An alternative argument for why women leave STEM
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It's worth taking a look at three other professions with long, high-intensity pathways from apprentice to master --all of which have been wrestling with the same challenges. They are management consulting, law and medicine. I've written about them elsewhere.
In medicine, there's been a surge of female participation (and leadership) in specialties such as dermatology, psychiatry and radiology, where it's relatively easier to rearrange hours and training regimens to be family compatible. There's been less progress in surgery, where hellish hours are considered part of the journey.
In law, some firms have been experimenting with a blurring of the boundaries between associate and partner, so that there's a middle level at which women can enter into motherhood without tanking their career chances. (In the traditional model, close to 40% of entry-level associates are female, but few of them stick around to make partner.)
I'm wondering if either of those models is transferable to STEM academia. Are there particular sub-disciplines where professional success and sane hours might be more compatible? Similarly, are there tenure-track or quasi-tenure track job titles that split the difference in tolerable ways?
I haven't researched these well enough to have clear answers. But it's worth discussing.
These statements couldn't be further from the truth. You don't need to hang out on HN for long to figure out that FAANG SWEs comfortably make upwards of 400k in their late 20s[1]. Barring FB and perhaps Netflix, most tech companies tend to have fantastic work-life-balance if you prefer to take it easy. L5s at Google make what Partners at McKinsey make. If you normalize by the number of hours worked, SWEs make a hell of a lot more than their peers in consulting (management or the Big4) and about the same as the median cardiologist with maybe 20% of the effort.
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/19ne7ccUdOWewD4rFDQjjnQEJDgs...
How much do you think the average phd in biology makes? maybe 30k/y till 27, then 45k/y till 30, then followed by 75-90?
I also think the remark about "stability" was hand wavy. What is it about non-SWE STEM roles that make them so unstable compared to consulting or law?
followed by 2-4 years at a postdoc, asked for in every job application for a 'biologist II' which has an average salary of ~77k (per indeed). This is for industry, not academia.
So how am I am misrepresenting the fact that being a biologist takes over 7+ years of being grossly underpaid relative to a SWE at FAANG to wind up being a little less grossly underpaid than a SWE at FAANG?
I do know a couple of friends that work at Genentech who comfortably pull in > 200k so there's that.
comp pretty much == salary (plus benefits, like insurance, 4% 401k match, maybe small bonuses). My take is that the low salaries is primarily due to the appeal of the work - kids grow up wanting to be biologists, (chemists, physicists) so there is a labor oversupply. A strong secondary contributor is overhead - a scientist can easily cost 2x salary in overhead for equipment and reagents (very field dependent).
To your point it is possible make decent money in big pharma, but they are essentially the FAANG of the bio/chemistry world and still come with 7y postgrad prereqs.
And, perceptional-wise, leaving for industry is often seen as a failure.
Bioinformatics is an entire field. The lines between molecular biology, genetics, physics, chemistry, statistics, and computer science are getting very blurry these days. Plenty of bio phds get hired for data scientist roles in industry.
No one is going to knock you for leaving for industry these days. Anyone who is a big deal enough in academia to have that kind of ego is already going to have started a company or three themselves on the side.
And as someone who works in the field, there's definitely a stigma against students not aiming for PI positions at R1 institutions. There's some practical reasons for that - students who go into industry are less useful for "empire building", but it's also cultural.
I'm lucky enough to be in a field where this isn't as true, but I'm faculty in a multidisciplinary center, and the closer you get to pure biology, the worse it gets.
The trick is to angle your skillset to the industry skill set, network network network, even collaborations with the company directly can happen when you are a grad student. When you show up to the interview and are recommended by the people you networked with and understand their technology since you've been all over it in grad school and have some papers published to prove it, suddenly you are the top candidate in the pile. It's not impossible to do this if you angle your grad career from the start, and go to a school in an area with a lot of these companies and other good research schools nearby.
Each of them is it's own world with it's own context and it's own problems.
I believe the "M" in STEM is Mathematics, not Medicine.
Law exhibits a bimodal distribution in compensation as well. Paralegals make even less than poorly compensated lawyers.
The article (and my experience) both deal with the "Science" part of STEM, and specifically in biology/biochemistry, and specifically in academia (professorships at universities in hard-science fields).
And defining those boundaries of discussion should be very much a starting point for any of these discussions.
As opposed to a physician, median salary almost double of a software engineer, and can live and work in much cheaper cities.
And considering how many tens of thousands of engineers the big tech companies have each, the top slice in our industry isn't that small.
Is an assistant professor different from a "full professor" in your usage here? I'm not sure how you define "paying well", but low six figures is significantly above average in the US (which is where I assume you're talking about, but also most likely above average pretty much everywhere else too).
1. Assistant Professor = no tenure, up or out after ~5 years.
2. Associate Professor = tenured, but still not "full"
3. Professor = tenured "full professor"
It’s a complicated issue, it needs to be tackled on many fronts. As men in the field we should advocate for those things Karen recommends, namely flexible hours, obscenely convenient high quality childcare, and other supports to make a career not the death of family.
Even if you disagree that there’s a problem here (and I think you’re wrong) how would these changes cause harm? Wouldn’t it just be a better world if people were less stressed by these things?
To sustain a healthy population, we used to need 10 children per fertile woman, which made "stay at home Mother" an obvious necessity for the vast majority of women. In modern times, we get by with 2 children per fertile woman, and that frees up a lot of female energy to be channeled elsewhere. It is high time to recognize that 2 children is still a lot of effort and make room for Mothers to take care of their own children.
Instead, we are soft forcing Mothers to drop their kids in the care of poorly paid strangers at the earliest convenience, to spend their full time energy enriching faceless shareholders. And have the gall to call this arrangement "female empowerment".
(I disagree with the thrust of the post and think that letting mothers participate in society outside home an important factor in female empowerment. But please let's talk about that, not haggle over definitions.)
Whoa, 50's regression much? Why not make room for fathers to take care of their own children?
> in the care of poorly paid strangers
Or you could leave your children in the care of educated professionals in child development, who will ensure your children gets age- and stage-appropriate stimulation, as well as socialization with other children in a safe environment, something that very neatly complements caring for children at home.
> And have the gall to call this arrangement "female empowerment".
Actual studies from countries that have a longer and better history of this than the US show that it does increase gender equality by quite a lot.
Nothing wrong with that, but mother goes first for obvious biological reasons.
This is certainly not going to be the norm.
Beyond that, there's also the matter of storage. Breastmilk is unpasteurized and needs to be refrigerated immediately for safety reasons. In an office, it can be as easy as putting the bottle in the fridge in the staff room. A fridge may not be available in other workplaces.
Still agree with the rest of your thoughts about other hurdles to overcome in the work place
that's ridiculous.
And I've personally seen plenty of women pump at work.
https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(1...
Unless you’d like to push them out of the workforce.
Whether this benefit is worth the great burden two years of breastfeeding imposes on women is, of course, debatable, and each woman should choose and not be questioned on their decision (as people often do). But sweeping the issue under the rug by denying the proven benefits of extended breastfeeding is not helpful.
(Not a knock on extended breastfeeding itself. I think mother and baby should breastfeed as long as it’s working for both of them - well into the toddler+ years if that’s what mom wants. But claiming unproven benefits is actively harmful to women.)
https://www.who.int/topics/breastfeeding/en/
>Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended up to 6 months of age, with continued breastfeeding along with appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age or beyond.
The mother can still go to work by using a breast pump to extract milk and leave it refrigerated or frozen, but the logistics are quite hellish and breast pumps not even always work.
All in all, and I say this as a parent that ideologically supports equality and believes that both parents should share parenting efforts equally... nature just doesn't work that way. At all. :(
Childbearing is of course not the only cost of having a child. Custody and parental leave just make it a bit less expensive (at least for some).
However, the initial investment is usually mostly by the mother. Other expenses come later. I think you could discuss who has the right to the kid if, say, the mother abandons it after birth and the father lovingly raises it for 10 years. I suppose that is also what happens in custody lawsuits?
I like this comparison, but only because I haven't found a better one yet:
Suppose you dream of sailing, and you start building a sailing boat. You work on it for a year, building the boat with your own hands.
The day the sailing boat is ready, your husband takes it from you, says "thank you, now you may go back to your normal career again", and sails off to unknown lands with your ship, while society applauds his sacrifice for the sake of your career.
That sounds wonderful, but it's economically impossible, except for the rich. The cost would be near or exceed what most people clear working a job.
In the US, sure, but there are other countries with other models...
Then we had twins.
There is a daycare just down the street that we looked into just for shits and giggles. A mere $550 / week if we wanted all three there full time.
That's a real big "hell no".
Women aren't born with innate genetic knowledge of how to prevent SIDS, it's taken generations of studies to figure out causes and develop working practices to counter it.
What is a "Mother"? Is it different from a "mother".
And I was a bit surprised by your conclusion - initially I thought you were going to argue that high-quality daycare, childcare, and maternity leave, are so valuable to society that they should be provided as a service by the government and/or guaranteed by law to be provided by employers.
It sounds like you are highlighting the contradiction between the fact that women are now increasingly expected and needed to do the job of full-time motherhood while also somehow, miraculously, contributing financially to the family through their careers. I agree that this places increased burden on women, and is due for a correction, both via new programs/regulation and a cultural awareness that this is being asked of them. Your point about raising children as 'unmonetized value' is something I think culturally we need to grapple with, much like we need to grapple with things like the externalities leading to climate change. We need to be able to price the value of child rearing into our capitalist society in a much better way, so women have clearer incentives and more freedom in choosing the path they take as they become parents, regardless of what path that is.
edit: I should state that while this article is about women and hence what I wrote above focused there, the same problems apply to men who want to allocate their time between parenting and their career. Society needs good parents, because we need good adults, and this value exchange is woefully un-accounted for in our current system. In practice, both parents suffer from having to make this trade-off, including those who have someone other than the mother take on a large part of childcare.
The internet can lose a lot in translation, and I think I was quite charitable with it, and only addressed the explicit parts.
Males also should equally share the burden here I must say, as more and more of us run away from life responsibilities. The 30 year old basement dweller meme is real.
Should we force Amanda to chose? How is that empowering?
There are also changed expectation, although presumably those can be managed. But once daycare is available, pressure can be on women to actually work. Where I live, you get strange looks if you don't give your kid to daycare from age one.
Apart from that it seems to me if somebody has a well paying career (like Amanda), they should be able to afford daycare anyway. If they don't, I'm not sure if society should pay for daycare just so that somebody can go to work to satisfy their ego (if their work yields less than the cost of daycare).
