A new post at Big Other, where I’ve recently joined as a blogger:
Over on his own blog, Jeff Vandermeer adds another dimension to the conversation by adding that women face particular challenges toward establishing a home life that will facilitate their writing careers. One difficulty is what feminists often call the second shift, wherein working wives and mothers put in a full day at the office and then come home to put in a second shift doing chores at home. Data suggests that women tend to spend a lot more time on this than men do, even in households where partners report they have an equal division of labor. Even if labor is divided equally, women are more likely to be held responsible for an unclean house, and so they’re often under more pressure.
…There are any number of ways that systemic sexism interferes with women’s careers, but one of the most direct is time. Time spent on housework is time not spent on writing. Time spent on hair and clothes and makeup is time not spent on writing. If women put in more of this time (and overall in America, they do), then that’s fewer woman-hours that are available for writing stories. When we start to address unequal representation in magazines, it’s important to ask questions on the editorial level, the content level, the submissions level, and so on — but it’s also important to interrogate the gendered ways in which sexism blocks opportunities for writing to occur in the first place.
