Click on the cartoon to see it a bit bigger.
[spoiler]The scene: Two women talk. One wears a black skirt, the other has a ponytail.
Panel one
BLACK SKIRT: the WAGE GAP has nothing to do with SEXISM! women are paid less because they make different CHOICES.
Panel two
BLACK SKIRT: HAVING A FAMILY, for example. many women take time off from work to take care of children or elderly relatives…
Panel three
BLACK SKIRT: so women work less. or work part-time. or need more flexible jobs. and as a result, they get paid less. but what does that have to do with SEXISM?
Panel four
PONYTAIL: couldn’t MEN do half of that unpaid work?
BLACK SKIRT: that’s CRAZY TALK!
Panel four, tiny subpanel in the corner
PONYTAIL: okay, i’ll let someone ELSE raise my kids.
BLACK SKIRT: what kind of LOUSY mother does THAT?[/spoiler]
Until men have to make these same choices and face the same pay disparities as women for making these choices, nothing is going to change.
Good cartoon!
I’m sort of surprised by it, though. I’m in full agreement that:
a) There is a (big) wage disparity measured by sex and earnings;
b) A lot of the disparity is caused by “choices” women make, which differ from the choices of their male competitors; and
c) A lot (most?) of those “choices” are not really free choices because of sexism, so that, in the end,
d) A lot (almost all?) of the earning disparity is attributable to sexism.
But blaming the disparity on sexism in general is a very different thing from saying that the earning disparity is due to direct sexism by employers, which has, IIRC, been the usual stance on Alas. AFAIK you usually reference the wage gap as being “unequal pay for equal work = sexism,” not “potentially-appropriate-albeit-lesser pay for patriarchally-mandated levels of of work = sexism.” This cartoon seems to be more on the latter side.
Have you changed your stance?
Great cartoon, up to the last panel. Where the speaker says “That’s crazy talk!” I think you probably meant to write:
“They could, and in some families they do, but by and large they don’t want to. In every family, the balance of labor is worked out between the adults present in accordance with their various preferences, their economic needs, and yes, with social pressure playing some role. On balance, most families find they work best with the men taking on somewhat more of the paid work and women somewhat more of the unpaid, but the averages show that both partners contribute broadly equal amounts of labor to the overall total. There are additional complications, naturally, where individual choices play a further role. For example, let’s assume a two-parent family has an exactly even balance of labor – both the man and the woman do half the unpaid work and both earn equal salaries for the same amount of time. Now an additional balanced increment of work comes into the scenario – they have a baby, or one of their parents needs help, or one of the children has a medical problem – and they now need to come up with more money as well as more unpaid time. Now, what if the woman really doesn’t want to do more unpaid time, but REALLY hates the thought of putting in more hours at work, while the man REALLY can’t stand the thought of changing diapers (adult or infant) and really doesn’t want to do more time at the office, either. Purely egalitarian theorists might suggest that they each do half of the new work just as they are each doing half of the existing work – but clearly, utility maximization would be best served if the woman did all the new unpaid work while the man did all the new paid work. That decreases their individual and total happiness the least, while hewing to a politicized formula of “equality!” would make them both less happy. The concatenation of these types of differences in preference are what lead us to a situation where the total burdens of labor are distributed differently, though not unfairly in the sense of total work done, and from there we end up with somewhat different distributions of income as well.”
Then the final inset panel should read “Holy shit, how did you fit all of that in one panel?”
Gee, Robert, what about the single and/or child-free women who still earn less than their male counterparts? You know, the ones without that adult partner you’re talking about? What about women who take time off to care for a parent while their brothers continue earning higher wages? It’s not just about domestic couples. It’s about equality.
Women who make the same career decisions and follow the same work pattern as men earn the same amount, generally speaking*. So the single and/or child-free women have no complaint on the equal-pay front.
Those women are making a different choice than their brothers are making; perhaps their choice is better, perhaps it is worse, but it is their choice. If they chose to continue working, then perhaps one of the brothers would step up. Or perhaps all the siblings would need to contribute financially for paid care-giving.
I don’t care about equality; I care about equity.
*There are some employers who do discriminate against women on the basis of wages and opportunity, though fortunately fewer than their used to be. And there is still a great deal of difference in the societal expectations and pressures that go into the choices that people make. But broadly, women who do what men do, make what men make.
Do you have a link to back up this assertion?
@ Jake … No time to hunt for a link now, but I believe I’ve seen statistics that unmarried women with no kids make similar amounts to men and that comparing married men with kids and married women with kids delivers the greatest disparity, even if we’re talking only full-time work. I’ll see if I can come up with something later.
As for Robert’s point, yes, we’re all adults and we don’t *have* to cave to social pressure, but for a woman to make the same career choices as a man often means not having a family at all, while for a man, it means having a stay-at-home wife and not seeing enough of his kids. Foregoing family entirely is something a lot of people aren’t willing to do. And it’s harder to find a husband willing to stay home with the kids than it is to find an interested wife (though certainly less hard than it used to be).
What I’d like to see a link – or at least an argument – for is this assertion:
…the averages show that both partners contribute broadly equal amounts of labor to the overall total.
@Jake –
Read Warren Farrell’s “Why Men Earn More”.
Warren does notice (and acknowledge) that there is still discrimination, and that discrimination needs to be fought with both social pressure and government action.
@Chingona –
It’s not true in every country, but it is true here and in most other rich nations.
http://ftp.iza.org/dp2705.pdf
(Interestingly, there is a correlation between fairly-shared work and per-capita GDP. Treating men and women fairly produces better economic outcomes.)
Popular version:
http://www.slate.com/id/2164268/
Italy is the big outlier, with men averaging an hour and a half less total work per day than women. Doesn’t surprise me a bit.
However …
This study of MBAs found that, even for controlling for aspirations and children, women MBAs started out making less right out of business school and those disparities continued throughout their careers.
They don’t go into their methodology, but I wonder if or how they corrected for differences in type of MBA. An MBA focusing on information technology is very different than an MBA focusing on human resources.
That said, it wouldn’t surprise me. There is still a lot of discrimination.
From the Slate article: “Many women with demanding careers tell me that it is women working full-time in the market, not women overall, who work more than comparable men. This study cannot settle that question because it does not report work time separately for people with and without market jobs. But if women with careers work more than men, while women overall work the same amount as men, then women without market jobs must work less than men.”
To address the qualifier at the end first: I would guess that, at least in rich countries, women without market jobs probably do work less than men with market jobs because, with modern appliances, it would be hard to spend 8 hours a day cleaning and cooking. (Robert mentions that men and women are more equal in total hours worked in the richer countries. Consider that women are probably doing most of the laundry in both rich and poor countries, but in Benin, a lot more women are taking laundry for a family of 8 to a river every day, while in the U.S., women are throwing laundry for a family of 4 into the washing machine once or twice a week.)
Going back to the question of whether women and men with full-time jobs do an equal amount of total work, given that studies consistently find that women do more housework than men, it’s probably a pretty good bet that women who work full-time, on average, do more work than their male partners who also work full-time.
One thing that complicates this tremendously is child care and how much of it should be considered work. Everyone agrees that changing diapers is work. I would hate to call reading bedtime stories work, but it’s not quite leisure time either. But how much child care each person is doing and what types of child care each person is doing can have a big impact on how people feel about the balance of work in the house and the balance between their paid jobs and the rest of their life and whether it continues to be worth it to work full-time. (Not even getting into the cost of child care and how it really doesn’t make sense for the lower-paid partner to keep working if you have more than two kids in daycare.)
The other conflating factor – and I suspect, the factor that accounts for a big part of the perception that women do more work – is differential preferences for cleanliness between the genders, on average. If I do 15 hours of housework a week, and my wife does 25 hours of housework a week, and I think the house would be clean with a total of 20 hours per week while my wife thinks it would be clean with 50 hours per week, then we both perceive ourselves as getting screwed.
Me: the house is way cleaner than it needs to be, and I’m doing 75% of what needs to get done while she wastes 20 hours a week on stupid shit.
Her: the house is a pigsty, and I’m doing 62.5% of the housework while he sits on his ass.
The moral of the story is that people need to have common ground with their partners about expectations and preferences.
Agreed, though this study (again, it’s a media report, not the actual study), found that married men did an hour less housework a week than single men, while married women did seven hours more housework than single women, and that co-habitating couples had a more equal division of housework, though women still did more.
So while that doesn’t disprove that different standards play into it, there are social expectations as well, and not just the ones that women impose on themselves. I don’t really buy that single men have HIGHER standards of cleanliness than married men.
http://www.livescience.com/2434-men-create-housework-women.html
@Robert: On the surface the link doesn’t say that at all. It talks about work, not pay. The one confusing set of numbers that addresses wages (Table 4) appears to say that men make more money per unspecified work-unit, between 1.86 and 2.8 something times as much.
And I don’t know what happened to my earlier comment, but PZ Myers just posted evidence for the straightforward sexism-by-employers explanation.
Not quite following you, hf. For Jake’s query about pay I referred him to a book. For chingona’s query about total work, I referred her to a paper (and popularized article) about work.
Robert @3: The final inset panel would probably be “So you wasted an entire panel’s worth of text to repeat yourself and say that women just CHOOSE to fuck up their careers and it’s nothing to do with sexism?”
I mean, you hide it in lot of excess verbiage, but there it is: social and economic pressure warp those choices. Men and women aren’t liking diapers or cutting back on hours in a vacuum of perfectly equal influences and consequences such that they just ‘happen’ to have different preferences.
Who says they’re fucking up their careers? Success is measured by the individual’s preference.
Show me a woman who wants to be the greatest computer programmer in the world and devotes her life to that, who gets shut down by sexist bosses and a sexist world, can’t get into CS classes, can’t get hired when she autodidacts her way into an amazing skillset…damnation that pisses me off, and I’m with that woman on the barricades barbecuing the admission director and the professors and the HR departments and the clients who refuse to hire her. Fuck those assholes.
Show me the woman who wants to be the greatest computer programmer in the world but who also wants to have three kids and be at least partially a stay-at-home mom and who just can’t the bear the thought of her dad sitting in a nursing home so she brings him back home to live with her and so she ends up working part time for many years and taking the job doing data support for the library instead of being a young gun at Google because the hours are so much more flexible, and who is then crying because she gets paid less than the young guns at Google…well, choices have consequences.
Barry’s argument in this cartoon is basically, well, the husband of that second woman should sacrifice some of his career so that hers can be better. He should stay home with the babies, he should tend to dad, he should make more of the dinners and clean up more of the diapers. Well, maybe he should – if that’s the deal that the two of them worked out in their relationship.