Unfortunately it seems to be fundamentally difficult to make both models of the family work equally well simultaneously.
Can you give me some examples? Not disagreeing, just would like to know.
I can see how there's a lot of benefits to society for men and women to receive equal amounts of esteem and respect for the work they do, but I'm not convinced it has to be the exact same work in the exact same proportions.
I think technological progress has freed women to do other things than, say washing clothes and other household chores.
That doing other things can of course benefit society, if they so chose. A washing machine saving 16 hours of labor per week can bring society a benefit of 16 work hours per week.
As for childcare, I am not sure I agree that organizing childcare so that fewer people can take care of the children is necessarily a benefit. It can be, but there seems to be a limit, too. For example few people would say "one person is enough to take care of 100 toddlers", which would free 99 people (mothers, mostly) to do other things than childcare.
Also, if we think in terms of "benefits to society", wouldn't there be other worthwhile targets? For example, what if instead of watching TV, people would do something useful for society? It would be a huge net benefit - so maybe we should outlaw TVs?
Meaning we neglect that people may have children because they like having them, not because they want to provide a service to society.
Given that, what’s a simple thing that we could do to make life better? Make it easier for people to cope with that. Good, easy childcare is one clear way to do it.
It’s also wrong to suggest this is a rich people problem. If anything the lack of childcare is an even more acute strain at the lower end of the wage scale.
Completely free childcare for everyone may be unworkable or undesirable for a variety of reasons, but it seems clear we can do a whole lot more, and we would benefit in the aggregate. Not the least of which because more people from different backgrounds in the workplace is a great way to build empathy and creativity.
Essentially, the going theory seems to be that society would be better of if it would delegate childcare to less people per child, contrary to the "traditional" one on one of mothers and their children. (Thinking about it, in the old days mothers had more children, so it was rarely one on one either).
Also, it seems to consider having children merely as a productive factor for society, rather than something people do for its own sake.
I like to compare children to Ferraris, as both are expensive (children probably even more so than Ferraris).
So in analogy, people like to buy Ferraris, but society would be better off if those Ferraris would be parked in somebody else's garage. Think about all the time people waste driving their Ferraris, which they could have otherwise put to productive use for the benefit of society.
And if you believe the feminist narrative that it is dads forcing mothers to take care of the kids, consider that most women chose their jobs and the expected salary long before they meet the future father of their kids. Man choose careers that pay less, so the fathers end up having to earn the money. Them staying at home would simply mean less money for the family, often not enough money.
However all of them experienced a lot of sexism from being a stay at home dad. So an alternative explanation to the skew between men and women at work could be that men face so much sexism at home so they have no other option than to just slave away for 40 years. The people I know were lucky to have a progressive wife with a high paying career and enough mental fortitude to shrug off the constant verbal jabs at you, most men are not that lucky.
A brand new account posting self-contradictory nonsense like For dads to step up, as feminists demand, mothers would have to give up that privilege. sounds like a troll to me.
I think the comment "no, you see, I can't possibly help you with this, because it's such a privilege for you." captured the contradiction pretty well.
(I "stepped up" and took time off when my child was born. It was both a privilege that I was able to do that, a burden that it needed to be done, and one of the hardest things I've done in my life. Trying to make it an identity labelled "feminist" move is insulting. I too experienced the sexism you referred to - I mean I bought dipers that say "only a mother knows" on them.)
It's not even a question of "I can't help you with that because of your privilege", it is that the question is not even the question.
Of course there are dads who wouldn't like to stay at home, or who don't even consider it because of societal traditions. Likewise mothers who don't want to stay home (less often). Overall, it is a question of money (privilege), and a private matter between the parents.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22080563
While women experience a "parent penalty", the one men would/do experience is much more severe because rather than being seen as necessary or expected, it is a character judgement: you chose to walk away and didn't have to so you have demonstrated you are wiling to be a traitor. (fair or not, this is the judgment).
If one is to advocate for men "stepping up", one must at least understand what they are asking.
"What, just step in front of the cavalry charge, they'll go around you don't worry you're just chicken hehe checkmate".
And while it might be unpopular to suggest this is so, I agree with the parent poster that the first thing that seems to get lost in these discussions is that taking care of children is not a burden. Work, yes, hard, yes, a burden? Only if you didn't want them in the first place. I say this as a father of 2 who sometimes sacrifices work to take care of my kids. It's a privilege the days I do so and I am currently undertaking a Herculean effort to modify the shape of my career and my income in order to do so more often because I love them and want them brought up right instead of leaving them in the hands of some daycare. Burden? WTF?
And it seems to be an absurd argument: "Caring for the children is a burden that holds back women therefore men should do it so women can work." Wait what? How does that fix anything?
This is why I largely stay out of these discussions. It seems to be impossible for them ultimately to be realized as nuanced. This problem is hard and a balanced, equitable solution is multifaceted. To state the solution as "well men should just...." in any context whatsoever does a disservice to the discussion.
For you to call that a feminist lie makes it sound more like you are trying to make this an ideological argument rather than anything based on experience. All your arguments are based on some strawman argument if feminism.
Why do you think mothers "less often" don't want to stay home?
Not sure if you are aware, but if you don't like them anymore, there are ways to get rid of them. You could send them to a boarding school (or at least to a school where they have to stay at school all day), hire a nanny, or give them up for adoption, for example. If your parents are still alive, you could ask them to take over, too.
As for feminism, the whole discussion only exists because of feminism. Therefore, yes, it is about feminism.
You are presenting an caricature of feminism, and that seems to be all you are able to argue against.
I read a study (from Rutgers I believe) about men who scale back on work to care for children. The conclusion was that while women are more likely to incur a “parent penalty”, this is partly explained by e fact that many men simply don’t scale back. The comparatively small number of men who do take time off or scale back to care for children face unusually severe career penalties for it. Some ideas explored were penalties for violating gender norms. Employers penalize women but in the end kind of expected this. When the men do it employers treat it as a kind of misrepresentation of intent and respond punitively.
I know a cite would be particularly helpful here, I’ll try to dig it up.
Society expectations evolve/change with economic and war conditions affecting a particular society at that time.
Those things, unfortunately, go in waves.
So we can pick different parts of history and we will likely see 'gender norms' are being adjusted for the particular environment at that time period.
On top, there are biological projections, and genetic predispositions that are projected on 'gender norms'.
Things that 'change less' are genetic traits and biological differences.
Combining economics/war conditions, with genetic traits + biological differences, creates a sort of 'superposition' that we are observing.
As a society, it makes sense to accommodate the desire of individuals, but not force people into particular choice.
Accommodating a variety of legal choices, is what we should be striving for, rather than trying to influence a particular path.
It is sort of like trying to introduce new type of species (animals or trees) into a new environment -- and expecting that we know about the ecosystem, to predict the effects of invasion.
Most of the time, with our current knowledge and prediction capabilities -- we fail.
---
Which is why, I think accommodating choices (and not predicting or promising outcomes) -- is what we should be doing.
The evidence suggests we don't actually need to parent so much.
Personally I see absolutely nothing wrong with sending kids to day care. We should focus on high quality family time, not high quantity. Unfortunately this view isn't acceptable in the age of helicopter parents.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...
This is analysis is just hard to believe. Between reading books, preparing food, driving to activities -- a full-time parent spends probably 4-5 full hours, except when another parent takes over or there is a continuous split.
The interrupt costs are also very high (and affect negatively ability to work).
Young children are information sponges. Think about how easy a 2-3 year old picks up language. It is not that hard to believe that 2-3 year olds also pick up behavioral patterns from their surroundings. For life. Do we want Mothers to shape their young children's behavioral patterns, or low paid child care workers with no skin in the game?
8 year olds? Send them to school with a key around the neck. They'll figure it out.
The math: 2-3 kids, spaced 2 years, up to 3-4 years old = a career break of 5-8 years. That ought become social norm and be encouraged.
Studies show that boys with working mothers are less sexist and have more positive relationships with woman in general. Picking up behavior patterns goes both ways.
I’ve also heard horror stories of private daycares from my friends who have lived in the US though. Particularly those studying so without particularly high incomes.
This is what a lot of wealthy people already do, because they can afford it due to one spouse's very high income, so the other spouse has a sort of vanity job (i.e. serving on the board of a charity).
But for the working and middle class, this is a bit of a pipe dream. Two people working are needed to pay the mortgage for the house that gets you the "good" public school.
Universal extended paid family leave and health care are a good way to encourage people to take time off to raise their young children. Many European countries do exactly that. I have friends in such countries who continued their academic careers part time while raising their children. It didn't hurt that they never worried about health care coverage for their families. It is a reason why European academics move back to their home countries after stints in the United States.
But things like that that will require raising taxes, and well, are we actually ready for that conversation?
Solving this by regressing to a society that discourages women from doing jobs outside the home is backward. Instead, change the system so that working parents have more freedom to make that choice to stay home with kids if they want to without imposing unreasonable struggle and risk upon their families, just like the wealthy have that option today.
While daycare workers may be underpaid, in many countries they work requires at least some education. They would also accumulate experience in proper child care the more years of experience they have in the profession. I.e. it is not a given that mothers are better than professionals in raising their own kids.
I'm willing to bet that there are plenty of childcare workers more passionate about raising children than the parents themselves.
Fwiw, in many societies retired grandparents raise the kids which has better alignment and allows parents to readily keep their jobs.
If you have ever cared for a less than a year old child, you will surely know that caring for six at the same time, and doing it well, is simply impossible. So most of the time they end up sticking them into "baby holding devices", largely ignoring them (as they have no time to pay attention to all the children), or what's worse, hypnotizing them with videos on a smartphone.
I don't blame the childcare workers, I would do the same (or worse) because it's physically not possible to do better with such numbers of children. I don't blame the childcare managers, childcare is already a significant expense for most parents and if they multiply the cost by 2 or 3 by hiring much more personnel, most parents just wouldn't be able to afford it. It's a problem that really needs either heavy public spending or societal change to fix.
As we're talking about stem mothers, I was thinking more of ratios I've seen in the SF for more affluent parents:
* Private nanny offering 1:1 time until kid is 2 or so (better option than daycare) or daycare with 1:3 ratio for infants
* Preschool for kids older than 2 with a 1:6 ratio.
My general read is that some childcare providers can outperform some parents. Yes, it's not their kid, but the higher passion for education can more than outweigh that.
It's high time that fathers start putting in some more work in that department too. Sweden has 480 days of paid parental leave, and each parent has exclusive right to 90 of those days. Have fathers spend some time raising their kids instead of just letting their wives do it and you'll see that things should get better.
