they may be willing to do better). It’s possible parents won’t want to use the service, though with 670 kids in my daughter’s school, I’m guessing I can fill 25 slots. There’s the question of liability, though that’s solvable. There are administrative questions — who fields the parent’s call if Kaitlyn/Braden/Jaden/Caden comes home howling that the driver was mean, how many times can the parent change the kid’s destination, can the parent sublet or give away the seat if the kid no longer needs it, what if the kid needs transportation 2x/wk instead of 5, what’s the protocol if the autistic kid loses it. Then there are minor hassles like setting up a bank account and doing what’s necessary to handle fee collection, contracts, & payment. But all that is manageable; I don’t see anything new in there.
The biggest unpleasantness I see is that, you know, it’s a sales job. I don’t think it’d be realistic to look for contracts longer than semester-length, which means that as soon as one group’s settled you’re trying to sign people for the next semester. If the demand is there, you’re just taking orders; if not so much, it’s a lot of work, paperwork mailing, followup calls, seeing that checks don’t bounce, recordkeeping, etc. But yeah, I bet I could make a living at it. If I can get 48 kids on a bus and charge a $7.50/mo admin fee for each, that’s around $3600/yr. And that’s one bus. This district has 11K kids, 8000 of whom are too young to drive. I’d bet at least a thousand of them need regular transportation to afterschool care or activities.
My long history of attempting to sell things in public schools (starting kindergarten, paper airplanes, 5 cents per) and solve public-school problems in a direct fashion tells me that in short order administrators will be troubled, converge on me, and attempt to “regularize” the matter. A service like this could not only make them look bad but shift some power out of the school. Then again, they may be just as pleased not to be involved. They don’t in general want to look in the direction of after-hours care.
Anyway, it’s been remarkably interesting talking to other mothers about this. The idea of setting up something like this, rather than going around begging your friends to help you and sweet-talking the boss, seems to make some of them angry. Same when it comes to solving the problem for all the parents at once rather than just taking care of your own lookout. Personally, I don’t see a business like this as a big deal — you don’t have to be smart, you just have to go out and flog a service for which there’s probably a demand and keep the paperwork straight — but apparently plenty of women do.
As you probably know, Britain doesn’t have school buses. Or maybe some places do, but I don’t think it’s as common as in the States to have a free bus to collect everyone. (Hang on: why doesn’t your school district have them? You’re in the midwest, after all.)
Every morning at 08:30 a big people mover pulls into our Close and collects one of our neighbor’s kids. There are about 15 seats. I’d ask the driver what it’s all about for you, but suspect the chances of any of it being applicable to you, in a foreign country, is pretty slim.
Jenny, I think many primary chools in the UK have free school buses – mine certainly did. I think these worked similarly to US-style school buses i.e. they picked up specific kids from their homes.
After primary school, schoolkids in the UK use public transport, and I think if you live a certain distance from the school you get a free travel pass (the assumption being that you can walk if you live closer?). At least that’s how it worked when/where I went to school! Things might have changed significantly in the intervening 30 years. And it may be different in the mainland – I grew up and was educated in Northern Ireland.
I must admit, I thought free school busses were the norm in the UK.
US school buses don’t normally go to a person’s house. There are designated stops you have to walk to – and most operate from kindergarten to grade 12 (last year of high school). But I guess as most states have no public transport and we tend to live far away from everywhere, in our car culture, this is a good thing.
Not when I was at school, Richard. I was always within walking distance (~1 mile away at most), kids from further away took the normal city bus and paid for it. And it was uphill both ways, in the snow…
In Iowa — by state law, apparently — districts may not bus kids who live within two driving miles of the designated school. (I imagine it’s part of code because Iowa spends a ginormous amount of money on K12 ed, but is thrifty where it can be, meaning everywhere unions aren’t involved.) In most of Iowa, a 2-mi drive area doesn’t net a lot of kids, but of course in the cities it means most kids don’t qualify for busing to elem. schools.
The politics surrounding school busing approach the asinine almost immediately. I’ve got a friend whose porch is the designated stop for about ten kids, because they’re at the end of the road and have made part of their yard into a turnaround for the bus. Otherwise the kids would have to walk about a mile and wait at the side of a highway. Now, my friends live in a small neighborhood with private streets and a homeowner’s association. The association, meaning neighbors, pay to have the streets plowed; they also pay to have the turnaround plowed. Last winter, we had about 5x Iowa’s normal snowfall, so of course plowing cost a stack, so the neighbors without kids tried to take over the association board and cut off funds for plowing the turnaround.
So on and on it goes, and of course people get upset for other reasons if you say, “Well, screw it then, we’ll pay for it ourselves.” It does make you want to move into a shack deep in the woods after a while, and deal with the animals what can’t talk instead.
Dorothy, when I was in school, all the kids took city buses that ran special school routes, and we paid for the tickets at a special price. (I managed to lose my ticket nearly every day. Jenny, that reminds me, I still have your spare keys.) I started at age six; there was an older boy down the street, and my mother arranged with his that we’d meet at the corner and walk to the stop together, that first year. After that I went myself; it was only three blocks away.