“But she couldn’t find a husband who was willing to do that!” Know what, I bet she could have – because male choices have consequences too, and your “budget” in mate selection is related to those choices. “Guy willing to sacrifice for gal’s career” is an asset class, just the same as “gal willing to sacrifice for guy’s career” is. When I went looking for a wife, “gal willing to raise babies and do most of that work” was high on my list, and “guy willing to work hard and make the dough so I can stay home” was high on the list of the wife I ended up with. Would you have a whole lot of sympathy for me if I started crying about how my wife doesn’t work in the marketplace hard enough, and how sexist it is that the system expects me to make money?
Maybe with what super-CS-mom has going on she’d have to bid downmarket to find a guy with more of the asset that she wants – but again, that’s about her choices. And that’s not sexism, that’s market value. Decide what’s important to you, and then pursue that. And recognize that very, very few people, male or female, end up with everything they want from life. Career success has a cost. Men and women have shown an equal ability to pay those costs and achieve that success. Whether from innate difference or mean old socialization, men and women show somewhat differential propensities to make the choice to pay those costs – but the people making the choice not to then turn around and make a choice to pay a *different* set of costs for *different* forms of success.
All success costs something. But all success is determined by the individual’s desire, not yours or mine or NOW’s or LAW’s. If super-CS-mom ends up being happy with her three kids and her dad at home and her crappy part-time job where she works on the computer in some capacity, then bully for her. She’s successful, not fucking up.
Hasn’t the wage gap between men and women been mathematically and economically proven? And hasn’t that line about women making less because they just choose (for whatever reason) to make less money than men been proven false as well?
http://econ.as.nyu.edu/docs/IO/9389/RR93-25.pdf
Maybe I’m overanalyzing your cartoon, but women don’t make less than men just because society forces women to perform a disproportionate amount of unpaid labor. Women are routinely paid less for the exact same amount of work, they don’t just work less on average.
Austin Nedved – looking at that paper, one important situation it appears not to consider is that of people having extended “career breaks”, as can occur for those raising children, to the relative detriment of their seniority and salary compared with their colleagues. The EXP variable used for years of experience is just a rough estimate of how long someone has been out of school.
http://khufu.openlib.org/~tchecndg/archive/2007/att-0755/DiscriminationHekman.pdf
I wonder how these unconscious prejudices impact employers’ evaluations of how much women ought to be paid and how deserving they are of promotion.
I don’t like the cartoon. Why is it framed as a conversation between two women? There’s a man involved who’s directly oppressing the woman in the cartoon by not doing his fair share of unpaid work. I think putting the problem down to general societal sexism, or economic and social forces is a bit of a distraction here. When women suffer due to their “choices” the problem pretty much always directly caused by one particular bastard not doing his share of the work. I don’t think these people deserve to be let off the hook like that.
Huh?
Sexism has an effect on the market. That is the whole problem. There isn’t any particular reason that she can’t choose to blow off childraising and go have a kickass career… but she’s more likely to suffer socially and be viewed as an outlier (as compared to men who make the same choice.) So even though her choice is happening in a market it is influenced by sexism.
And there isn’t any reason her future spouse can’t choose that he wants to blow of working and be a kickass child-raiser… but he’s more likely to suffer socially and be viewed as an outlier (as compared to women who make the same choice.) So even though his choice is happening in a market it, too, is influenced by sexism.
Those are costs. They affect the market. If you decide to use the market “as it is,” sexism included, then relying on a market analysis to prove a lack of sexism is merely a tautology.
I meant that the tradeoffs people make in the mate selection process (homogamy, to shortcut it) aren’t sexist, they’re just tradeoffs.
I agree that there’s sexism in the expectations around who does what, meaning that it’s more of an uphill fight to do certain things.
Robert, it seems to me that’s the point of the cartoon – a woman doesn’t have to be denied a job on account of being a woman to be negatively affected by sexism. Societal expectations create a high market value for the woman who’s willing to let her career slide and a low market value for the man who wants to stay at home raising children. As in so many other contexts, you don’t have a truly free market until you eliminate the outside pressures upon it.
I get that people make tradeoffs. I don’t get how you’re getting from “people make choices” to “…therefore this isn’t a sexism issue.”
So just for kicks and giggles, let’s move this to hypothetical SexistLand: Mary wants to find a job as a blacksmith, but her father tells he that he’ll disinherit her if she won’t marry at his will. Also, all the women in her social circle will shun her. Bob wants to be a full time nanny but his father tells him that he’ll disinherit Bob unless Bob works in the family blacksmith shop. If he takes a “woman’s” occupation, all of the men in town will shun him.
Presumably you would recognize the sexism implicit in that hypothetical–even if, as in your example, it is still possible for both Mary and Bob to “choose” their selection according to the market. Does this help you to see how relying on the market doesn’t solve the sexism issue?
“That’s crazy talk!”
How very ableist of you.
So I’m clear about what you’re saying: is the argument basically that women can have a high powered career, but only at the unjust cost of having to compromise in other ways by having a partner slightly less attractive, wealthy, with a more grating personality, etc, than would otherwise be the case? And that this is sexist, because men in the same position do not have to make similar sacrifices?
Not that you quoted me, but I’ll try:
There will always be tradeoffs in life. Tradeoffs are not automatically considered to be sexist, by any means. Both men and women will have some societally mandated guidelines like “don’t tattoo FUCK YOU on your forehead” and both men and women will have their decisions moderated by social class, location, race, etc.
Some of those tradeoffs will be different by gender. With some exceptions*, the greater the sex difference in a tradeoff, the greater the assumption that the difference is mandated by sexism. That assumption can be attacked, of course. But it’s there.
This thread talks about the fact that the tradeoff for a man who decides to work instead of raise kids is lesser than the tradeoff for a woman who decides to work instead of raise kids. Finding a compatible spouse is easier for the man than the woman. The obverse of that statement is also true: the tradeoff for a woman who wants to stay at home is lesser than the tradeoff for a man who wants to stay at home. In that situation, finding a compatible spouse is easier for the woman than for the man.
* such as things directly related to pregnancy (as distinguished from parenthood) or things related to real physical differences (i.e. “why there are not likely to be any female NFL linebackers”)
… which is to say:
No.
It’s considered to be sexist because they don’t have to make equivalent sacrifices. Things can be different and still similar.
Societal expectations create a high market value for the woman who’s willing to let her career slide and a low market value for the man who wants to stay at home raising children.
No, the latter person also has a high market value. Many women don’t have such husbands/partners because they didn’t bid for them, and are now unhappy/complaining about sexism because their male partners don’t want to distribute the labor in a certain way. Men willing to distribute the labor in that way had a HIGH value, and the women didn’t pay that price.
I’m not saying that it isn’t sexism that these differential expectations exist, it is and they do. I’m saying that it isn’t sexism that’s to blame when a woman picks a man who doesn’t want to distribute the labor in a gender-egalitarian way. She knew what his labor preference was going in. There are men with a different preference; she didn’t choose one of those men.
Another rewrite:
“Couldn’t MEN do half of that unpaid work?”
“That would involve “marrying down” – which most women don’t do”
———————-
We know that women heavily invested in their careers seek men they perceive as even more successful than themselves. Highly educated women seek men as well-educated as themselves, or moreso. (This is one of the reasons Jewish American women have abysmal marriage rates – they are among the most highly educated women in the country, shrinking the pool of men they will consider.)
Even though we are living in a cooperative, information economy, most women are still looking for a Neanderthal-style “alpha provider”.
So: to usher in a Brave New World of perfect equality, women need not surrender their own Neanderthal instincts in mate selection – but they can boo-hoo about the obvious consequence of “marrying up”: seeking an “alpha” automatically makes you (and your career) number 2. Surprise!
… show me the stock brokers (female) married to the school teachers/male nurses. Doesn’t happen in any appreciable numbers.
Note to whiny career women: Remember the old feminist line about how “I wish I had a wife at home”?
Try marrying “down”.
Presumably you would recognize the sexism implicit in that hypothetical–even if, as in your example, it is still possible for both Mary and Bob to “choose” their selection according to the market. Does this help you to see how relying on the market doesn’t solve the sexism issue?
There’s enormous sexism in the hypothetical, but it isn’t the sexism I’m talking about. Let’s extend your hypothetical – Mary decides “screw you, Dad” and moves across the country and pursues blacksmith lessons in a more liberal social milieu where such is permitted. Bob says the same thing and moves as well, and starts looking for a wife who wants to work.
Mary meets Bob and decides, meh. She continues looking and finds Cletus, a blacksmith in her blacksmithing school, and is smitten. She and Cletus wed. Cletus found her blacksmithing ambitions cute when they were dating, but never intended anything other than a traditional balance of gender roles, and said so. So Mary is now miserable, reduced to turning out the occasional horseshoe while the kids are at school.
NOW I am saying that Mary’s misery is not the result of societal sexism. That was the source of her misery when she was stuck back home with an oppressive father and nobody in the village who would hire her; now she has real choices, but she (perhaps foolishly, perhaps in a rational calculation balancing all her interests) chose a man who wasn’t going to support her having a career. That’s not sexism; that’s Mary making a (perhaps) bad choice.
(Bob, meanwhile, met and married Carol, a hard-driving cooper with a heart of gold, and is now happily raising the eleven children that Carol squoze out in between epic bouts of barrel construction. Carol chose wisely.)
Many women don’t have such husbands/partners because they didn’t bid for them, and are now unhappy/complaining about sexism because their male partners don’t want to distribute the labor in a certain way.
?????
I keep writing responses and erasing them. Are you serious? Yes, men are totally upfront with their girlfriends and tell them from the very beginning that the longer they’ve been married, the less laundry they’ll do, and that after they have kids, they’ll pretend to be soundly asleep every time the baby cries or one of the kids wets his bed or has a bad dream. And women should just stfu because they only have themselves to blame for marrying such a douchebag. Did I get that right?
Note to whiny career women: Remember the old feminist line about how “I wish I had a wife at home”?
Try marrying “down”.
My mother married “down.” She has a PhD. He has a GED. Except when she was a full-time student, she’s always made significantly more money than my father. My father has always worked, but he doesn’t have a “career.” Growing up, all our moves were to accommodate her career and her education.
She has achieved a high degree of success in a male-dominated, hard sciences field.
She also still does more housework than he does. (He would attribute this to different standards. He does do housework. She just does a lot more.)
And when she got tenure, she got royally screwed over salary-wise in a way that was pretty obviously discriminatory when compared to her male colleagues.
Men frequently tell my father that they wouldn’t stand for their wives making more money than they do or mock my father for having a “sugar mama.”
Yes, there are men out there who will provide the support a woman needs to prioritize her career. They are a rarity.
And even if you find one, it doesn’t mean you won’t suffer from discrimination in the workplace, including in your salary, and it doesn’t mean you won’t do a lot more housework than your male counterparts.
No, you didn’t get that right.
There are no competent people getting married who do not have at least a fair estimate of their partner’s attitude towards the division of domestic labor. I knew what my wife wanted out of marriage; she knew what I wanted. We were not heroic in our self-disclosure and discovery process. It’s part of being in a competent adult relationship.