1 in 7 children in America may not know where their next meal is coming from. Many children live in unsafe neighborhoods.
I think perhaps a better way of putting it is that men are primarily responsible for the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs while women are primarily responsible for the upper tiers. Obviously that doesn't mean a man can never change a diaper or a woman can never pay a bill.
There are very important emotional aspects to parenting that you people who constantly complain about feminism seem to completely ignore, I'd much rather have a father who's there and who I can spend time with than a father who's working two jobs because "more money earned == better parent".
Now try that if you are under the mean. Good luck. It is absolutely the case that SOMEONE has to pay the bills. If you are making 40-60k and alone you can live pretty ok, now try that with 3 kids.
Making so much money you can afford to relax, take time to hangout with kids, take them skiing, buy PC for them, take them travelling, feed them good food. Put them in school where they will make connections for the future. You will absolutely makes a better parent, period.
There are more effective ways to help poor people than special paternity clauses/bonuses etc.
The work of child care used to fall on the entire extended family. The nuclear family reduced the flexibility in raising children. It was further reduced by a lack of work-life balance for both fathers and mothers. When women started working (again) the lack of flexibility fell on the mothers to fix.
In my own life - I worked, my mother worked, my grandmothers worked, and my great grandmothers worked. I had flexibility through daycare, my awesome husband, my awesome mother, and my awesome employers. I know they are all awesome because when my daughter (a software engineer) faced the same issues, her employer was not at all flexible. She quit work to stay at home with her three boys. I have a bunch of engineering friends who faced the same issues as my daughter. I originally thought they left the workforce out of choice and now I know they did not.
You really need some data to back it up here. "I worked, my mother worked, my grandmothers worked, and my great grandmothers worked." is not good evidence. For one, there is a representative issue. For another, there is a huge difference between part-time work and full-time work. We don't know how many hours your mother, grandmothers, and great grandmothers worked, or worked for how many years.
Check data presented on this webpage: https://ourworldindata.org/female-labor-force-participation-... . Female labor participation rate has being increasing since 1900.
Apparently the data contradicted with your own personal experience. This is why we should try to avoid general argument based on our on personal experience.
I'm not sure what you think this proves. When the choice is "do something or starve" people do all sorts of things they would rather not do, from farming to prostitution to selling their children:
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/4-children-sale-1948/
There but for the grace of god went your mother.
Neither would have her husband been counted in the non-farm labour force survey. Thus swapping husband for wife would not have shown up as a change in the first place.
This is an interesting discussion. I remember my economists professor talking about how in Alberta during the 2006 boom labour force participation dropped as wages increased. In that case it was an example of the in-elasticity of labour demand.
From the social aspect it was an example of how for many families 2 working parents is not optional. A situation was fully true earlier in the industrial revolution. As the revolution progressed and labour had more negotiation power over capital real wages rose and duel working parents decreased.
Thus my pet theory is that the reduction in real wages is a non-trivial driving force for the current historic high labour force participation stats.
This varied from what we'd now call "housework" to "productive" labor on farms etc.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/weekly-hours-dedicated-to... shows how females use to work full time in the home (and as Hans Roslings' famous talk about the impact of the washing machine shows - this was hard, physical labor).
Your comment brought back those memories. I know an anecdote is not data but in my case (we're not American however) most women were expected to help out with the harvest and sowing. Children also helped out during harvest (some of my worst and best memories!). I also would say that at least in my region, some would help only seasonally in the farm. The rest of the year they're expected to be "managing the home" and any women that wanted to study would be met with very sexist attitudes and responses. Also worth mentioning that raising children does take a toll on you. If you think peasant women look bad because of hard work on a farm, it's probably not. Think hard work off the farm, combined with poverty, stress, anxiety, etc.
The historical norm of peasant societies is gendered work roles. Roughly speaking, the male works in the fields and the female works around the house / village. This pattern is even present across age groups, not uncommon to see 10 year boys herding the cows to pasture, and 10 year girls milking the cows at home. While I'm aware there are task and/or region and/or period specific exceptions, we're talking of the general pattern of [european] peasant societies here.
Women working away from their house and young children is the prevalent modern anomaly.
Working mothers is a modern anomaly.
Prior to industrialization, most women were home-makers.
And home-making was no slacking off either. Managing expenses, food (storage & cooking), raising children (feeding, teaching, playing), social bonding (neighbors, communities) etc. It kept their hands full.
Running an aristocratic, bourgeois or farming household is a full time job, just as much as being an office manager. Post WW2 mass affluence with lesser time demands for running a household due to domestic appliances and other convenience led quickly to women exiting full time household management and joining the labor market.
If by modern you mean common for the lower middle class in 1850 sure:
>And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the business of vicarious leisure, for the good name of the household and its master. In descending the social scale in any modern industrial community, the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the master of the household-disappears at a relatively high point. The head of the middle-class household has been reduced by economic circumstances to turn his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which often partake largely of the character of industry, as in the case of the ordinary business man of today. But the derivative fact-the vicarious leisure and consumption rendered by the wife, and the auxiliary vicarious performance of leisure by menials-remains in vogue as a conventionality which the demands of reputability will not suffer to be slighted. It is by no means an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work with the utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common sense of the time demands.
The majority of people at the time lived in rural Asia, so anything said about women in the anglosphere applies under 1% of the worlds population.
Traditional societies however had essentially no women working outside the house once they got married if they weren't destitute.
Flexibility to take time off with a short notice, office politics that does not induce constant stress and suspicion of being stabbed in the back.
And being around your young children (before 7 years old), most of the time they are awake.
Is there any evidence indicating that this is actually true? What makes you think that the existence of out-of-home childcare is forcing mothers to work? This seems backwards; I think it's much more likely that the existence of mothers who worked would lead to alternative childcare options being offered, not vice-versa.
The market rewards being above the mean, but otherwise works to make the mean cheaper. If a few % of people find a way to move above the mean, they reap great rewards - which encourages others to do the same; the mean starts to move up, and competitive pressure starts to push its value down. In the end, "the new way" becomes the default way, and initial rewards from doing it are erased.
Women working is a way of evening out the power imbalance that has led to suffering for women all over the world since the beginning of time.
When you have no economic power you are dependent on your husband which is why unpaid labor is so dangerous. The husband calls the shots. Not all husbands are good guys. It's only reasonable for women to want to reduce their exposure to this problem via things advocated for by feminists over time: birth control to avoid unwanted and forced pregnancies (far more common in the days of having 5+ children) and of course death during childbirth, literally their own income stream so they can pay for things a husband might not value equally: healthcare, tuition, clothes, and more, an income stream to enable a divorce should the husband be an abuser, problematic addict or worse...
in less shitty scenarios, the sudden death of a male partner can result in financial ruin for a family with a 'non-working' mother. Again, its economically reasonable for a woman to want to hedge against being stuck at 40 years old with no advanced skills in a career.
It's all about female empowerment.
Solving this supposed problem with “convenient” (aka tax-funded) childcare is a huge misapplication of resources from the perspective of the family. It benefits big business by increasing the labor supply and driving down wages. It benefits big government by adding taxpayers and creating a problem to be solved with more bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the family is trading the value of motherhood (an untaxed $160,000 according to the article) for an average 9-5 job in most cases, plus losing out on quality mother-child time. If a family really wants to make that trade then they can pay for it themselves, but it would be unconscionable to push people toward that outcome by subsidizing childcare.
I think where you find big gender gaps in career paths you are looking at awful jobs.
Flexible hours impose large costs in terms of increased difficulty of coordination and communication and if you’re really serious about them you need to completely upend the organizational structure, like changing an on premise company to a fully remote one. There’s also a hard upper limit on your career because managers are the bottleneck for communication so they almost have to be available when active else is. Arrangements to make flexibility economically profitable are also often denounced, see Uber.
> Even if you disagree that there’s a problem here (and I think you’re wrong) how would these changes cause harm? Wouldn’t it just be a better world if people were less stressed by these things?
It would be a better world but flexibility imposes large costs. Obscenely convenient childcare is also far from a panacea. Sweden has cheap to free childcare and it’s available 24/7 for those whose jobs demand it. But while Sweden’s employment rate is very high it’s among the most sex segregated in the world and fertility isn’t noticeably different from countries that aren’t so generous, suggesting the effects on family formation are minimal.
This flexibility and cost you are talking about is borne entirely by them as they rearrange their lives and attempt to make things work while men continue with barely any disruption.
I'm my opinion this is deep, unintentional, structural sexism. It is the biggest issue I have with articles like this.
Stamping out overt workplace harassment and sexism is barely the beginning. There are deep structures in place that have benefited men like me for millennia.
These need to be considered not as complicated side issues but as the core barrier to achieving equity (as opposed to equality) in these fields.
A 'career' is something pop singers and top athletes (male or female) have. They even have agents to manage those careers. But most people have a job; they do work, travail, tripalium.
The fact that people confuse the two is just capitalist propaganda.
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=travail
Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised, since English still has the word "travails".
"Work" on the other hand means action, doing:
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=work
That's quite a difference: one is something no one wants, and the other is something everyone does.
"Labor" falls on the "travail" side, meaning exertion, pain:
If the answer is no, then bigotry is at play. It's impossible to know this answer, so we should just make it painless to take time off. I know of plenty of academics who go on sabbatical, fall off the face of the earth, and ignore every department email for a year or however long. This process actually improves their career, not hinder it. Taking time off is harmless.
In Nordic countries (I live in Finland), which are quite well known for having good quality childcare available to all families at low cost, the situation has not increased placement of women in STEM professions.
In fact, quite the opposite: the more "gender-equal" a society, the fewer women study STEM subjects.
Possible reasons are considered in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...
I haven't researched these well enough to have clear answers. But it's worth discussing."
One of the easiest, and most important things, academia could do is make pausing tenure clocks have both less stigma and be easier to do. Like, automatically opt-in for both men and women.
Unfortunately, it's much harder to pause grants, which is its own problem.
Of counsel[1] isn’t an intermediate rank, it’s a recognition that you’re almost certain never to make partner but that you’re capable of working with close to zero supervision. Non-equity partners[2] are closer, given that in some firms at least they get both a voice and a vote on firm wide decisions.
In academia the equivalent to Of Counsel is probably either a post doc or a Visiting Assistant Professor, both of which are contingent positions, like being Of Counsel. The closest to non equity partner is tenure track teaching faculty, often called lecturers in the US, or maybe staff scientist, which is more or less being a post doc with job security.