I remember cycling to school because I didn’t like buses, but maybe it’s different in the country. I could have got one if I’d wanted.
My Mum wouldn’t let me cycle.
Thinking about it a bit more, the primary school buses probably did have designated stops – but because it was a rural location, these coincided with people’s houses! Regarding the passes for public transport, I have a feeling these might have been means tested…..?
I always walked to primary school as we only lived about a mile away – but I was very jealous of the kids that got the school bus as it seemed like an exotic way to travel!
At risk of exacerbating another Henry button, the previous Mayor of London, Mr K. L., introduced free bus passes for anyone at school in a London borough. His successor has not dared to cancel this directive (yet?). Hence my eldest daughter aged 18 still gets free bus travel to school each day. Literally thousands of students and their families (parents) benefit. I do not know if other UK towns have similar policies, but London is so huge that more students (and people generally) have to use public transport, compared with other places where a higher proportion of people can walk or bike to school.
(I am no more a fan of Mr K. L. than I am of Mr B. J., by the way.)
I do this as much as anyone, but this conversation shows several times a “blog conversation standard phenomenon”, in which people write subjectively and often emotionally about a particular experience of theirs and extrapolate it to the world. Just an observation. There are a lot of interesting viewpoints in this thread, but yes, “life is tough” for everyone. I don’t find it that fascinating to read “sob stories”, I find short comments that are relevant to the issues raised in the post or discussion arising from post more engaging.
I think this discussion is about to self-immolate, owing to the unfeasibly long number of comments ;-) (probably just as well given my slightly frustrated comment above.)
I cycled to school when I was as young as 6. Of course, that was here (My elementary school is just out of view to the right. The graffitied building is a community centre across the street from it. But the intersection in the picture is the busiest one I had to cross on the 20 minute trip to my high school.)
Hi Maxine,
I will endeavor to be briefer with my comments in future!
/suitably chastised
Indeed. I mean, how can anyone hope to keep up?
Have a bit of faith, Richard…
Pfft.
Jenny – I certainly did not mean you. Very sorry if I gave that impression.
I did not mean to sound ratty, but there are a lot of comments here, and time is short. I think the post is a very serious one, and have wanted to contribute to the discussion. Yet when there are so many comments to scroll down to try to forumlate a contribution, I just got a bit, well, petulant, at what I saw as some rather long “special pleadings” about individual’s lots. I also was unfortunate in that I was reading just before Nature Network crashed yesterday, which it did for some hours – immediately before it crashed it went very, very slow – so I was finding it was taking a long time to get to the point where I could comment.
But please let me apologise if I offended anyone, I should probably just have gone away and not said anything.
I’d try to talk less, Maxine, but it never does any good. :) I compensate by being inaudible in person.
This after-school bus project’s being really interesting. As it turns out, unless you’ve got a grandma handy to take care of all the child-ferrying for you, the chartered school bus is cheaper, safer, more convenient, and more reliable than any other option. I’m shocked by how cheap it is — about $3.75/day per kid, use as many days per week as you need, send the kid where you like, same driver every day.
And yet many of the mothers I talk to don’t like the idea — unless they’re academics or med students/residents, in which case they’re all “where’s the form, where do I sign?” The other mothers tend to look alarmed, and then say they’d probably just try to work something out with another woman or a sitter, even when they’ve had trouble with those arrangements before. Then they offer to pick my daughter up a few days a week, maybe, for a while, in that awkward “I don’t want to embarrass you by offering charity” way. Which made me blink the first couple of times. Not only hadn’t I come begging, but I need reliable transportation for the kid so I can work. They can’t possibly provide that. But there’s a strong sense of “come back in, come away from buying that terrible impersonal service.”
The weird thing is that the same mothers would have no trouble sending their kids off by schoolbus if they lived farther away, and it were a district service.
My sense — and I could be wrong about this — is that they feel it’s unloving to hire the bus. A mother or a mother-proxy should be involved in picking the child up: a sitter, a representative of the daycare, a representative of the school, a friend. It’s the cake all over again, Henry.
Well, I’m hoping to have the fatherly charter-sales guy at the parents’ meeting in April. Maybe he’ll do as a proxy.
Maxine, the trick is to just skip to the bottom – the chances of anyone else making the same point as you is slim; and you would probably do it twice as eloquently anyway.
p.s. I wasn’t offended before, I was just joking around. I hate emoticons, but they do have their uses.
I just got a bit, well, petulant,
Maxine, if your petulance is the price to pay for your continued participation, then show me where to sign.
Thanks Richard- you are so, well, chivalrous! And a couple of other kind knights in shining armour also commented very robustly and kindly in another part of the network, which I much appreciate.
(Pity about a certain gentleman of inventive names, who could populate an entire theatrical production, in the Opinion forum….)
And thank you, Jenny. Yes, I think when 300-plus comments are involved, it probably is best to scroll down quickly, even at the risk of repeating some point. On the occasion of the grumpy comment, even scrolling was terminally slow – quite literally as the network crashed for a few hours just exactly then.
Is this comment thread a record, yet? Heading there….
Posted this as a comment to the wrong post, but just to note here that the Nature Network downtime turns out to have been partly due to that fish. Who would have thought it?