We are not talking about shadings of exactly how idealistic each partner will be about leaping to take care of diaper needs; we’re talking about the basic outlines of responsibility.
With respect, I think that’s easier to do when you are seeking a clear division of labor. More often these days, both parties are in theoretical agreement that they’ll both work and both take care of home and family responsibilities, but then all the good job offers for him are in city X and all the good offers for her are in city Y and you can’t simultaneously live together in both cities. If sexism weren’t in play, even among couples who claim to want and even have relatively egalitarian relationships, you’d see about half of such couples moving to city X and the other half moving to Y. That isn’t how it tends to work out.
People who half-ass the most important relationship decisions they will make in life are not going to get good outcomes.
The incidence of couple-agreement seems to be low enough that it’s not clear whether the proper response is “people should do a better job screening spouses” or “many/most people don’t appear to be able to do a good job at screening spouses, and the problem is widespread enough that it’s ridiculous to plan society on an assumption of screening successfully.”
It’s ridiculous to plan society, full stop. To paraphrase the old joke about lab animals, people, under rigorous scientific protocols in a carefully-controlled laboratory environment, will do as they damn well please. In the wild? Forget about it.
The incidence of couple agreement is low because people in general (and women being people) are very resistant to the idea that they have to pay for what they want. Women in particular have been sold a bill of goods – that you can have everything you want in life if you just go for the gusto.
Certain types of goods, people are very reluctant to pay for. They decide, or feel, that things should be a certain way, and ergo that is the baseline and should involve no extraneous costs. (My wife is morally certain that a computer should be able to run Photoshop, Outlook, Firefox with DVD video, and MSN Chat all at the same time, all smoothly, as though it were running nothing at all. It gravelled her immensely to have to shell out thousands of dollars for a machine that could actually do that; the $200 bargain special from Wal-Mart “ought to be able to do that”.) Men just ought to want babies in the same way women often do, and so having to “pay extra” in terms of the relationship for a man who actually does want that is just an outrage. Having to go downmarket for a man who’s willing to adjust his expectations and do more of a certain class of work is just a horrible oppressive experience.
Many men do the exact same thing, though physical attractiveness seems to be the element which they feel ought to come free gratis as part of the universal entitlement of mankind.
Men just ought to want babies in the same way women often do
I don’t know if you’re going off of anything but your own personal experience, but among the couples I know, the men, on average, are more gung-ho about having babies. And of course they are. It costs them less, in every sense, than it does women.
I don’t think anyone thinks that you can have relationships with no trade-offs (my friend who won’t make any trade-offs for the sake of his relationships has very short-lived relationships) or that career choices will never come at the expense of family choices or vice versa.
What we’re objecting to is that the same career and family choices come at a radically higher price for women than they do for men. That’s sexism, and it’s worth fighting.
Having to go downmarket for a man who’s willing to adjust his expectations and do more of a certain class of work is just a horrible oppressive experience.
Who the hell is saying this, other than you?
I have not seen much indication that there is a huge, untapped pool of wannabe househusbands out there. On the contrary, I think that pool is largely tapped. The pool is getter larger, thanks to the success of feminism in making gender roles less confining (yay!) and the crappy economy (boo!), and I can only hope it continues to get larger (for the feminist reasons), but these men are still in pretty short supply.
I don’t know if you’re going off of anything but your own personal experience, but among the couples I know, the men, on average, are more gung-ho about having babies.
Having babies, perhaps. Caring for babies, I seriously doubt it. I was referring to wanting to care for babies. About half the women I know have been seriously into actual caring for babies. Most of the other half were neutral about it. The preference is significantly weaker for men.
And of course they are. It costs them less, in every sense, than it does women.
It costs them less, in most of the senses that women value and prioritize. Men have their own values and priorities, and it is not self-evident that the losses are all that one-sided taking both sexes’ desires into account. As one example, women are not physically capable of hyperfecundity, while men are; having children generally forecloses men from mating opportunities that remained available. (A woman who commits to caring for a child for a year foregoes at most one opportunity to reproduce; a man foregoes hundreds.)
What we’re objecting to is that the same career and family choices come at a radically higher price for women than they do for men.
I don’t buy it. A higher price, for some choices, yes. But magically altering the social balance so that the cost of those choices was more equal, would make variations in the costs of OTHER choices larger. The costs do not appear all that radical; pennies on the dollar, measured economically.
Who the hell is saying this, other than you?
Absent the “horribly”, the original cartoon seems to be making this argument. Men should make different choices, so that women don’t have to go downmarket, seems to be the original point. Am I misinterpreting?
I have not seen much indication that there is a huge, untapped pool of wannabe househusbands out there.
I have not seen much indication that there are a huge group of women who actually do want men to do more of the work and who accept what that would entail. If they wanted a downmarket pool, they’d be out looking for it. They aren’t. Instead, they find the best mate they can find at their own level of class/wealth/influence/attractiveness, what have you, and attempt to guilt, persuade, or ideologize that male into changing his preferences and ordering his labor in a way that will maximize the woman’s utility instead of his own. They know this is mostly futile, but they do it anyway, instead of taking the practical steps (going downmarket) that would lead them to what they claim to want.
I also perceive a considerable amount of mommy-blocking. Women want shared labor, but they don’t want shared power; they want the man to follow their directives and be Mommy Jr. under their command, instead of a partner who does his part of the work his way. Unsurprisingly, this fails to gain much traction, and so a lot of male labor usage gets foregone because the labor is only available autonomously, rather than submissively.
So it’s no huge surprise that a big pool of sellers doesn’t develop; there aren’t that many actual buyers. Just a lot of people talking about their wishes.
Pennies on the dollar, per hour. Hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a working life.
To me, “radically” means “you have to move to another country to be able to work” or “your life is at risk because people in the field you’re trying to break intro try and kill you” (which did use to happen though thankfully rarely). Pennies on the dollar, most or all of which you can obviate by making the same choices as the person earning the higher amount? Not radical.
And it’s not just the costs on the other side of the gender fence that I don’t see as radical. I am self-employed now but I had aspirations for a corporate career at one point (before realizing the futility of all worldly goods and becoming my current Zenlike self) and in those days if I had wanted to be a super-committed dad it would have been a serious (and I mean serious) career blow. I was at Microsoft where 50-60 hour weeks were the baseline and people who said things like “well, its 7, I really want to get home and put my kids to bed, I’ll come back in a couple hours once they’re asleep” during ship time were viewed as slacker losers on the daddy track. Forget about promotion, forget about project leadership. Dimes on the dollar in terms of lifetime earning, not pennies.
That verges on being a radical cost but isn’t quite there. 94 cents vs. 100? Pfft.
I don’t know what you’re basing the 94 cents on, but let’s just set aside radical as an adjective.
This is the kind of thing I’m talking about:
You don’t need to give me a list of 15 things you are quite sure she didn’t control for. I already know you don’t take this at face value.
It is simply not true that women can eliminate the wage gap by making the same decisions as men. In my example of my mother’s career path, even marrying “downmarket” didn’t protect her from wage discrimination.
I’m quite sure it’s too late to redirect this whole conversation, but the more I’ve thought about this (and I’ve thought about it all day – can you tell?), the more examples I’ve thought of — all in the last 15 years — of women facing outright discrimination at work, including in promotions and pay.
chingona (post 36):
But since most women “marry up” the decision to build the man’s career is not primarily due to sexism, but the simple economics that favors the alpha career.
Plus biology, since most women/couples also want to nurture a family, which inevitably cuts into the woman’s career. Gaia is a sexist!
I don’t dispute the outright discrimination. I think it’s appalling (though better than it used to be, thanks, feminism).
@ Ben David … His career becomes the “alpha” career when they move for his job opportunity and she takes a not-as-good job in his city. If they moved for her good job opportunity, the reverse would happen. There’s nothing remotely inevitable about it.
The three months (if that) that most women take for maternity leave, times the two kids most American women have, does not substantially disrupt a career. That’s the only part that’s biological. Again, there’s nothing remotely inevitable about it.
The way you talk, you’d think that the way family and economic life are organized has remained entirely constant for all of human history.
Right now, the second generation of women ever to have meaningful career opportunities are raising their children, so obviously, if we haven’t yet achieved feminist utopia, it must be because it’s impossible for things to change one iota more than they already have. It’s biology!
His career becomes the “alpha” career when they move for his job opportunity and she takes a not-as-good job in his city. If they moved for her good job opportunity, the reverse would happen. There’s nothing remotely inevitable about it.
Which is true, if they start with equal careers. But Ben’s point was that women tend to marry up – the (f) computer programmer marries the (m) project manager, the (f) nurse marries the (m) doctor, the (f) school principal marries the (m) superintendent, the (f) entrepreneur marries the (m) venture capitalist. By no means always, but that is definitely the trend. So there ends up being a starting difference of position that makes it much more likely that the higher-earner’s career gets the preferential treatment in the relationship.
Amp did a pretty good cartoon about this and how the initial inequality can grow and grow.
The three months (if that) that most women take for maternity leave, times the two kids most American women have, does not substantially disrupt a career. That’s the only part that’s biological.
Some people breast feed for two or three years, and not everyone can (or wants to) pump. Driven careerists can hand the baby over to dad or the nanny; many if not most women feel a strong desire to spend a lot more time than that. There is undoubtedly some social pressure involved with the decision, but the drive itself seems likely to be at least somewhat biological. A species with women who thought “dang, it’s been two weeks, can’t someone else take care of this little bastard for a while” would probably not have gotten this far.
The way you talk, you’d think that the way family and economic life are organized has remained entirely constant for all of human history.
Well, obviously it hasn’t…but the biology has remained entirely constant for all of human history, and the organization of the family and economic life has drawn some inspiration from biology, don’t you think? We didn’t just decide “women will feed the children” out of some appalling Neandertal oppression of women.
Right now, the second generation of women ever to have meaningful career opportunities are raising their children, so obviously, if we haven’t yet achieved feminist utopia, it must be because it’s impossible for things to change one iota more than they already have. It’s biology!
The second post-feminism generation which has had some more widespread opportunities than previous generations, but my great-great-grandma had meaningful career opportunities. (She ran her own farm.) They weren’t as unlimited as they are for my daughters – and I’m glad my daughters have the opportunities. But we’re not coming at this from a standpoint of “damn, it’s such a bizarre mystery how men and women can balance all these various responsibilities and workloads now that women no longer spend their days caged at the back of the cave, released from permanent suckling and childbirth duties for the first time in history”. There’s a fair amount of history and experience already laid down. We have 20th and 19th and 18th century feminists writing about their own career aspirations and their own struggles with family obligations and men, to say nothing of the class facts – a social expectation of woman as pure FT mother is a relatively recent and fairly upper-class phenomenon.