These positions already exist but post docs, adjunct faculty and grad students are cheaper, so they’re comparatively rare.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_counsel
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partner_(business_rank)
In law firms, partners are primarily those senior lawyers who are responsible for generating the firm's revenue. The standards for equity partnership vary from firm to firm. Many law firms have a "two-tiered" partnership structure, in which some partners are designated as "salaried partners" or "non-equity" partners, and are allowed to use the "partner" title but do not share in profits. This position is often given to lawyers on track to become equity partners so that they can more easily generate business; it is typically a "probationary" status for associates (or former equity partners, who do not generate enough revenue to maintain equity partner status). The distinction between equity and non-equity partners is often internal to the firm and not disclosed to clients, although a typical equity partner could be compensated three times as much as a non-equity partner billing at the same hourly rate.
For an extreme example, just look at the AAA games industry.
Having said that, I think you could say the same about most industries unfortunately. I don't know if it's just because that's what competition forces us into, but I would guess that is a big part of it.
a) compensation is very high
b) hours of work cannot be 're-arranged' due to critical life-safety or court-rules.
I presume there are other professions that do not compensate that well, but have similar 'cannot move dates' constraints.
And it would be interesting to see women participation rates on those.
Perhaps this is a specific factor that has gone received proper attention in various analysis.
This is really a bad thing, because women are generally superior to men at tasks involving fine motor skills.
Unlike lower-skilled workers, the kind of person who even has the opportunity to get a PhD is also likely to have other good opportunities should they choose to take them. Academics should improve their lot and that of others by voting with their feet.
You do see the problem here, don't you?
It would result in more people going into successful careers in industry.
That's a good thing.
For a lot of people who head down that path, they consider it more of a vocation than a job. It may well be a good thing for all the next folks who consider the path, but it choosing that would come at a large personal cost for them.
Most folks are not that altruistic.
Every now and then I get an overwhelming sense of guilt when I talk to/think about my friends who are engaged in academia or pursuing advanced degrees (I'm 28, for reference).
The crazy workloads they have, the insane restrictions on how they can do their jobs, and the cut-throat nature of the industry means that they're working so much harder than I am, and are either doing their part to advance the grand sum of human knowledge, or are training to literally save peoples lives...and I'm sitting here, a college drop out, getting paid _way_ more than they're making, in an industry where I will never have any fears about job security, playing with networking equipment and writing about it.
That idea of being a comfortable tenured professor at a great school is a dream for many. And obviously, many don't make it, lot of folks are going to just drift around as adjunct professors, scraping by, taking second jobs. But as long as SOMEONE is getting to be a full professor at Stanford, lots of people are going to think, "that could be me", and get exploited along the way.
Arguably even the winners in academia don't make that much in terms of money but they're still viewed as successful professionals, have a decent lifestyle, and do OK--especially if they're not in the highest cost areas.
That guilt is proportional to the value you place on your work-time/daily output. The guilt will subside as your output importance does.
Also, the grass often appears greener, and many in academia are mired in its doldrums too.
Sounds like you're under 45
The first thing I thought as well. When you read all these horror stories about burned out phd students, why is anyone doing this?
If a woman in STEM wants to combine family and work (or a man or anyone else really) there are many jobs in the industry that are actually relatively 9-5, and pay really well.
I don't understand academia at all. It sounds like a combination of paperwork, flying to conferences, endless networking, publishing papers for publishing's sake. It's like a Kafka novel.
I think the joy of pure research is that you only have to engage in occasional bullshit academic politics and otherwise have a completely pure existence in a monastery of scientific spiritual ideological purity of sorts. This is probably why some of the most sought after jobs under communism were non-political professorships at Universities, like being a math professor. Many of the post-soviet oligarchs were professors at universities during the soviet union times.
Did not work out, since I now have an office, but at least I can show up at 2pm without being fired.
As an academic, your description is rather accurate regarding the research part of academia (you left out the teaching).
Some of us put up with all that because we love the science, the sense of discovery, of doing what no one has done before, advancing human knowledge, the feeling of working for public good and not for some profit-driven corporation. Flexible hours is also a plus (although also a double-edged sword).
(I confess I do like the "flying to conferences" part as well, though).
By advancing human knowledge you are arguably working for hundreds of profit-driven corporations at a time
And women don't have the luxury of putting up with that BS.
Sure, I maybe have the mental faculties to become an engineer. Do I want do so, however? If I go to work in a firm, I need to do what the owner of the firm wants to in exchange for the monetary and other rewards. In academia, you write grant applications and research proposals for something you want to do (or to be practical, something you and you advisor agree on, but usually the opportunities are much larger than "client wants a webshop").
And what I would be doing at a $firm? Building more applications and other products and optimized adverts of products for other people, when majority of my free time I try to avoid unnecessary apps, adverts and consumption of useless products that waste natural resources of our planet for no good reason at all?
Sure, there are some companies who offer opportunities at doing basic research, but a) getting into those jobs you need to be exceptionally exceptional (getting into a PhD program, mere "exceptional" is enough), and b) would I really, really want to work there? I am reasonably sure that I have less ethical dilemmas if I am funded by a government or foundation to do research at a public university than getting a paycheck from $big_name_company, to produce value for $big_name_company.
It was less than minimum wage.
This is exactly what is happening! (Well, the leaving, not the improving).
The argument is that men are more willing to put up with the particular nature of the poor working conditions in academia, hence women disproportionately leave.
Further, companies can go from research to product that ostensibly makes a difference at scale with a speed that absolutely no University could.
I'm really not seeing any reason to stay in academia whatsoever if you want to do the most exciting applied research today. Maybe if you want to do basic science or something more obscure where the applications are very far off.
1) They have more data. It's not clear that it's better.
2) That difference is, to the eyes of many of us, showing up, making things worse, and then "pivoting".
3) I get to decide what I want to do. I want to add a project on X? I go work on it.
I'll Grant that The above doesn't really apply to pure math or philosophy
But right now, I'm working on projects in emerging infectious diseases, healthcare associated infections, some philosophy of science stuff, some algorithmic work in network science, and something that can best be described as "digital humanities".
Industry in healthcare, especially the tech industry, has a long road of trust building ahead of it.
I think we're also a little jaded. We've been talking about how big, real-time data streams like pharmacy sales data, social media, etc. are going to change the game for disease forecasting since I was an undergrad. We're still not even close.
Isn't that the point of being an academic? That you don't have much, if any, interest in generating a product?
For researchers at University of Toronto as well as within Google, neither (probably) wants to directly work on a product.
However both would certainly (At least in my experience) like their work to impact humanity on a wider scale then simply the number of citations their paper has. Again primarily thinking about applied researchers here.
So in that sense, both researchers are insulated from the producing of something business related based on their research. However one of them has a significantly greater chance of their research being used to actually affect people at large scale in their lifetime.
I wonder why there are few women in engineering, where the conditions and the pay are so much better. I've seen a number of women in IT industry, from junior developers to CTOs, and most of them were brilliant and sharp. But they are still a minority in the field. This puzzles me.
But there are plenty of other people willing to take their place, so the only consequence is that research standards drop, which is something most of society will only notice over the very long term.
So I disagree with the idea that individuals leaving will somehow fix the problem. The real solution is to change the terrible culture imposed on academic by the people at the very top. Turning it into a business espousing KPI driven nonsense rather than a vocation. This culture began in the USA and is now widespread in the UK, and it has destroyed goodwill and IMO resulted in dramatic drops in teaching and research standards.
The solution is to scrap REF, restore direct government funding, rebalance funding from grants to departmental funds, reverse the centralisation of administration and the lop-sided admin-academic balance, remove admin workload from academics, provide proper teaching and research career tracks, and cut the number of students attending university.
This is a problem that can only be solved with intelligent thought at the top, not by people acting individually. Market forces are the problem in academia, not the solution.
I think a big issue in the study of gender differences in work is that it is much easier to quantify the salary earned than the price one must pay in order to be successful in the field. About the best you can do is compare sub-populations that have paid roughly the same price - eg, urban childless single college-educated adults. At that point, studies generally show an insignificant gender difference in wages and success.
So, why is there a gendered component to participation in high-pay/high-sacrifice fields? I've not seen any sort of hard data, so I'd have to speculate. If you made me single out a candidate for investigation, I'd have to look into the how the heterosexual dating market will asymmetrically treat career success. People respond to incentives, and dating success is one hell of an incentive.
Anecdote: My uncle explicitly stated on his dating profile that he was looking for women with masters degrees who were willing to stay at home. I have no idea why he wanted that or why my dad's sister agreed, but this kind of demand is oddly common.
It's both genders; women do not lack agency in the dating market. It'd be as fair to make "my partner should be willing to give up their career to start a family" as the default and blame the dynamic on women - after all, they prefer men who are unwilling to compromise in the pursuit of their career.
I try to avoid either, and just mention that this axis has a gendered component in terms of both what people do and desire.
Since the funeral I've thought about this a lot. Our later-life relationships will be affected by the age at which we had kids. I'm sure this is in the minds of a lot of people in this economic age. There's a lot of "investing in your career" where the equation doesn't account for this.
I wish we could have an economy where this was easier. Say you could have your kids early, in your 20s, yet still progress your career. Perhaps pay for it with working to an older age, which should be possible with some improved health outcomes. Along with a flexible education system that allowed you come in and out. And perhaps incentives for firms to let people in and out, instead of the constant career grind that requires people to constantly push. Some of the finance and legal tracks seem to be for people who are expected to die at 45, like some weird victorian dystopia.
But, physically and emotionally, I wish we could have had kids at 22 or so. Of course we hadn’t even met so this is pure wishful thinking. But still. Raising a family is a real joy, but it’s also very physically demanding (even for men), and the younger you are the easier the physical aspect is. Also, we know a small number of people who had children very young, and now in their 40s their children are grown. It’s a really fascinating relationship, with somewhat more ability to relate to each other and a really cool ability to live life together. Especially when this is across generations, it’s amazing to have an extended family with three generations not just alive but still well.
I have no idea how society could ever adjust to make something like that work out - I think it might be easier to “fix fertility” to give more people the option of starting a family in their 40s. But still, I wonder about it often.
Just like it used to be.
Also, imo- for the most part kids degrade life experience significantly before they improve it, often in the part of your lifespan that you can actually enjoy life the most. Are you going to be taking risks and travelling to far flung countries in your 40-50s? most probably not by choice.
Hanging out with my kids at 40 isn't gonna happen even if i had chosen to have kids. Kids nowadays will be in school/tutoring programs/hanging out on social media not have time for me as a father to teach them outdated cultural mores(that they will ignore anyways just like i did).
I know many other young families. While I am a well-paid software engineer most of my young family friends are middle/high school teachers.
And who will pick up for missed work, absence, and economical expenses of such a model?
Many years ago an ex-girlfriend, who works in STEM academia (and is otherwise a liberal, progressive feminist), expressed concerns similar to the author about having kids. When I brought up that it wasn't written in stone that she would need to be the primary caregiver, she said she'd never even thought of the alternative!
(Anne-Marie Slaughter touched on this in a 2012 Atlantic article called "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" for anyone who's interested.)
"It's biology" has a long history of being used to justify everything from sexism to racism to genocide. Please provide a source for your claim (and for the implied claim that men do not have the same drive).
But that doesn't mean we, the smartest of them all, can't make some changes. Nature is also killing the weaker etc, things that we don't agree on as humans.
The author's point about being over-critical of sexism is well-taken, but by reducing the sexist attitudes towards, for example, stay-at-home dads, it may be possible to help more women in STEM have fully productive careers.
From what I can see, working in STEM academia definitely means you are likely to be the lower-income partner.
I envied doctors at the time, they could just name their hours, some other professions can - but not STEM fields for some reason. I'd say the reason is sexism - its a bunch of guys who are married to women who look after the children, so flexibility is not built in to the system.
I was thinking more along the lines of shared half time jobs, or 3 or 4 day a week jobs, jobs that allow women (or men) to work, look after their kids without becoming automatons. They exist in medicine, in law, in accounting, I've known a number of doctors that do 4 hour days in the office, and a bit at home. The only other choice I've seen is cafe jobs, or minor admin jobs. I don't see any reason that a lot of IT jobs couldn't be structured this way. As has been said many times - there's an IT shortage - of young white males who'll work cheap.
Also many women tend not to want men who earn less then them:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/rich-women-like-rich-men-a...
That too, is sexism, of course. Sexism also harms men.
There is about 4 billion years of evolution and the thinking that it can be socially engineered away is a folly.
> Sexism also harms men.
Yes it does. But this is not one of those circumstances. However that is a completely different conversation.
Nope. I didn't say that.
> There is about 4 billion years of evolution and the thinking that it can be socially engineered away is a folly.
I didn't make any statement on how to arrange society. I simply stated that I believe they would all eventually fail.
Also, if you believe _all_ arrangements of society will eventually fall, then wouldn't that make any arrangement acceptable to you? Including the one you were dismissing?
No it isn't. It is a statement of what I believe to be the truth. All the evidence and arguments around the topic I have seen and heard seem to lead in that direction. If you disagree with that conclusion that is fine.
However it doesn't mean that I believe that things should arranged in such a manner.
> Also, if you believe _all_ arrangements of society will eventually fall, then wouldn't that make any arrangement acceptable to you? Including the one you were dismissing?
I don't know. I wasn't saying anything about that. I was simply disagree that it is sexism. I don't buy into this the notion of "unconscious sexism".
But yes, many kinds of social arrangements come up naturally and woman taking care of house and kids seems to be one of them. Another one is "the powerful rule over the weak"... something we nowadays generally think should be kept in check to the benefit of society and thus spend effort doing so. But spending effort to keep pre-defined gender roles in check must be somehow bad?
Define "Better". Why should we be trying to change it? Why should we be meddling with other people's lives? People aren't being harmed here.
> But spending effort to keep pre-defined gender roles in check must be somehow bad?
Both men and women at least in the western world enjoy the same rights and discrimination by gender is not only frowned upon but can be brought before a court. I seems to me that they are already kept in check.
To a degree, yes. But are you really trying to pretend it's already perfect?
Though you seem to not believe in systemic injustice, so I doubt we will be able to find a shared consensus.
Custody is a more widely known example were us men fight an uphill battle. Obviously not everyone is unsatisfied with societies default roles, but I'd certainly consider this a harm, if I ever end up in such a situation.
Again, it could be worse. And I'm not trying to meddle in your life. If you and your SO want to live by traditional roles, that's great. But I don't want those thrust on (and thus being meddled with) my life. And I don't want to live in a society that doesn't even try to improve anymore.
Perfect is the enemy of Good.
> Again, it could be worse. And I'm not trying to meddle in your life. If you and your SO want to live by traditional roles, that's great. But I don't want those thrust on (and thus being meddled with) my life. And I don't want to live in a society that doesn't even try to improve anymore.
Everyone is trying to pin an opinion to me here because I am just questioning the underlying assumptions. I don't really have one other than "You can't have it all" unless you are extremely wealthy or extremely gifted.
> But I don't want those thrust on (and thus being meddled with) my life. And I don't want to live in a society that doesn't even try to improve anymore.
Neither do I. However there will never be a utopia. I find it actually pretty immature to think that you can make everything perfect, there are trade offs to everything.
Well, the author is saying that she is considering giving up her career in reearch which she very much wants to pursue to have children because she can't find a way to reconcile the two.
That is clearly harmful and if it is affecting women at a large scale as the author suggests then it is definitely something that should be corrected.
I disagree. Unfortunately you have to make decisions in life on what you want to prioritise. You can't have your cake and eat it.
Also I don't consider having to make a choice harmful. Being harmed mean things like being assaulted, having your house robbed, being abused by your spouse. What it does not mean is coming to realisation that you may have to make a choice between family and career.
You know what does allow you to have both, wealth.
Unless you're a man.
Many men work long hours and miss out on their family time. Also men typically work more dangerous jobs and are more likely to die on the job. They are also more less likely to win custody in separation. Men are more likely to commit suicide. Nobody has it easy and your sort of glib remark that ignores all the issues men currently face isn't helpful.
If I were a parent I would be trying to mitigate the risk to my child. As I previously stated it is unfair but not unfounded.
It cannot be sexism if it is based in fact.
> An African American is much more likely to be a murderer than a white American, but that doesn't make it ok to cross the road whenever you see one.
* I don't live in the US, I am from the UK. The term African American doesn't really mean much here.
* If there was a young guy dressed in sports gear and appeared to be somewhat of a lout, no matter what the colour of his skin I would cross the road.
It is unfair. Sure. But when I was a younger man (I am almost 40 now), I used to be followed about and stopped by police and security because I was simple 1) Male 2) Under 25. People are simply mitigating the amount of risk to themselves, business and family.
As usual, it's not the facts that are in dispute here, but their interpretation.
I didn't say anything about Black men. I said if I saw young men in General that looked like louts I would be wary.
This maybe be an American thing. I am not from the US, I've never been to the US so I don't know. There are plenty of groups of yobs in the UK in poorer areas. Outside of London and the big cities these tend to be white. In my own home town (which is 99% white) there are 4 or 5 problem areas where you don't walk through at night because you get surrounded by youths. It happened to me at least once or twice when I was in my 20s and I only got left alone because one of the guys knew my brother.
I get so bored of this "well you secretly meant something else because I want to label you a bad person".
Firstly, I doubt many parents actually do do their research on this and use such a statistic to inform their decision. More likely it will be based on gut feeling.
Secondly, the probabilities are the wrong way round. More relevant how likely a given man is to be a sex offender, vs the likelihood for a given woman. If both probabilities are very tiny then despite their relative magnitudes there are other things to worry about.
Thirdly, "sex offender" is an extremely broad term and the great majority of those offenses would not have involved nursery age children.
[citation needed]
It is true that a black man is more likely to be prosecuted for murder but that’s a wholly different statistic.
EDIT: In fact it is higher at least in the UK
> In 2011, males accounted for the vast majority of prosecutions for sexual offences (98.2 per cent).
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
In a given year, there are about as many black bodies as white bodies, while the population ratio is 1 : 6.
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/race-and-hom...
> Of the 13,455 cases from last year in which the FBI listed a victim's racial information, 7,039 victims – or 52.3 percent – were black. That compares with 5,854 cases – or 43.5 percent – in which the victim was white, an increase of about 8 percent from last year.
> It's a disparity that becomes more pronounced in the context of population, as 2015 Census estimates suggest that whites account for 77.1 percent of the overall U.S. population of roughly 321 million, while blacks comprise 13.3 percent.
Note that males in species with low sexual dimorphism compete for mates as fiercely as males in species with high sexual dimorphism.
Also note that the human species has very low sexual dimorphism relative to other species. E.g. our females are not many times the size of males, as they are in Black Widow spiders, our males don't have different colours of body coverage, like many species of birds do, etc etc. And of course many humans can easily pass for the other sex by changing their hair-style and clothing as evidenced by numerous cases in history where females passed as males by cutting their hair short and wearing pantaloons etc.
They're definitely the only ones who can breastfeed(at any practical rate anyway).
One may, of course, elect not to do that, but it does make a difference for the child.
Children don't magically become independent when they turn 1 either, they need a lot of investment from both parents in order to develop harmoniously.
Starting at this point one could wonder if fathers couldn't spend the same amount of effort as mothers. Technically they could, but by that point they probably aren't very good at some kinds of care and bonding, nor is the baby used to them in that way, unless they already did it during the first year.
It's also not something that is appreciated by others, except maybe the mother, if she can get over their clumsiness and has the patience to teach them what to do. All in all, there's no benefit for the family if the fathers instead of the mothers work part time or stay at hole.
> they need a lot of investment from both parents in order to develop harmoniously
Completely agreed, I said nothing against this except that the assumption that the mother had to be the one to stay home was odd.
> Technically they could, but by that point they probably aren't very good at some kinds of care and bonding
No citation here, this really just seems like repackaging assumptions as fact.
> It's also not something that is appreciated by others, except maybe the mother, if she can get over their clumsiness and has the patience to teach them what to do. All in all, there's no benefit for the family if the fathers instead of the mothers work part time or stay at hole.
I am positive many fathers and close family would beg to differ.
Even if the husband takes care of the child, doing your masters in LA, your PhD in London, and a postdoc in Sidney, why on earth would anyone want to drag a child along with them?
Well, certainly nature is sexist in that only one of the sexes is able to gestate a child. Perhaps that will change someday. However, for now, (biological) women face a unique reproductive burden that is worth recognising and compensating for.
Biology aside, there is an important difference between assuming women must bear a disproportionate responsibility for childcare, and recognising that women do bear a disproportionate responsibility for childcare. The former is sexism, the latter is pragmatism. Saying "my house is on fire" doesn't make you pro-fire.
> That's something that very few diversity-in-STEM folks are really thinking about.