In large part we haven’t reached feminist “utopia” because not all that many people want it. Most women (and many men) want equal opportunity – but the failure to achieve pure equality of outcome, the “failure” of men to decide that they want to be parents and homemakers first and foremost and damn career success anyway, let’s leave that for the women – these failures don’t strike huge numbers of people as calamitous. Feminism has done yeoman work in creating those opportunities and smashing some of the assumptions that prevented it…but the ideal society that hardcore feminists dream about is one that an awful lot of people would recoil from. Women want to be free to go to work and have great careers, and they also want to raise their children and spend a lot of time with them, and they want their menfolk to be broadly supportive and helpful of these goals… but that mix is unlikely to lead us to a 50-50 world of perfect egalitarianism.
@41
Social Devices for Impelling Women to Bear and Rear Children
Robert @17: Well, you, for one. You can’t even make it through the second paragraph without sneering at the young woman that “choices have consequences” – never mind that the young (male) guns at Google might also have a spouse and kids and ill parents, but they’re not struggling with the expectations of their employer or wife or culture that it’s their responsibility to handle all that, too, instead of having a wife or paid caregiver or nanny picking up any slack. That’s the point of the inset in Barry’s cartoon, after all: that if a woman does the same thing as a man and offloads primary responsibility for childcare to someone other than herself, she’s a lousy mother.
“Choices have consequences” doesn’t answer the question of why we make those choices, and how free we are to make different choices. Handwaving and saying well golly, you know how women are, they just do that, maternal instinct gatekeeping wharrgarbl, is also not an answer.
Whether or not we achieve perfect 50/50 egalitarianism is less important than whether egalitarian choices are common and realistically available. Given how often I get wide-eyed looks and “I don’t know how you do it!” because I have, like, a career and shit yet am not childless or single, and how often (never) my similarly-situated colleagues get the same ‘compliment’, I’m thinking we may not be all the way there just yet.
Ben David @46: And….those choices to ‘marry up’ and the impact of children on a woman’s career are just like totally facts of science, and have nothing to do with sexism at all!
Personally, I know that I’ve met very few men who are “down” the education ladder from me who are willing to date “up.” Like someone said upthread, guys face a lot of societal pressure that tells them that they’re less of a man if their wife earns more than them or is more educated than them.
Ruchama @52: And of course in a culture where money and job status = power and men are supposed to have that power in the marriage, that’s a whole extra level of pressure.
We shouldn’t assume that even those few marrying down men are taking on their share of the housework and caregiving:
The Job Without Benefits
Recently, I came across a comment from a guy that described the time he stayed home with his kid as the “most idyllic year of my life”. Small wonder.
Robert’s post 49 pretty much nails my response to chingona – plus this:
Actually, the physical differences between men and women had much more economic impact in previous centuries – if not millenia. No doubt the long run of agrarian economies based on male brawn – and constantly threatened by scarcity – shaped women’s preferences in mates. It certainly curtailed their economic options – if they were interested in reproducing.
The industrial and information revolutions that leveled the economic playing ground are recent blips in human history. A lot of adjustment will be necessary.
Career women can help that adjustment by marrying – and affirming – nurturing men who may not be as educated as them, and don’t earn what they do.
Where are you getting this? From what I’ve seen and experienced it can absolutely disrupt a career.
Start with the simple things: Unless you work for an employer who qualifies for FMLA and unless your work qualifies you for FMLA (or some equivalent state statute,) then you’re not guaranteed to have a job when you get back. So there’s no guarantee it will last three months. And if you select jobs based on FMLA qualifications, then you limit your options and incur costs at the get-go.
And that’s assuming you can get a job at all. Many small employers avoid hiring younger childless women for fear that they’ll leave. (If the employer is small enough, this is perfectly legal.) This is also both unfortunate and often rational, as the cost of replacement and holdover is usually higher for smaller businesses. I’ve seen it happen many times: a reliable employee goes on pregnancy leave in a small business–say the store manager takes off. By the time that leave is over there’s a new manager in place.
If you ARE guaranteed a job when you get back, as a practical matter many employers will still penalize you for it. It’s unfortunate and often rational, again. Holding a job open for three months is incredibly difficult and expensive, unless it was a low-level fungible job in the first place. If you did something which was a specialized position in which people relied on you, then either the employer has to replace you with a temp (difficult) or deal without your position (also difficult.) You also run the significant risk that in your absence there will be minor changes in your job (reassignment of plum clients, etc.) that will make things worse upon your return, and which can really affect your career in the long run.
And in either case, your employer will be worried about the future. Did you just have a kid and take three months off? Did they actually provide you with leave? Was it expensive for them to do? It may be a while before your employer assigns you to a position where you’ll be incredibly difficult to replace. While that’s illegal it’s almost impossible to prove. It’s those minor decisions which often have a huge effect on a career: not “who holds the title of VP,” but rather “which two VPs get the extra handshake with the president at the Xmas party.”
And notably, the positions where this is less of an issue–where you are fungible, and leave doesn’t hurt your employer–are not the valuable ones. You will be able to take leave more easily if you’re replaceable… but you’re a hell of a lot less valuable if you’re replaceable. Value and career success are linked.
Finally, timing makes it worse. If you do this early in your career, then you lose the ability to get the plum assignments which often multiply exponentially into success. You can take three months away from phone support and return to the job unscathed, but you can’t take three months from running your own company. If you do it later in your career then you are more likely to be able to take leave but you’re more likely to lose more money doing so.
FWIW, this is not only derived from my own personal experiences and those of my friends, but from many conversations with many other attorneys and HR folks who are involved in the process.
Trying to force companies to offer leave is a bit like trying to use rent control: everyone who doesn’t like the law will immediately move to the boundaries of legality and will do their best to find loopholes.
And the companies who aren’t legally obligated to offer leave (which applies to many people!) do, very often, fire for absences. I’ve sat in on many a meeting where a decision has been made for someone to be laid off. Sometimes they have a sick kid. Sometimes they have personal difficulties. Sometimes it’s a basic as the fact that they’re a single parent and it’s a snowy winter and their snow-day emergency care keeps falling through. It’s really brutal for the employee but the employer often feels that it’s not their personal responsibility to provide a social safety net.
Also, remember that for many people, the most flexibility for a starting job is with a small employer. If you need job flexibility, you might not work at the Gap. Instead, you might want to work at a local retailer. That’s a normal way to do things: even if you can’t move up, after a while working there, you’ll have more experience and can apply to manage something else.
but those small employers, which are such a crucial part of career building, are almost never covered by FMLA and are often not even covered by discrimination laws.
And women who have babies while still in college or grad school pretty much have a choice of either going back to school within a week or so after the baby is born or losing that whole semester (including TA-ships, student loans, etc.). And for people in academia, having a baby while in a tenure-track job can be hell — different universities have different rules, but a few months off can put research back by a year or more, which can put people way behind on publishing enough before being considered for tenure.
It would be interesting to see the results of a model where we assume an absolutely gender-egalitarian society, where women and men are considered totally interchangeable, except for women have the babies.
There would then be a gender gap in salaries, for family-having women, from the types of logical consequences Ruchama and G&W lay out…how big would it be?
Actually, the physical differences between men and women had much more economic impact in previous centuries – if not millenia. No doubt the long run of agrarian economies based on male brawn – and constantly threatened by scarcity – shaped women’s preferences in mates.
Let me guess. You’ve never lived in a community that practices subsistence agriculture. Women in those communities do tremendous physical labor that contributes enormously to the economy of the household, usually including working in the fields alongside the men in between doing laundry, gathering firewood, cooking, doing all the animal care, and taking care of the children.
Sure, women want mates who will pull their own weight. Most people do, in whatever division of labor that society/culture/couple have settled on.
However, given that in many traditional societies, women didn’t actually get to select their own mates, it would be hard to say what traits, specifically, they preferred.
I don’t think that the problems I listed are necessarily logical. They just reflect reality at the moment.
Also, it’s a feedback loop. So long as it is more common for one gender to do ____, then employers will bias their actions towards that action… thus making it more likely that members of said gender will do ____, and thus feeding the loop.
To use a sexism-specific example: if employers believe that women are more likely to take on childcare and push work aside, they’ll give them worse jobs on average, or will otherwise do things that affect their career. That would mean that women would tend to get paid less over time. That would mean that M/F couples who seek to maximize total income would more frequently elect to have the man work and the woman do childcare. And that would mean that women would in fact be more likely to do childcare and push work aside… which would lead back to the start of the loop.
But it’s important to realize that the loop can start ANYWHERE. It can theoretically start with (from Robert’s view) the choices of many women to do childcare. But it can also start if women get paid less, and it can start if employers are sexist, and….
What I meant to say is that there is no inherent reason for three months, twice in a career, to be a big deal. It can end up being a big deal because of how we deal with it.
Men sometimes take unexpected leave too. Men get cancer or are in bad car accidents. Sometimes they get fired for it, and it sucks. Other companies make sure everyone pitches in until the person can come back. But regardless, there’s not all this extra social/cultural baggage influencing how the absence is perceived or that extends to men generally.
FWIW, I’ve never worked somewhere where they hired temps to handle maternity leave, and no temps were hired to cover my leave. Everyone just shouldered more work, the same way we did when someone had to do chemo or someone took a fellowship or someone just up and quit.
And getting back to Robert and “what women want.”
First, I used the term feminist utopia a little bit sarcastically or tongue in cheek. I’m not aiming for an exact 50/50 split in which men and women are 100 percent interchangeable. Like mythago said, I want a society in which egalitarian choices are readily available to most people.
Some people breast feed for two or three years, and not everyone can (or wants to) pump.
I think breastfeeding is great. I breastfed my son for nearly two years, and I fully expect to nurse my daughter just as long, unless she self-weans earlier than that. I’ve been lucky to work in jobs where pumping was feasible (though by no means easy), and I happen to be someone for whom breastfeeding was a big enough priority that I made it work.
That said … only 30 percent of American babies are still being breastfed at all by six months. The difficulty of combining breastfeeding and paid work is probably part of that, and I’m all for making it easier for women to combine the two. But … let’s consider this: The majority of American women, when having to chose between breastfeeding and working, are choosing to work. Even going back to the Middle Ages, various authorities are exhorting women to breastfeed their own children instead of handing them off to wet nurses so they can go do more rewarding (to them) things. The European countries with the lowest birth rates are those in which it’s the hardest to combine work and family. Again, while most women want both, when forced to choose between work and having kids, a significant percentage of women are choosing work at the expense of having kids.
The fact that evo-bio enthusiasts somehow forget this part always boggles my mind. It’s as if they view all of human history as one singles bar.
Robert @59, who knows? But I think we can confidently say it wouldn’t look like what we have now, where ‘choices’ are not as free as we wish.
This argument, I don’t get.
Of course men take unexpected leave; of course women also take unexpected leave, for cancer and car accidents and such. But it’s not the fact of leave in general which leads to a problem, it’s the difference in leave. “Men take leave too!” obscures the fact that men don’t request either pregnancy or lactation leave, and that–due to all sorts of sexist factors–men are also less likely to request child care leave.