I'm not sure how that can be true. What you're describing, the assumption that men work and women stay home, is the foundational stereotype that sparked second-wave feminism. Unless the argument is that "diversity-in-STEM folks" aren't familiar with basic feminist ideas like gender roles?
In any event, here is some evidence that this is, in fact, something that people are really thinking about:
> The boundaries of the gender division of labour between productive and reproductive roles are gradually being crossed as women have started to enter formerly male-dominated areas of work and men have started to accept greater responsibility for domestic tasks, including child care. However, changes in women’s roles have been greater and much more rapid than changes in men’s roles.
— Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action – Fourth World Conference on Women (1995) https://www.un.org/en/events/pastevents/pdfs/Beijing_Declara...
> Take measures to increase the participation of men in caregiving both within households and in care professions, such as information and awareness campaigns, education and training, school curriculum, peer programmes and government policies to promote men’s participation and responsibilities as fathers and caregivers, and to encourage men and boys to become agents of change in promoting the human rights of women and in challenging gender stereotypes, in particular as they relate to men’s roles in parenting and infant development
— Agreed Conclusions of the 53rd Commission on the Status of Women (2009) https://www.unwomen.org/-/media/headquarters/attachments/sec...
> Labour market policies that offer men access to paternity and parental leave, especially when coupled with Scandinavian-style incentives which encourage men to actually take leave, are a critical signal that men have responsibility for their children. However, gender norms are strong and pervasive. [...] Through community-based organisations and educational sessions supported by social protection programmes, health clinics and schools, fathers should be actively integrated into childcare activities and helped to see themselves as central to their children’s development.
— Women's Work: Mothers, children, and the global childcare crisis – Overseas Development Institute (2016) https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/public...
> The time-use and labour force data presented in this chapter make a compelling case for inequalities in unpaid care work and inequalities in the labour force being deeply interrelated. This not only confirms the “unpaid care work–paid care work” connection discussed in Chapter 1, but demonstrates also that no substantive progress can be made in achieving all dimensions of gender equality in the labour force before inequalities in unpaid work are tackled through their effective recognition, reduction and redistribution between women and men, as well as between families and the State.
— Care Work and Care Jobs – International Labour Organization (2018) https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dco...
> Rather than focusing only on increasing women’s workforce participation, it is also important to increase men’s participation in caring responsibilities. In countries where family policies incentivise men to take caring roles, the impact is seen both in the rate of men accessing leave and in societal attitudes towards parenting.
— Women in STEM Decadal Plan – Australian Academy of Science (2019) https://www.science.org.au/files/userfiles/support/reports-a...
Life is about collecting wonderful memories with the people who you love, not about maintaining some idiotic excel spreadsheets in an open plan office. Maybe we should measure how many women are happy with their life rather than measure how many of them have a certain job title in a certain field. If we can maximise the former then who gives a shit about the latter.
Because if women don't participate in the industry, the men who do will continue building a world designed for men.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-w...
There is a lot of pressure on woman to have families and in circumstances where their right and ability to both do that and progress in their careers isn't respected and protected we end up with the current system. One in which woman drop out of less flexible fields earlier, and even in them don't get promoted as fast as their male counterparts who don't need to bow out of the field for months at a time to have a child.
I don't disagree with most you said, but if you weren't there then no amount of artificial thinking will compensate for that.
We can take several actions to balance the books, but the important point I would like to ask is: Do we really want to stop/de-incentivize intelligent women from having children and having an active role on raising them?
Of course there are lots of compromises that can be made to balance the work-home life, but ultimately a decision does need to be made. Spending time with your children in those crucial fundamental years before pre-school is incredibly important and rewarding.
That's not really true. If all women chose to raise children instead of working, many products would have poorer design due to lack of diversity in ideas. And if 95% of women chose not to work, the 5% who want to work will have a harder time in many respects.
Why should the preferences of the 5% override the preferences of the 95%? A widespread norm of two incomes per household makes it much harder for women to be homemakers and full time mothers (since single income households have to compete with dual income households for positional goods like housing).
That is not the only alternative to a male-dominated workforce.
Yes, and employers should be more flexible to allow parents of all genders to do more of this and keep their jobs.
With all due respect, I don’t understand this call to action. Faculty position is basically a zero sum game. If more women end up as faculty, fewer men will. So, unless it costs more to train women than men, I doubt any “investment” would be saved (and that’s not the point of gender equality anyway).
Btw, this maternal wall idea is nothing new. I talked to my mother about gender inequality in hiring many years ago and she was quick to point this out (didn’t call it “maternal wall” though).
The assumption is that aptitude for these positions is roughly the same between genders, so if there's a significant imbalance, society doesn't get the best people on the given set of seats.
The later calculation is along the lines of "society is pouring so much money both into these positions and into getting-women-into-STEM programs without reaching this supposed goal, so here's a counter-proposal to use this money more wisely"
> Btw, this maternal wall idea is nothing new.
She's quite upfront that she borrowed the term as well, so the idea can't be new. But it might be time to reiterate that point (as opposed to the popular reduction of the problem to sexism only), and since she did a good job (IMHO) to collect sources...
An assumption which I have to point out is absolutely not verified. In fact, there are mountains of circumstantial, statistical, and biological evidence to the contrary - which policy makers in the west are increasingly ignoring as they ram gender parity down industry's and academia's collective throats, possibly to the detriment of the institutions and society at large.
1. Differences in hormonal expression and response affecting behavior and interests, e.g. testosterone and competitiveness (biological)
2. Measured differences in performance in different types of intelligence, e.g. spatial reasoning (statistical)
3. Consistent differences in achievement and specialization between men and women across almost all societies and all of human history (circumstantial)
The truth may be inconvenient but the idea that men and women are on average equally suited to all tasks doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.
2. and 3. can be explained by structural issues, as I said.
It's not really a question of the distribution of capabilities in men and women today which interests me the most, but the potential malleability of those capabilities given the right social structures, because if there's a way to bring a larger fraction of the population into STEM work, we'll have a much more creative and prosperous society.
What you were suggesting is that men are better than women at STEM. Simplg saying men have more testosterone doesn't cut it as evidence. (Besides, competitiveness doesn't make you a better researcher or employee, and can even be harmful in a team).
I also need data for the number 2 in that list. At what are men better at than women by a significant ammount? And how does that thing relates to STEM?
And number 3 doesn't prove absolutely anything. Women were subjugated throught history and basically no opportunity to do anything. Even with their limited possibilities, you still have women like Hatshepsut, Ada Lovelace, Marie Currie, Sappho, Ann Lister, Hypathia of Alexandria, etc. And now that they are finally allowed in higher education they outperfom men in terms of degree gained. So there is clearly not something that holds them back from studying. If they have the ability to get a PhD, then they can also be good researchers. Simple as that.
If you are going to continue with this subtle sexist talk (implying men are better than women at STEM), I want clear examples. Thanks.
>If you are going to continue with this subtle sexist talk (implying men are better than women at STEM)
You're probably unlikely to find too much on the subject - it's dangerous to academic careers to even propose research which could potentially justify any aspects of classical sexism. I'd just like to point out three things:
1. You're aware of the massive differences in physical capabilities, on average, between men and women, right? Which make men and women better suited, on average, to certain tasks? Why would sexually dimorphic specialization stop above the shoulders?
2. This isn't about inferiority, it's about specialization over thousands of generations. We see it in practically every other sexually reproducing species. The fact that humans have some ability to override instinct doesn't preclude gendered differences in average behavior.
3. This doesn't say anything about individual ability. We are talking about distribution statistics. What that means is that differences in average performance lead to different proportional representations in various fields. That doesn't justify discrimination or mistreatment, but it does suggest that, say, forcing gender parity in industry is unrealistic and potentially harmful.
1. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/male-female/201910/m...
https://www.geo.arizona.edu/Antevs/nats104/00lect13dimorph.h...
(Note: We are homo sapiens, pan troglodites is our closest relative still alive the social ape chimpanzee, pongo pygmaeus is the solitary orangutan, gorilla gorilla is the small group living usual gorilla, others are extinct relatives)
If you narrow your definition of sexual dimorphism to body mass, as in your link, then sure, the difference isn't huge relative to other primates. But even a cursory internet search produces results which absolutely, unequivocally demonstrate that physical performance of males across all measures of strength and endurance is in a league far above that of females, both trained and untrained. By some metrics, like grip strength, the bottom 10th percentile of males outperform the upper 90th percentile of females. Female records for 100m sprints are regularly beaten by teenage boys. Men are approximately 50% stronger on average in measures of both upper and lower body strength - and the gap widens enormously among elite athletes. Lung capacity, injury resistance, training response - I could go on, but I would say that this is more than enough to fit the definition of massive - particularly considering that in practical terms even trained females compare poorly to untrained males by most metrics.
Sorry, it may be an uncomfortable truth, but there is simply no ambiguity regarding the degree of physical specialization among males and females, and I've yet to come across any compelling evidence that the same specialization doesn't apply to the brain. In a truth seeking society, this should not be a controversial topic - the facts are absolutely undeniable, not to mention they almost universally match anecdotal experience.
Physical specialization is obvious to everyone and an "uncomfortable truth" to no one.
What makes me uncomfortable is how some men use these largely obsolete differences inherited from a time where childbearing was constraining our species so much more than today's world where this is a solved problem (like feeding or keeping ourselves warm) to justify that men with such stronger muscles must also have a better reasoning and therefore be better in STEM positions, or leading positions, at taking decisions, at leading people starting with heading a family, and so on. There is no evidence of this, neither factual nor anecdotal (actually, anecdotal evidence suggest a negative correlation between development of muscles and that of brain). This is just patriarchy, plain and old, aka the ideology behind which men hide their domination. A domination that is not justified by men having a better brain but merely by men trying to control women in order to control their body that they are so dependent of. And this is the real controversial topic in my opinion.
I'm not comfortable with this ideology despite being a man not only because I'm ashamed of it, but also as a father of a daughter whom I hope won't be limited in how she will experience life because the other half of the species try hard to maintain an obsolete domination, and I sincerely hope she will kick the ass of all ape-like men thinking that it is "absolutely undeniable" that more muscles means better brain.
I see nothing there but speculation about evolutionary history. It would be a shame if the potential STEM contributions of half of the human race were left fallow because of a half-assed evolutionary just-so story.
■Women are smarter than men.
Once women started demanding equal rights, their IQ scores—which had lagged slightly behind men’s for decades—not only caught up with men’s, they surpassed them. According to IQ expert James Flynn, women now outscore men on intelligence tests in Europe, the US, Canada, and New Zealand—and women scored higher everywhere. “The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ,” Flynn says. “But women’s have risen faster.”