And isn’t that the issue? I understand that for minor differences it can be best to say “ignore the differences; these things are the same.” But this isn’t minor IMO, so obscuring the issues makes the problems more difficult to fix.
(and w/r/t your other nursing post, were you aware that the new health care bill had a hidden employment provision (a) mandating that employers provide reasonable lactation breaks (b) in a room that is private, and (c) which is NOT a bathroom? Just in case you need to know….)
chingona:
How many Ozzie-and-Harriet 2-parent dad-works-while-mom-stays-home families are there out there? Most families I know (obviously a small subset of “all American families”) are dual working parent families. The disparity in my career choices vs. my wife’s have been pretty much due to the disparity in our educations and abilities. I’d be willing to bet that there aren’t that many stay-at-home moms these days; certainly far fewer than when I was a kid.
Among the couples I’ve known it’s been the women, hands down, that were more gung-ho about having babies than the men. Does the phrase “biological clock” ring a bell? It was the guys who saw having kids as putting constraints on their life. There’s the financial cost, the need to buy a mini-van instead of the convertible, the huge hit your social life takes, the lack of spontaneity in your life (everything revolves around the kids), etc. I’m curious as to what kind of environment you live in where the guys are the ones pushing for children. I haven’t seen it.
And isn’t that the issue? I understand that for minor differences it can be best to say “ignore the differences; these things are the same.” But this isn’t minor IMO, so obscuring the issues makes the problems more difficult to fix.
How would you fix this? What would you do differently?
The reason I’m talking about treating various types of leave the same is that I see the fact of the leave having the same impact of the company, regardless of what it’s for, and employees taking leave for medical/family reasons is a fact of life. I see maternity leave having a disproportionate effect on women’s careers because it triggers all sorts of other thoughts in the mind of employers – what if she doesn’t take her job as seriously? What if she’s always wanting to leave early? And so on.
Let me give an example, from the job I had when I had my son. There were three of us in our twenties who were hired roughly within six months of each other. I was pregnant when I got hired, so I didn’t actually qualify for FMLA. I negotiated the leave, instead of even talking about salary issues, because I knew that while they couldn’t withdraw the job offer (legally, anyway) because I was pregnant, they didn’t have to give me leave. I took two months. It was absolutely a disruption when it happened, but I came back and worked there another four years. They never regretted hiring me and were sorry to see me go. By the time I left, they hardly remembered the two months I took off. Of the other two people they hired around the same time, one was a woman who is quite certain she doesn’t want children and who still works there, happily child-free, and the other was a man who was diagnosed with testicular cancer less than six months after he started working there. He took two months off for surgery, chemo and recovery, and then left for another job less than a year after returning to work. The two young women were the better hires.
My point is that while any given female employee Jane in her 20s or 30s may be more likely to go out on maternity leave than generic employee Pat of any age or gender is to go out for chemo, the rationality of discriminating against women on that basis is significantly overstated because you never know what will happen when you hire anybody. Even setting aside issues of leave and family/work balance, people up and quit with no notice and everyone else is left scrambling. Shit happens.
For what it’s worth, FMLA, while explicit about allowing time off for the birth or adoption of a child, basically treats maternity (and paternity) leave the same as any other leave for either personal illness or to care for an eligible relative.
If you think that papers over the differences in a way that ends up hurting women, what solutions do you see? How do you think it should be handled?
(As for pumping, thanks for thinking of me, but I’m already covered under state law, and actually have a pretty good set up. I’m also, thankfully, getting close to the end of that stage. At my last job, when I was pumping for my son, I was pumping in the bathroom and even having to run an extension cord in there – not exactly discreet – but it wasn’t because they were jerks about it. They were actually really cool about it, but it was the only option. The office was one room with seven desks and a one-person bathroom. There wasn’t even a storage closet, so I just made the best of it.)
Finally:
The presumption here is that sexism causes the inequities found in the employment market place. Sexist social conditioning causes men to feel free to pass off child care to their wives while women feel the pressure to assume the role of nurturer. Ah, if only things were really equal and feminism had triumphed. Then men would take on 50% of the nurturing role and women would take on 50% of the wage earning role.
Me, I figure that while there’s certainly overt sexism going on, there’s another factor. Men and women are different. They’re built differently and they’re wired differently. The most obvious difference leads to a new life growing inside a woman’s body for 9 months, changing her body, and then bringing it forth in pain and effort. Followed by feeding that new life directly from one’s own body for a period longer (something that a woman can avoid if she wishes, but that’s the way women are built). Men don’t have that experience. Women are to that extent undeniably born to nuture, whereas men are not. Why, then, should it be ignored or unaccounted for that perhaps the primary reason women do choose such a role is not because that’s they way they’re pushed from outside but is the way they’re guided from inside? That there’s something to biology? Pretending that this doesn’t exist, or that society can obliterate this, or that it’s automatically desirable to change this seems to be absurd.
Should women be required to fit into such roles if they do not desire to do so? No. They shouldn’t be required to marry, they shouldn’t be required to have kids, they should have the same pay for the same work if they decide to pursue the same career options as a man does. But if you’re looking for reasons as to why they do not do so, don’t ignore biology. And don’t presume that going against biology is an improvement. It seems to me that people point at statistics about employment and housework and presume that if they’re not 50:50 there’s something wrong. That’s not to me an automatically valid presumption. That proposition needs to be explored.
I don’t know the solution. But I think that whatever the solution turns out to be, it’s going to be dependent on acknowledging reality.
I don’t see you as someone to fails to acknowledge reality, just to make that clear. But a lot of the discourse surrounding the wage gap seems (to me, anyway) to be pretty unrealistic.
@ RonF … When I said “not having a family at all,” I was referring to the very high level, CEO/top-tier executive types. Women who make it to that level often don’t have kids at all.
I think it’s something like 75 percent of women with children under the age of 5 work, so yeah, most families have both parents working.
As for men wanting kids more than women, maybe this is generational? Certainly, I’m well aware of the biological clock. Once I decided I wanted to have kids, I wanted to have my first by the time I was 30. But among my friends from college, I’ve seen a lot of ambivalence about both marriage and kids from many (not all) of the women. I think we’re pretty conscious of the trade-offs involved.
I’ve seen the same thing in a lot of my friends around my age (30). The husband thinks that having a baby would be great and awesome and babies are adorable and you’re not a REAL grown-up until you have a baby, while the wife wants to wait a little while and figure out when would be an OK time for her to take time off work and get into a job where maternity leave won’t kill her career first.
There are no competent people getting married who do not have at least a fair estimate of their partner’s attitude towards the division of domestic labor.
As an experienced couple therapist, I can assure you, you are completely and utterly wrong about this, Robert. I have seen hundreds of couples, same-sex and opposite-sex, enter a relationship talking egalitarianism and equality and modern gender roles and etc. only for things to eventually turn very Ozzie and Harriet. I worked with one woman (as an individual) with an MA who had put a successful career on hold to be a full-time mother because her husband talked “shared parenting” right up until the first month after the birth, when she wanted to talk about them both splitting job time and parenting time as she came off maternity leave, and he pressured her otherwise. We spent a two-hour session listing all the tasks (daily, weekly, monthly; short, medium, and long-term; repetitive and occasional) that she was responsible for in their family.
As a woman with a terminal degree and a modestly-successful professional career, this entire discussion is immensely painful for me (seriously, I haven’t been able to read more than a few comments without bursting into tears), because I have found that most men do not want to marry UP (or even ACROSS), and even if they do have initial attraction to a highly-intelligent, successful woman, the pressures and expectations of patriarchy cause them to lose interest in a relationship in which the woman does not eventually shift into the role of nurturer, emotional care-taker, domestic worker, relationship facilitator, and general helpmeet. While the relationship may start out with them being excited about how dynamic, motivated, challenging, and cosmopolitan you are, at some point the resentment builds that you don’t down-shift into becoming a facilitator for their life. It’s easier for a man to meet a (younger) woman who behaves like a more conventional woman than it is for him to adjust his expectations, work harder at things he isn’t used to working at, and live up to the values he talks but doesn’t walk.
Until THAT is addressed, this whole conversation feels somewhat analgous to me to addressing rape prevention measures to women (crappy metaphor but it’s all I’ve got). Women are being told how to change their expectations, romantically, professionally, and generatively, but while the system as it is still has tremendous buy-in from men, there’s no leverage with which to make any change for women seeking male partners.
As an experienced couple therapist, I can assure you, you are completely and utterly wrong about this, Robert.
Nope.
I have seen hundreds of couples, same-sex and opposite-sex, enter a relationship talking egalitarianism and equality and modern gender roles and etc. only for things to eventually turn very Ozzie and Harriet.
Selection bias. By definition, you’re getting the incompetent people. The ones who got it right don’t need you. And also, the people talking about what they’re going to do are worthless, and people who listen to promises are clueless. Observed behavior is the only worthwhile evidence.
I worked with one woman (as an individual) with an MA who had put a successful career on hold to be a full-time mother because her husband talked “shared parenting”…
OK. So he was a liar, and she was bad at detecting lies, at establishing boundaries, and requiring compliance to agreed-upon terms. They were incompetent in their relationship (her at doing her due diligence, him at being a decent human being). And?
As a woman with a terminal degree and a modestly-successful professional career, this entire discussion is immensely painful for me (seriously, I haven’t been able to read more than a few comments without bursting into tears)
This I am sorry for.
I have found that most men do not want to marry UP (or even ACROSS)…
What are you bidding to incentivize them to behave as you would prefer?
to lose interest in a relationship in which the woman does not eventually shift into the role of nurturer, emotional care-taker, domestic worker, relationship facilitator, and general helpmeet.
Only one of those five elements are primarily about the division of physical labor. Given the resonance of the other four, I wonder just how important the “domestic worker” part is. I don’t really see the point vis a vis the other four; yeah, these are the things that (many/most) men want from their relationship with a woman, regardless of the distribution of labor in the household. (And they’re largely mirrored in what many/most women want.)
Women are being told how to change their expectations, romantically, professionally, and generatively, but while the system as it is still has tremendous buy-in from men, there’s no leverage with which to make any change for women seeking male partners.
Well, I think the amount of buy-in from men is overestimated, and dwindling. But leaving that aside, what do you mean there’s no leverage? You just listed the elements of leverage that the men are looking for: the things women have/can provide that men desire. Only one of them involves who takes care of the nappies – and from this man’s perspective, that’s the least important of the five you listed (and the one that can be most easily outsourced to a paid worker, too).
If you want a man who will take care of the children, then the way to get that is to find a man broadly willing to do it – there are lots of those – and find out what you need to bring to the table in order to secure his labor. There are a lot of things that could go into that last term, but you’ve listed some of the most important ones, and they aren’t, by and large, things that get in the way of a career by throwing huge spikes into (real or perceived) work productivity. Do you have to stop seeing clients if you spent part of the previous night telling your man how awesome he is?
What it sounds like is that you want a man who will take care of the children and who doesn’t need you to do the things that most men want out of a relationship, and in fact will take on those primary emotional jobs himself. That’s a much bigger stretch than just an egalitarian division of the household labors.
If I were a single guy again, I think the analogy is:
me looking for a wife who is going to hold down a job and be a financial contributor to the family, while I also work and do the same thing and us splitting the other forms of work/childcare/etc,
versus:
me looking for a wife who will work outside the home and earn a living AND be the primary emotional breadwinner AND do all the housework, while I sit at home and play video games.
Scenario A is reasonably plausible. Scenario B requires me to have Brad Pitt’s looks and George Clooney’s money and SNAG+ relationship skills, for me to lure/sucker/incentivize a woman into the arrangement. It’s not impossible, but it’s hardly going to be the norm. It sounds to me like you’re looking for something pretty far off the norm, and that you’re taking a whole host of things that a male partner brings to a relationship as being things you’re just entitled to, rather than things you have to bid for.
Homogamy is a cruel mistress but her terms are not usually irrational.
Left this part out:
It’s easier for a man to meet a (younger) woman who behaves like a more conventional woman than it is for him to adjust his expectations, work harder at things he isn’t used to working at, and live up to the values he talks but doesn’t walk.
You’re right, it is. Therefore, as the person who wants him to adjust his behavior to suit your preferences and needs, it’s up to you to come up with reasons for him to do so.
Flipping it around to me and my hypothetical search for a young childbearing wife: It’s easier for a young, attractive woman to meet a man closer to her own age who behaves like a young stud, than it is for her to adjust her expectations (kids? now?), work harder at things she isn’t used to working at (changing diapers? I’d really rather hit the dance floor), etc. So if I wanted that, I would have to bring a lot extra to the table vis a vis the young studs. I need to be a nicer person, or a more skilled lover, or wealthier, or in better shape, or a more fulfilled (and thus fulfilling) person, or SOMETHING – there are a lot of somethings it can be, but these other guys are my competition for the affections of Lady Hypothetica, and I have to bring more than they do.
And? This is terribly unfair? This is a sexist world? No, this is me wanting something valuable (a relationship that meets my needs) and having to extra work to get it versus something less valuable (a relationship that doesn’t).
Elusis:
Robert:
It’s clear what Elusis’ qualifications are that she speaks authoritatively on issues of marriage. She’s observed a broad swath of them, interacted with them professionally, and been trained on how to deal with them.
What are your qualifications, Robert, so that you can shrug them off with a ‘nope’?
—Myca
Knowing how selection bias works, for starters.
“Most people in the world have perfectly functional kidneys.”
“That’s not true! I’m a world-renowned nephrologist and every day I see dozens of people whose kidneys are in horrible shape!”
My point in stressing competence is not to put down the women (and men) who find themselves in relationships where a miscommunication has damaged the prospect of a successful marriage/LTR; that sucks as a situation and those folks have my sympathy.
But if we’re analyzing what people can expect to get out of relationships and the social intricacies thereof, people who are fucking up on the fundamentals like “know who your partner is before you start pumping out babies together” are going to be bad examples to use.
“What are your qualifications, Robert, so that you can shrug them off with a ‘nope’?”
Robert clarified completely. In no way did he disrespect the Elusis’ position as a therapist. Rather he rightly pointed out that Elusis’ examples are based on people who were already having trouble. Robert’s original statement was:
“There are no competent people getting married who do not have at least a fair estimate of their partner’s attitude towards the division of domestic labor.”
Elusis response was:
“As an experienced couple therapist, I can assure you, you are completely and utterly wrong about this, Robert.”
Had Robert said that “There are no people getting married who do not have at least a fair estimate of their partner’s attitude towards the division of domestic labor,” then Elusis’ statement that he was wrong would have been correct. The adjective “competent” is vital to an accurate understanding of what Robert said.
The facts are that most of us enter into LTRs of any sort, completely untrained. Factually speaking we’re not really competent. We either ignore warning signals, are are simply unaware that something is a warning signal. Additionally we often expect that others think and feel the way we think and feel. So when someone is hurt by something we’re not hurt by, or is not bothered by something we are bothered by, it often comes as a bit of a surprise.
In Elusis’ example couple, wherein the man promised to share the work load up until a month before the birth of their child, Robert’s analysis was:
“OK. So he was a liar, and she was bad at detecting lies, at establishing boundaries, and requiring compliance to agreed-upon terms. They were incompetent in their relationship (her at doing her due diligence, him at being a decent human being). And?”
Frankly, this is most likely true.
“In therapy” does not equal “incompetent,” and thanks for the ableism inherent in saying so (all kinds of things bring people to therapy – grief and loss, trauma, organic mental health, management of medical issues, infertility, child problems, parenting problems, extended family issues, etc.). A couple therapist does not only see couples who are having marriage problems, nor do all marriage problems present in the same way across all couples and all domains.
Also “thinking you wanted your life to be one way and finding that in practice, you prefer another way” is not “incompetent,” given that growth and development is a lifelong activity, and our beliefs and preferences are constantly shifting with our context. Nor is “not being psychic” the equivalent of “incompetent.”
The rest of the condescension Robert has added on is just proving the point of the original cartoon. Women are shafted by sexism and our choices are inherently false choices, because we’re trying to shift the status quo with the short end of the lever. Attempts to reduce the conversation to “changing nappies” or asking insulting questions like “what are you offering to induce change?” is just minimizing the value of women’s unacknowledged, uncompenseated, unappreciated labor, physical AND psychological/emotional (which has been well-documented by 40+ years of research on gender roles in marriage) while simultaneously suggesting that while that infamous MRA shibboleth, success, is really really hard and it’s just terrible that men have to strive for it to have a hope of mating, women who are successful STILL NEED TO DO SOMETHING MORE because it’s just not “good enough.”
And the very definition of sexism is having to do more than a man would in the same circumstances to get anything like similar results. And yet, research shows that the more years of graduate school a woman has, the less likely she is to be married and have children, so there’s no clear idea whether there’s actually anything at all that women can do about the fact that most men turn out to want a little woman at home, even the enlightened ones.
There’s a nice bit of circular logic in Robert’s argument. “Competent people don’t have this problem” and “people who have this problem aren’t competent.” It makes whatever he defines as “competency” a pretty useless measure of whether people’s marriages are likely to turn out as they planned.
“In therapy” does not equal “incompetent”
No, you are right that it doesn’t. My apologies for painting with too broad a brush. But, “not knowing what my partner wants in marriage and not knowing whether I can trust their word when they say they want [x]”…I’m sorry, that is relational incompetence.
People who develop and change…well, that is a difficult case, but it’s also, I’m suspecting, a relatively rare case, where the change just happens to fall in the nine-month period between deciding to have a child (or oopsing into one) and the time for child-rearing to begin.
Women are shafted by sexism and our choices are inherently false choices, because we’re trying to shift the status quo with the short end of the lever.
My suggestion is not that women don’t have the short end of the lever when it comes to shifting the status quo; I’d say that’s a fair description of reality. My suggestion is that some women are trying to shift the status quo (a near-impossibility) instead of shifting their own situation and environment (which is well within their agency).
Attempts to reduce the conversation to “changing nappies” or asking insulting questions like “what are you offering to induce change?” is just minimizing the value…
It’s not an insulting question. That you find it insulting to me indicates that you ARE working from a place of entitlement, where the very idea that you’d be expected to contribute something of value in a relationship is an insult.
of women’s unacknowledged, uncompenseated, unappreciated labor
But that’s the labor that presumably, you don’t want to do – or at least, you said that relationships have foundered on your unwillingness to do it. So not only are you entitled to the level where questioning whether you do the work is an insult, you’re entitled to the point that you think you deserve credit for the work you yourself say you don’t do.
while simultaneously suggesting that while that infamous MRA shibboleth, success, is really really hard and it’s just terrible that men have to strive for it to have a hope of mating…
But that is the exact opposite of what I’ve suggested. I suggest that both men and women have to put in a lot of work to get what they want, and that a portion – not the entirety – of women’s unhappiness with the balance of labor in the relationship comes from a feeling of entitlement on their part that they don’t have to put in that work, or that they should get credit for the work (in terms of the kind of man they can attract) even if they don’t do it.
I suggest that it is perfectly reasonable and rational for men to have to do a lot in order to get the kind of relationship that they want. I suggest that it is perfectly reasonable and rational for women to have to do a lot in order to get the kind of relationship that THEY want.
I don’t suggest that it’s terrible AT ALL. I suggest that both men and women are in the same boat and need to do much the same things in order to achieve success: bring stuff to the table. Pursue mates whose qualities, taken as a whole, are broadly equivalent to the qualities we bring to the relationship ourself. Acknowledge that the things we want are goods, that there is competition for mates, that we have to put in labor (of a lot of different types) in order to achieve the goals we want.
women who are successful STILL NEED TO DO SOMETHING MORE because it’s just not “good enough.”
Well? If I came in and said it was awful that a man who was successful still NEEDS TO DO SOMETHING MORE (like, be a kind and loyal partner, sometimes put his partner’s needs first, be honest or decent, etc.), would you not think this an outrageous case of give-me-a-cookie? “I’m successful, why do I need to do anything more???” Well, because being successful isn’t good enough.
And the very definition of sexism is having to do more than a man would in the same circumstances to get anything like similar results.
I quite agree.
so there’s no clear idea whether there’s actually anything at all that women can do about the fact that most men turn out to want a little woman at home, even the enlightened ones.
Women don’t need to do anything about what “most men turn out to want”, in order to find a man. They only need to find out what A man wants. You sound very, very much like an MRA/nice guy complainer, talking about how unfair it is that “women want this” and “women do that”. Instead of focusing on solving the soluble problem (“I’d like a partner”) you’re focusing on the whole entire world (“I’d like to fix the male gender so that they behave how I want them to behave and want what I want them to want.”)
Maybe 95% of men do want a “little woman” at home. Well? That gives you two rational choices:
1) Be a “little woman” and draw your mate pool from the 95%.
2) Start looking in the 5%.
Demanding that the 95% start acting like the 5%, is less rational, far less likely to succeed, and far less sympathetic.
We tell “6” nice guys “hey, if you want a relationship with a woman who appreciates your vast knowledge of Star Trek canon and D&D rules minutiae, then start hanging out with “6” women at science fiction and gaming conventions, instead of bitching that the hot “10” cheerleaders aren’t interested in what you’re an expert in. Oh, there’s only a few of those “6” women around? Well, I guess you better improve your presentation and improve what you bring to the table and be the guy that one of those women PICK then, shouldn’t you?”
I think the advice goes the other way too. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think holding men and women to the same standard is sexist.