■Women are more sensual than men.
According to researcher Israel Abramov of the City University of New York, women have a much more finely tuned ability to see slight variations in color than men do—which is why no straight men know what “mauve” or “taupe” are, but all women do. Women also have a superior sense of hearing and can distinguish between different scents far better than men can.
■Women are better at finding things than men.
Everyone knew that already, but it took psychology professor Diane Halpern to establish that women are better at navigating any given area by using landmarks, which makes them better at finding the lost keys and the missing remote control than men are.
■Women have better immune systems than men.
Estrogen gives women a better natural defense system against bacteria and viruses, according to a study at McGill University.
■Women tolerate pain better than men.
After all, they have to endure the equivalent of a bowling boll popping out of their vagina every time they give birth. But an episode of the show MythBusters proved that women can hold their hands in freezing water 19% longer than those crybaby men.
■Women have better memory than men.
A study at Aston University in England concluded that are better than men at remembering things two minutes, 15 minutes, and 24 hours after learning them. A Mayo Clinic study said that not only do women naturally have a better sense of memory than men, the gap widens with age.
■Women handle stress better than men.
Researchers at the University of Western Ontario concluded that women are far better than men at handling the stress of job interviews. Female brains also secrete more oxytocin—AKA the “cuddle hormone”—than male brains, making women calmer under fire than men are.
■Women are better at multitasking than men.
Multiple studies on multitasking have shown that women are far superior to men when it comes to handling multiple jobs at once. This must be why no man in world history has been able to simultaneously cook spaghetti, talk on the phone, and change a diaper.
■Women are better computer programmers than men.
This goes against every possible sexist stereotype, but a study at the University of Sussex found that girls created much more highly sophisticated coding systems when designing 3D games than boys did.
■Women make better doctors than men.
A Canadian study concluded that female doctors are much more likely than male doctors to adhere to physicians’ guidelines and to prescribe the right drugs for any given ailment.
■Women make better leaders than men.
The International Journal of Business Governance and Ethicspublished research concluding that female-led companies are more successful than ones led by males. A Pew Research poll found that the public agrees—women make fairer, more compassionate, and more trustworthy leaders than men do.
■Women are better drivers than men.
Studies show that male drivers are 77% more likely to die in car accidents than female drivers. A study of car accidents in New York City found that over five years, a staggering 80% of crashes where pedestrians were killed or seriously injured involved male drivers. This is why women pay lower car-insurance premiums.
■Women make better cops than men.
Authorities in Peru and Russia have begun switching over to female-dominated police forces because women’s superior psychological, communication, and negotiation skills make them better than men at handling volatile situations.
■Women make better students than men.
A joint study by the University of Georgia and Columbia University found that female students are better at acquiring and retaining knowledge than men. And Department of Education stats show that men are more likely than women to drop out of college.
■Women are better with money than men.
A study conducted by Barclays Wealth and Ledbury Research found that female investors experience a higher return on their investment than men do mainly because testosterone impels men to take unnecessary risks. A 2005 study by Merrill Lynch said that women also sell off their bad investments more quickly than men do.
Sources: http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1827162,0...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9401241/...
https://psychcentral.com/news/2013/01/05/why-girls-do-better...
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html?...
https://newrepublic.com/article/121432/biology-professor-man...
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/science/men...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/where-men-see-...
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/03/17/health/male-memory/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/11640371/Why-women-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24645100
https://www.glamour.com/story/women-are-better-than-men
http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/28/why-women-are-better-a...
You can claim there are differences in the physical body between men and women and no one will deny you that. However, it is just ridiculous to claim that me make better scientists than women without supporting your claim with rigurous data. Saying they might have better spatial isn't enough to make them much better scientists than women. Especially when there is evidence that women excel at learning and the highest IQ score ever recorded was that of a woman.
Aptitude can be exactly equal and aiming at equality can still be a poor choice if men and women are different. Among medical school graduates women are more likely never to practice, to work part time, to retire early and less likely to work past retirement age. If working more hours leads to more productivity and we value productivity rewarding productivity makes sense.
If your goal is to maximize the number of hours worked in the medical profession, you should optimize for that _much_ earlier in the pipeline because all those post-PhD women who then move into part time work already took away precious college resources from those hard working men who are more likely to work past retirement age (if they don't die of a heart attack long before reaching that still-working-at-80 panacea).
(may contain traces of sarcasm)
> And yet, if you ask leading women researchers like Nobel Laureate in Physics 2018, Professor Donna Strickland, or Canada Research Chair in Advanced Functional Materials (Chemistry), Professor Eugenia Kumacheva, they say that sexism was not a barrier in their careers.
— is such a bizarre argument to make. How can one conclude anything about sexism by asking leading women researchers whether whether it has been a barrier in their careers. The very fact that they’ve achieved leading positions says that it wasn’t; it says absolutely nothing of whether it was for those who have left.
_(I am not claiming anything about sexism; I was simply mystified by this paragraph)_
Also, The whole idea of having young people work like dogs in order to have a shot at making partner, or gaining tenure, or gaining a medical degree is both outdated and ageist.
No one is forcing people to work that hard to gain money and social status. They do it to themselves.
If a company allows employees to take unlimited leave, then worker A who avails him/herself of it, will be at a disadvantage to worker B who keeps working like a dog, when it comes time for promotions.
If company A mandates 32 hour workweeks, then they will eventually lose out to their competitor company B who mandates 40 hours (or more informally).
If country A says ALL companies must have <=32 hour workweeks, then country B, with no such law, will become more productive. And on and on. There will always be some less enlightened competitor to take advantage -- and do we really think America is ready to stop being #1?
It also assumes that workers A and B both working 40 hours (or more informally) are both working like dogs, trying to earn a promotion before the other. This is definitely true in some fields like finance, but not all.
The last assumption is that there is no economic benefit to added free time. Where would we be if the world was solely workers who didn't have the free time to engage with their own thoughts? We certainly wouldn't be on this website, or a computer for that matter.
We aren't computers with a job queue that can be maximized. We are animals that get exhausted easily, distrust our own warning signs, and have been known to do foolish things like jump from buildings if an artificial number dips below some arbitrary level. I think we can all afford to slow down just a little.
Naw. Efficiency is only one variable. Working like a dog is usually marginally inefficient, but the first 6 hr/day are still roughly as efficient to the 3-day-weekend-er. Working more hours absolutely increases productivity even if per-hour-productivity decreases (except in extreme cases of burn out). This is pretty obvious when you look at how any high-achiever spends their time. It's amazing how often people claim the opposite on HN.
You can't dictate this though. Say you have a well-run engineering team where everyone spends exactly 40 hours a week and only 40 hours a week on their jobs. And everyone does this.
You hire one new person who just LOVES THEIR WORK and they work 80 hours a week. Their output is through the roof, they get recognition, raises, bonuses, and promotions.
Now everyone chases them. Goodbye work/life balance for the entire team.
And before one suggests "make it against the rules to do that", good luck seeing how long your group or business lasts with such a policy. Probably NOTHING could be worse for morale.
Even being generous and kind, you end up with that situation. So your solution must work with that tendency, not assume it out of the problem.
According to PEW (https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/diversity-in-the-...) there were 17M STEM employees in 2016, so this leaves less than $1000 per employee for childcare. According to Fortune (https://fortune.com/2018/10/22/childcare-costs-per-year-us/) the average cost per child is $9K/year (probably more if you adjust for the distribution of STEM careers?). I'm guessing STEM employees have at least one child on average (some have none, others have multiple, etc), so that only covers about 1/9th of the bill. That's a dent in the bill, but I'm not sure it's enough to make even a proportional dent in the pipeline.
Note that this assumes the money finances a benefit that must be offered to all employees; if you can target the women in question, the calculus clearly changes; however, I suspect that would be difficult under current US discrimination law (IANAL).
That said, I'd rather that money go to employees where it would certainly be useful as opposed to the current programs which, as far as I can tell, is squandered (to put it nicely).
What statutes do you believe would stand in the way of an organization offering excellent daycare services to its employees, as suggested in the OP?
I ask because my partner Is a software engineers. She plans on continuing to work and I plan on staying home with the kids.
Practically speaking it doesn’t totally make sense since I currently earn more being a few years older in the same career. It’s just what we both have wanted since we found one another and we’re willing to make the life adjustments necessary to make it happen
I can’t help wonder how often women partner with men with lower incomes. Obviously the physical toll of baring children tips the scale a little but given couple where the woman makes significantly more than her partner I would imagine the decision would be logical for her to continuing work and wonder what percentage of women leave stem in this particular subset of the group?
It's just a different form of it than the "my coworkers constantly stare at my tits and don't take what I say seriously" variety.
We've put women largely in charge of child rearing duties. Obviously, men aren't able to get pregnant and bear children. We are, however, perfectly capable of changing diapers, singing lullabies, and doing laundry.
I'd bet that we would see the same kind of impediments to women rising to the tops of their professions in many demanding fields, fields where if you take too much time to have a life, you are considered broken and uninterested in excellence.
That is sexism. It is clear sexism, it is classic sexism and it will not go away by pretending that it is not. And I agree very much with the author that it is the real reason behind the constant stream of promising female researchers leaving STEM academia.
We need to--as much as we are able--change societal expectations, workforce expectations, and the way jobs are structured so that women are not at a disadvantage. These changes can also benefit men (eg, equal parental leave and other policies that it more affordable and feasible for people to have children). It hurts both sexes when workplaces are biased towards this archetype of a male breadwinner that is content putting in long hours away from his family.
You could view this as anti-family bias, which, due to society and biology, disproportionately affects women.
I agree with your sentiment, but there's a big biological difference here in terms of the fertility age. As discussed in the article, this question is very urgent for women in their 30s, but men can delay reproduction until their late 40s with no major issues. As such, men don't face an ultimatum on this, the way that women do.
But at late 40's do these men feel like they have to choose between children and early retirement?
Furthermore, most men don't just wait around until their late 40's to find a young woman to reproduce with. Human relationships aren't this calculated. You don't get to plan when you end up meeting the right person. Life happens. There are plenty of men in their 30's in committed relationships with women in their 30's. Just because he can delay reproducing doesn't mean they can. Usually this is a decision that a couple makes together. And I haven't heard a man say that he had to choose between his career and having kids because his wife's biological clock was ticking.
Or, to put it more simply: why don't men leave their careers to have children at any age?
Most men don't leave their careers at any age because they have to provide for the preganant wife which can't work and needs lots of care.