It seems to me that what Robert and others on his side are saying in a very long-winded way: direct discrimination is bad, but there’s no such thing as indirect, institutional or social discrimination. That’s a faith-based position, but one I can work with. It does explain a lot about a typical mode for arguments on Alas: someone reports a racist or sexist incident, and several of the more right-leaning commenters go to great lengths to postulate circumstances where it might possibly not be racist or sexist or etc. And more left-leaning commenters, who are aware of the evidence that society actually effects people, get very frustrated.
I read a very interesting critique recently, addressing the problems with treating relationships as economic models. It’s a critique of Dan Savage from a Christian perspective, so hopefully it is framed in a way that will appeal to people who aren’t necessarily receptive to liberal politics.
Robert,
Men and women both show a gap between “what they want” and “what they have now.”
The existence of a gap is itself meaningless. It’s the relative size of the gap that matters. And the gap is larger for women.
This is unsurprising. Historically, many men who said “I don’t want what I have” have been told “well, go get what you want!”
Historically, many women who said “I don’t want what I have” have been told “shut the fuck up and deal.”
Not only does the present mirror history to some degree (though things are certainly much better now than they were 100 years ago) but history has changed the baseline for both sexes.
So: are men forced to sacrifice? Yes. I sacrifice all the time to get what I want, in relationships. But as a functional matter women who want what men want are forced to sacrifice more.
No, individewal, there’s plenty of indirect and institutional discrimination. That’s just not what the domestic-labor gap is about.
G&W – the size of the gap is not necessarily evidence of anything. Maybe women just want more than men do while doing the same amount to get it; ergo, larger gap but not evidence of discrimination. What’s material is the amount of gap closed per unit of effort expended. I’ve seen no evidence that there is a gender-based difference in that measurement.
“”In therapy” does not equal “incompetent,” and thanks for the ableism inherent in saying so (all kinds of things bring people to therapy – grief and loss,…”
I’ll address the false claim of ableism first. My comment was: “The facts are that most of us enter into LTRs of any sort, completely untrained. Factually speaking we’re not really competent.”
Elusis ignored the fact that I used the words *us* and *we’re* indicating that I include myself among those that are not really competent and thus those that are incompetent in [at least one part] of our relationships. In my particular case, my incompetence has been in my failure to recognize that potential partners do not view household cleanliness and organization as important as I do and in recognizing they desired sex FAR more than I do. As I mentioned in my post, there were signs. In fact, signs in every single case, signs I missed or ignored due to my incompetence.
It is no more ableist of me to state that I have been incompetent in this area of life than it is for me to state I am incompetent to fly a plane or lead a nation. I have been trained for neither of these. As I stated in my original post, I, as most of us, entered my relationships untrained. This is what led to my incompetence. Stating the fact that I need counseling because of my incompetence is in no way ableist.
However, having said that, I can understand how some people, Elusis included, would view my stating such about myself, as a sort of put down. I apologize that I did not choose a better word. One of the disabilities I have is that once I find a particular word to describe what I am trying to say, I become hyperfocused on that word. Unfortunately any word I subsitute is going to say and mean the same thing “I didn’t know how to do such and such because I was not taught to know how, and knowing how doesn’t come natural to me, so I need counseling.” In either case admiting my own disabilities, including my incompetence in recognizing traits in a partner, and thus my need for counseling, is not ableist of me. Rather, it empowers me to seek the help that I need. This is a GOOD thing. Seeking counseling is NOT a bad thing.
While it is true that people seek counseling for a variety of reasons, the anectdotal example Elusis gave, shored up Robert’s claim that both partners were acting in one respect without competency. This does not mean they were incompetent in other aspects of their lives or relationship, nor did he, or I even so much as imply. It doesn’t mean THEY are incompetent. Rather it means they are simply unable to see the warning signs for what they are.
If a certain degree of cleanliness is important to one of the partners in a relationship [like me], then that person needs to really verify that the other partner is capable of co-sharing that degree of cleanliness BEFORE having a child with them. (This assumes that not maintaining said degree of cleanliness together is a deal breaker or will lead to intolerable levels of strife). It is INCREDIBLY rare for a person to be able to fake a high level of cleanliness and orderliness for long periods of time. Being able to improve one’s competency in recognizing when a potential partner is capable of co-sharing in the domestic duties would do nothing but improve ones chances of weeding out potential mates that don’t meet one’s needs.
“A couple therapist does not only see couples who are having marriage problems, nor do all marriage problems present in the same way across all couples and all domains.”
No. But the example you gave, they were having marraige problems.
“Also “thinking you wanted your life to be one way and finding that in practice, you prefer another way” is not “incompetent,””
No it’s not incompetent. But again that’s not the anecdotal example you gave us.
The rest of Elusis’ comment was answered amazingly well by Robert.
“There’s a nice bit of circular logic in Robert’s argument. “Competent people don’t have this problem” and “people who have this problem aren’t competent.””
Competent pilots don’t have the problem of not being able to fly a well working plane. People who have the problem of not being able to fly a well working plane, are not competent pilots. You can define these statements as circular but they are not. They are simply facts.
“But, “not knowing what my partner wants in marriage and not knowing whether I can trust their word when they say they want [x]”…I’m sorry, that is relational incompetence.”
Precisely.
“It seems to me that what Robert and others on his side are saying in a very long-winded way: direct discrimination is bad, but there’s no such thing as indirect, institutional or social discrimination.”
Nope. You made that up.
Personal and societal descrimination does exist. However, our not liking another’s actions, does not automatically make those actions descriminatory. Frankly, it doesn’t even make those actions wrong. A man that doesn’t care about a house being cleaned to the degree his wife wants it cleaned, is not being sexist (or wrong) if she cleans it to her liking, without his help. Now, if he requires her to clean it to his liking, and she’s the one that doesn’t want it cleaned, well then maybe he is being sexist.
Now why can I say this? Because when the reverse is true, that is, I am man, want the house cleaned to a particular degree, but my female partners did not, it was not wrong on their part to not help me. It cannot be wrong in the case of the desires of one gender, but right in the case of the desires of the other gender.
chingona @ 11
I’ll confess that my first thought when I read this was, “Now there’s someone who doesn’t look after kids.” I see that I’m completely wrong about that, but I’m puzzled as to why you would bring this up. I doubt that, in a discussion of market labour, anyone would propose exempting the more enjoyable aspects of a job (e.g. we sent you to Asia last month, and then there’s all those times we had you entertain clients at upscale restaurants, so we’re not going to count that time as work, and your salary actually works out to $300/ hour, not $100). This sort of questioning (is it really work?) strikes me as a devaluation of women’s labour, suggesting it’s something women should be glad to do for free and eschew any recognition for doing. But maybe I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying, as it seems out of character with the rest of your (excellent) comments.
BTW, if we were to exclude tasks such as reading bedtime stories, it would increase the unpaid work gap between men and women:
International Comparison of Gender and Unpaid Labor
Mothers
Physical care and supervision of child 60%
Educational and recreational care 27%
Transporting a child 13%
Fathers
Physical care and supervision of child 45%
Educational and recreational care 41%
Transporting a child 14%
gin-and-whiskey @ 61
Re: the feedback loop
The most promising initiative I’ve come across is Sweden’s parental leave. It seems to have had some success in breaking people out of the “raising children is for women” mindset:
Ahh.
To use a race analogy, this is like distinguishing between AA work and anti-racism work. The former addresses any gap caused by historical problems (how you got here), while the latter addresses any disparities which unequally affect people’s movement (where you’re going.)
To some degree your confusion makes sense. There isn’t as clear a split when it comes to sexism; both “now” and “future” get addressed in the same way.
But are you saying that you don’t care about the gap (which you are, if you mean that “the size of the gap is not necessarily evidence of anything?”)
“his sort of questioning (is it really work?) strikes me as a devaluation of women’s labour”
I don’t know that I agree the question itself is a devaluation of any parent’s work. Indeed I think parents will all answer differently. If one parent says, “no it’s not work” that doesn’t mean it isn’t work for other parents. A person who has no experience raising children, might errantly view it differently.
So is watching a movie at night with your children work? Is going to the company picnic work? How about going to the pub after work with fellow employees or customers? Taking a client out to lunch?
I think the real answer to these is, yes and no. It is entirely dependent on the circumstances and the persons involved. As someone who nannied his nieces and nephews for years, I’d say, watching TV with them was in fact work some of the time. Other times it gave me a nice break from the hectic pace children have. As someone who is running a startup now, some of the time going out to lunch with my partners is not work. Other times, especially when I have a full schedule elsewhere, it is work.
But I solve all of it by not allowing someone the ability to devalue my work. THEY can define me any way they choose. That doesn’t mean their definitions are correct.
But are you saying that you don’t care about the gap (which you are, if you mean that “the size of the gap is not necessarily evidence of anything?”)
Not following any part of your comment, but this part especially. I’m not talking about the wage gap here, but rather the gap in relationships between “what I’ve got” and “what I want”.
“To use a race analogy, this is like distinguishing between AA work and anti-racism work.”
This is a poor analogy. Most analogies frankly are poor, it’s why analogies are anathema to critical thinking arguments. Relationships and division of domestic labor face an entirely different set of circumstances and problems from employed work.
But are you saying that you don’t care about the gap (which you are, if you mean that “the size of the gap is not necessarily evidence of anything?”)
Correlation does not equal causation. I think Robert’s advice to verify that you WONT have the gap if having that gap is a problem for you, is evidence that he does care about the gap, at least for those that also care about it themselves. Myself, I’ll state plainly “that the size of the gap is not necessarily evidence of anything.” This doesn’t mean that I personally don’t care about the gap.
In fact, my not *automatically* accepting the claimed causes that are handed to me, means that I am free to explore the truth. Is the gap because of sexism? Is it because of partner prefence? Is it because one partner works more out of the home? Is it because one has religious preferences? Is it because of….? When we always only accept one cause, and only one cause, we shut ourselves down to the possibility of solving a problem, IF there are indeed other causes.
@88
I was talking not about the answers to the questions, but the act of questioning.
@ rain … I make that distinction because I’m not willing to reduce my children to a job description. Yes, they are a ton of work, and even many of the fun things take up time that I could be using to do things that would be more personally enjoyable to me. But they are also people with whom I am in a relationship, people I chose to bring into a relationship with me, part of my family, etc., and I’m simply not willing to say that every second I spend in their company should be tallied up as work. This might be terribly sentimental of me, but there you have it.
And given that men usually do more of that type of childcare, I would say that questioning how much of it should be considered work would devalue men’s contributions more than it devalues women’s. If a father is trying to count a half hour spent at the park as equivalent to the half hour the mother spent cleaning up projectile vomit, that devalues women’s work!
My intent, though, wasn’t to devalue anybody’s contribution so much as to point out that how this gets divvied up can have a big impact on how people feel about the overall division of labor, in part because a lot of child care is work, but doesn’t get counted that way, and in part because even enjoyable time spent with your children can leave you with a lot less energy to tackle other tasks and more resentment about the division of labor. I think at that point I was responding to Robert’s study that showed a roughly equal total amount of work in the day for men and women, and it wasn’t clear to me how they accounted for child care.
Men and women are different. They’re built differently and they’re wired differently. The most obvious difference leads to a new life growing inside a woman’s body for 9 months, changing her body, and then bringing it forth in pain and effort. Followed by feeding that new life directly from one’s own body for a period longer (something that a woman can avoid if she wishes, but that’s the way women are built). Men don’t have that experience. Women are to that extent undeniably born to nuture, whereas men are not.
Feminists are well aware of how babies are made. Many of us have even made them.
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Feminists are well aware of how babies are made. Many of us have even made them.
And yet they seem to fail to think through the implications. Rain cites studies of “unpaid labor” (as if caring for one’s own child is comparable to employment somehow) and then links to a study on Sweden’s parental leave policy, a government-enforced requirement for businesses to grant men and women parental leave. Why? Certainly there is an imbalance of how men and women deal with the tasks of child care. There’s an imbalance of how men and women deal with various tasks. Who put together the new crib when we bought it? Not my wife. Who was outside for hours skinning and cooking their hands on a car engine removing and replacing the thermostat so that we could get the car running again? Not my wife. Do we need government intervention to make sure that this kind of labor is split 50:50 among the sexes?
Why is it desirable to change the current conventional roles regarding the effort behind raising children?
Why is it desirable, or proper, for the government to intervene to bring this about?
“I was talking not about the answers to the questions, but the act of questioning.”
Yes, that’s what I assumed. And I don’t believe that the mere act of asking that question, is devaluing my work.
“I’m simply not willing to say that every second I spend in their company should be tallied up as work. This might be terribly sentimental of me, but there you have it.”
Agreed. And frankly it’s not much different from any relationship. We’ve been told that it takes effort to make a relationship work, well it does. But I would be loathe to calculate my hours spent doing relationship things with my partners as work.
“I think at that point I was responding to Robert’s study that showed a roughly equal total amount of work in the day for men and women, and it wasn’t clear to me how they accounted for child care.”
Which I think is the case whenever they calculate how much time is spent in child care by men. Quite a bit of it is dimissed, even by the men themselves. My brother in law would often be the one cleaning up the projectile vomit, even with my sister’s kids that he did not father. But he would also take the kids out doing things in the garden so that my sister could rest or watch them when she went out. Yet, he was told often enough that he wasn’t contributing to child care that even he came to believe it. I’ve seen this sort of situation occur often enough that I no longer *automatically* believe that men perform less of the child care than women. I don’t automatically DISBELIEVE it either.
“Feminists are well aware of how babies are made. Many of us have even made them.”
Right. But a great many feminists deny that the physical differences ever account for and even deny any emotional or mental differences between the sexes.
“Do we need government intervention to make sure that this kind of labor is split 50:50 among the sexes?”
Some would like that.
“Why is it desirable, or proper, for the government to intervene to bring this about?”
Because other people in their relationships make choices that we would not make in our relationships. Since they could not possibly really want to make such decisions, we must force them to make the same decisions we would make. (Even when we’re not actually making the decisions we claim we would make
See, that really goes to show: You married the wrong wife. For me, at least. With some few exceptions my wife can do everything I can do, and vice versa. As her father (from whom she learned) would say, “always marry someone who can change their own oil.” I’m glad she taught me before we got married.
She ALSO happens to be nurturing. And awesome. And, OK, I’m a better carpenter than she is. But the fact that your wife can’t fix a thermostat has everything to do with your choices, and nothing to do with her gender.
@ Ron … Feminists don’t fail to think through the implications. We disagree about the implications.
You don’t work on your family’s car because you’re a man. You work on it because you know about cars. My husband doesn’t work on the car because he doesn’t really know anything about cars. He’s still a man. (Never fear, he has plenty of other manly skills.)
I’ll answer your anecdote with an anecdote. When I had my son, my husband was in grad school. I needed to go back to work early because I was our sole source of income, other than student loans and a 10-hour a week work-study job. However, he was able to arrange his schedule to be home three days a week with our son.
This was our first child, and neither one of us had spent much time with babies before. I remember, around maybe 4 weeks, commenting to my husband about the difference between the hungry cry and the tired cry. He had no idea what I was talking about. After about two weeks of being by himself with the baby all day, three days a week, he knew exactly what I was talking about.
I didn’t pick up on our son’s cues first because I am a nurturing womanly woman (though I am). I picked up on them first because I was spending more time alone with him. When my husband started spending time alone with him (without me around to “mommy-block” him), he picked up on it too. That has formed the basis of a relatively (not exactly 50/50 but maybe 60/40) egalitarian shared parenting experience. I see so many couples where the dad is fine to play with the baby, but as soon as it starts crying, it’s right back to mom. And that sets the stage for mom to be indispensable to the kids in a way that dad is not. If the kid is sick, it HAS to be mom who stays home, rather than deciding based on what each person’s day at work looks like, because dad just doesn’t know what to do.
And all these little inequalities start to multiply. If the couple stays together until one of them expires of old age and they’re both happy with the arrangement, maybe it doesn’t make that much difference. But when we see statistics about how divorce frequently sends women into poverty, well, this is one of the reasons.
Should government intervene in this? Is the Swedish example outrageous social engineering? According to the article, Swedish law seems to allocate leave for new parents on a family basis. At least two months are reserved for the man. It doesn’t sound like men are actually required to take it, but it isn’t available to the woman. Well, in that one respect, our law isn’t that different. FMLA leave is equally available to men and women, but if a man doesn’t take his, it’s not then available to his wife. So, their outrageous Scandinavian social engineering is that they build in a use-it-or-lose-it incentive for men to spend a little bit of time with their new babies. That incentive makes it normal for men to take off, so instead of worrying about the stigma, male workers assume they’ll take off. Any man who feels his manliness is reduced by spending time with his newborn child doesn’t have to take the leave. His wife will have the same 11 months either way. I have a hard time getting too worked up about that as a gross imposition on people’s family arrangements.
I agree with Chingona @97. My wife is the carpenter/mechanic/trade competent one in our family.
“See, that really goes to show: You married the wrong wife. For me, at least.”
Not really. If he is fine being the one putting together the grib, fixing the thermostat, working on the car, and she is fine performing other domestic duties (because all of these ARE domestic duties), then, at least in regards to work division, he made the right choice. Since you value a woman that can do everything you can do, then she might be the wrong wife for you. In my case, I care less whether my partner can do everything I can do, or I everything he or she can do, because I don’t believe thats truly realistic to expect. Some of the things I can do I’ve been learning for years. I’d rather have a balance where we can help each other. But again, that doesn’t fit your sit-ee-ation.
“But the fact that your wife can’t fix a thermostat has everything to do with your choices, and nothing to do with her gender.”
Of course it does. I don’t think any of us are claiming that men cannot do house cleaning or that women cannot fix cars (or that either prefers to do either). Rather, we’re saying that a majority of one or the other tend to prefer conditions in one way or another. A wife might not like housework, but she has a cleaning preference that is more strict than her husband’s, so more of that work falls to her. A husband might not like working on cars, but has a preference of how the car runs, so that work falls to him. (In my case I should note that most of these are reversed and if I am with a woman, she’s more likely to be working on the car than me.)
“You don’t work on your family’s car because you’re a man. You work on it because you know about cars.”
True. But it is also true that more men tend to know about cars than women. This might be because of sexism, but I really doubt it anymore. There are so many educational resources open to us all regardless of sex or gender, especially thanks to the internet, that if someone doesn’t know how to fix cars, they are as much to blame as anyone. I say this as someone who doesn’t really know how to fix cars (in most cases).
“My husband doesn’t work on the car because he doesn’t really know anything about cars. He’s still a man. (Never fear, he has plenty of other manly skills.)”
What makes him a man is his self identification as such. I hope when you say plenty of other manly skills you include such things as changing diapers, house cleaning, babysitting, and others. The idea that one action or another is manly while something else is not, is an idea whose time has come and gone. I rarely know men that think such and such is manly, but I often meet self identified feminists that claim that’s what we men think. Not a single man EVER gave me ANY flack for being a nanny. But lots of women did, especially and including those that claimed they were feminists.
“I didn’t pick up on our son’s cues first because I am a nurturing womanly woman (though I am). I picked up on them first because I was spending more time alone with him.”
Agreed. But there are nurturing *skills* and nurturing *desires*. Those that desire to nurture are more likely to learn those skills, because they will be doing the nurturing. However, based also on my anecdotal experience, I’ve never really seen a difference in nurturing desire or skills between men and women.
“I see so many couples where the dad is fine to play with the baby, but as soon as it starts crying, it’s right back to mom.”
I don’t doubt your experience or the experience of many women. It’s just that my experience has been overwhelming different. When it is that “it’s right back to mom” it’s because she comes up and takes the child, when the dad is perfectly willing to care for the crying infant. In the case of my family, we learned that a certain cry meant that my neices or nephews wanted me, or their mother, or their father. So that’s typically who took the child when she or he was crying.
“But when we see statistics about how divorce frequently sends women into poverty, well, this is one of the reasons.”
Right. And one of the solutions here is shared custody. Too often women seek full custody and then do what they can to keep dad out of the picture. If we want fathers to contribute more than money, we have to allow them to contribute more. This does not solve the sit-ee-ation of those fathers that won’t contribute more than money, but those that will, we need to let do so.
” It doesn’t sound like men are actually required to take it, but it isn’t available to the woman.”
The comment about Swedish law said that they ARE required to take it. If they don’t, then other government benefits are stripped from the family.
“So, their outrageous Scandinavian social engineering is that they build in a use-it-or-lose-it incentive for men to spend a little bit of time with their new babies”
Which sounds great. It might even be great. Are the parents paid during their leave? If not then how do they make their bills? Even if they are paid, what happens when the work that only they can do at their job doesn’t get done because they are on leave? Sometimes a two month hiatus can bring a business to a financial halt, and send customers to the competitors.
“Any man who feels his manliness is reduced by spending time with his newborn child doesn’t have to take the leave. … I have a hard time getting too worked up about that as a gross imposition on people’s family arrangements.”
This is a classist statement which ignores nuances that vary from family to family and job to job. Maybe he’s not taking the leave out of a fear of not being manly, but because other circumstances prevail upon him not to take it. Reducing his avoidance of leave to soley “he’s avoiding it because it’s not manly” hardly solves the sit-ee-ation.
“I agree with Chingona @97. My wife is the carpenter/mechanic/trade competent one in our family.”
I tend to be the carpenter, and any partners would tend to need to be the mechanics if we were to DIY our car repairs. However, taht doesn’t change the fact that the sheer overwhelming numbers support the statement of the original commenter.