But even assuming the whole business of giving birth took a whole year (the full nine months for carrying a baby to term and another three to recover) there is no reason that this has to be the end of a woman's career for good. It's one year. People take one year sabbaticals and go and gawp at Machu Picchu. It's not the end of the world, especially if you're young and even in a fast-moving career like STEM academia. it's not like you can't ever read the latest publications again because you have to lie in bed for a few days after giving birth.
The care you say men must give to their wives lasts at best a few months of a year. After that a man is free to leave work to raise the kids and the woman can go back to work, if they so wish.
So why don't they do it?
Then there's 8 weeks of recuperation after birth, paid by the health insurance which are more or less mandatory and it would be stupid not to take them. Even if the body's not fully recovered at this point, the woman can work.
The question is, why would a mother leave her newborn in order to work, when the outcome will be worse both for the mother (weaker bonding, working through recuperation) and the baby (missing its mother during the day)? That's why it's common here that women either take one or two full years of parental leave or they stay at home N years. This can also be and is mixed with part-time work.
In any case, that would be an easy pregnancy. Childbirth over 30 becomes harder and over 35 it's classified as a high-risk pregnancy.
"After that a man is free to leave work to raise the kids and the woman can go back to work, if they so wish. So why don't they do it?"
One reason could be that by the time those months (in reality a year) are over the mother's better at caring for the child than the father.
I've also seen that women tend to like spending time with their babies(!) so they prefer working part-time or staying at home.
Finally, it's often the case that the husband earns more. Women also tend to prefer men which are successful. In the case where she earns more, it makes economical sense for the husband to work part-time or stay at home. I read an article about such a case a while ago, and being a stay at home dad looked like a sad existence: besides the social disdain and emasculation, that person wasn't even welcome to spend time with other parents (i.e. mothers), because they were looked on with suspicion.
Or would you keep looking for a solution that allows women, who have the very normal female attribute of “having breasts”, to also be catered to and be able to get work done and be compensated despite the whole “breast having” thing?
Do you mean something else by the "it" in "It seems to be just plain old biology"?
So a year off work, at most. Let's say three if you want to have three children (most women in the Western world today will have one or two).
How does that square up with giving up an entire career, that lasts considerably longer than three years?
So yes, it’s totally normal that the expectation of caring for children fall on women because it is the prolongation of their pregnancy. Actually this is not even disputed except by a minority of people in a minority of countries (the Western world).
I'm saying that it's only women who leave work to _raise_ their children and that _that_ is sexist. There is no reason to abandon your career to raise your children, there is no reason that this is never done by men (who can do it just as well as women because it does not involve special biological characteristics) and there is no reason that women are expected to do it.
In the western world of course we have such things as maternal leave and in some countries even _parental_ leave which is an attempt at a solution to exactly the problem we're discussing here: that women are expected to leave their careers _permanently_ to raise their children even though they only need at most a few months or so to recover after giving birth (a year is an absolute extreme), and that men are not expected to do the same.
EDIT: So, I say "in the western world" but it turns out that's not _all_ the western world. From wikipedia's article on parental leave:
The United States, Suriname, Papua New Guinea, and a few island countries in the Pacific Ocean are the only countries in the United Nations that do not require employers to provide paid time off for new parents.[6]
EDIT 2: "You are missing purposely the fact".
I'm not and I could assume you are wilfully misunderstanding _me_. And where would that get us?
1) This is a conversation concerning those in a relationship as to who will be raising the child (if it's not a shared effort)
2) I know a few guys that are stay at home dads, share the responsibility with their spouse of parents, or use caring services and nobody needs to be a stay at home parent.
3) If they are permanently leaving their career then it sounds like there's something completely unrelated that's affecting this other than some sexist issue.
4) How's what you're saying any different than some women expecting the man to be the bread winner and provide for the family? Or expecting them to be the one to defend the family if there's an intruder in the house? Or expecting the guy to fix things around the house or be the one to hire a contractor to do it? Or expecting the guy to take the garbage out or change a tire or talk to their son about sex, etc.
Like I say in another comment, sexism harms men too.
It really is not a matter of men-vs-women, here. My understanding is that these are traditional ideas about manhood and womanhood, that were useful in the past because they helped ensure societal stability and perhaps a sensible use of limited resources. But, in today's world, especially in the Western world, where the majority of men and women don't e.g. have to work the fields or do the washing by hand, these traditional ways of seeing each other only help to restrict our options. In the end, most women and most men have loved ones in the other sex (wives, sisters, mothers, daughters, husbands, sons, brothers and fathers) and it just doesn't make sense to stick to archaic ideas that want us to be somehow adversaries. Most women want the men they love to do well in their life and vice-versa. So why not work to maximise each other's options, rather than restrict them? We can work together rather than against each other to achieve our full potential, as individuals and as family units.
She literally spends 25%+ of the post explaining the fertility wall that does not affect men.
That's what the author is failing to discuss. Why do women need to give up their career to _raise_ children when the business of _having_ children takes a tiny portion of the duration of a career in STEM academia.
Do you have an explanation for that?
Anecdotally, observing my own family and that of my (mostly well-off STEM) social circle, I can tell you that this is when women really take a hit career-wise. What's less obvious in the graphs is that many of them take it deliberately, and _choose_ to focus on things other than career. This, ironically, puts pressure on men to provide, and compete in the workplace. I know it put pressure on me like you wouldn't believe - we "settled", got a mortgage, monthly expenses went through the roof. I've roughly tripled my earnings between the time my son was born and his 10th birthday. It came at a tremendous personal cost - I basically didn't have a life for a decade, and our marriage nearly fell apart. I like where we are today, though, thanks to all that effort. My wife took a couple of years off work, and did not aim for a quick career progression afterwards, preferring lower stress and more family time. Was my career progression done at the expense of someone less motivated at work? Quite likely, yes. Was it worth it to my family? It was, although there were many times when I was in doubt about that.
This is something the workforce percentage graphs do not communicate at all.
But in modern society, we tend to cast off our grandparents.
I think the way to measure this might be grandparents moving out of state of family (think Arizona and Florida).
Obviously the stigma of aging should get the bulk of the responsibility here.
Any got any advice on how to re-norm grandparents? I'm hesitating on moving out of state during my kids early childhood.
Living in the same neighborhood as your grandparents would be best. I know families that do that, and the payoff is great for the kids, the parents, and the grandparents. The kids love their grandparents, the grandparents love taking care of the kids, and the parents get safe, reliable, and free help. It's a win all around.
It's the way things ought to be.
All of my parents grew up and lived in the same state as their siblings. All of my siblings live in different states, and none of us live in the same state as our parents.
My siblings and I don't have any kids yet, but their family life and amount of time they spend with extended family (aunts, uncles, cousins) will look dramatically different than my experience, and it's only been ~25 or so years.
Judging from my neighborhood at least, the answer to that seems to be the grandparents get a class A RV [1] or a large travel trailer [2] and move to their kid's lawn for a few months to help with the grandkids.
Probably only can reasonably work, though, if the kids wait until they have a home and decent sizes lawn to have kids of their own.
[1] https://www.fleetwoodrv.com/models/pace-arrow-1
[2] https://www.rvusa.com/rv-guide/specs-by-model-2019-heartland...
This might be different for people who have kids much later; however, in modern society there IMHO still is no gap where the grandparents already can look after kids because they've retired and still can look after kids because they're physically and mentally able to do so, because most non-rich people tend to work as long as they can, and when they stop working, they themselvelves need caregivers instead of being able to be caregivers for the extended family.
To moderators/downvoters: It is said that defending a cause with bad arguments is the most pernicious way to combat it. Similarly, resorting to authority and censorship to defend a cause must be the surest way to ruin it.
We have seen sexism actually grow in the last decades in this field, and i start to worry that this attitude of dealing with it with the argument of authority or other threats on one's carrier may just be one of the causes that we are slowly losing this ideological battle. Or maybe just a symptom?
It's perfectly understandable that less economic and social pressures lead to people choosing things they actually want. It just happens to be that there's a notable difference in women's choices under those circumstances.
It certainly seems like there's substantial misinformation out there these days.
Countries that are more egalitarian and have more social mobility have STEM percentages that are decreasing as the same society becomes more egalitarian over time because the women have other options, and they choose to take them.
To the extent there are factors which systematically work against opportunity, there's both a moral issue, and a pragmatic issue (i.e. losing good talent) at play, before we get into the more controversial issues of representation and equality of outcomes.
Sexism is real but its importance is far from being large. It is really tiresome to see the news regurgitating the talking point on wage gap without properly giving context.
What is clear to me is that the wage gap as measured by the average earnings by gender (even drilled down by field) is very hard to be fixed given the obvious biological differences between males and females (in which motherhood reigns supreme).
Women also need to be honest about their prospects, it is very hard to juggle a career and motherhood. You can't have your cake and eat it too. So there needs to be an honest confrontation on the trade offs of motherhood and having a career and the cope that comes with it.
Work and family is a trade-off, their is no way around it. One can live a balanced life and be moderately successful. But to be among the best, the most elite, something generally has to give.
That's not to say that we can't reform the systems to not make it as "winner-take-all", sort of like how the author suggested.
Does anyone ever stop to consider that? Maybe women are doing what's best for themselves, sticking to things they like, and screw your arrogant western leftist ideas of what YOU think they should do?
Let's just pretend women like shoes and handbags more and men like engines and guns more just for purely random reasons. Despite global perpetuity. Everywhere ever.
Let's just pretend engineers and nurses is inflicted, not chosen, despite what ultra high gender equality Scandinavia says.
Let's all pretend that only the North Koreans are brainwashed and that only they care little for facts and human flourishing.
Let's all just slosh in wierd western religious fervour. Or actually, how about no, and hop on a plane to the civilised world.
I mean, it's a more actionable level of detail, but it's still sexism, no? Just maybe more structural rather than at the level of individual hiring or advancing decisions?
Similarly, men live fewer years than women, and so receive less retirement benefits. This is a structural gender-correlated inequality (maybe gender-correlated is even better than gender-based) but I don't think many people would call it "sexism against men". They would just say "oh, yeah, that's odd... maybe we should adjust that now that you've brought it to our attention".
Winner takes all is a very male attitude, and I think it gets back to men being more expendable because their sexual refractory period is orders of magnitude shorter than women's.
But does it make sense? Does the 80th hour on the ward as a resident make you a better doctor? Does the fifth publication make you a better professor? Does another fifteen minutes of billable time make you a better lawyer?
I don't think they do. I think these careers are needlessly intense and stupidly so. I contemplated going down a couple of those paths and recoiled because it seemed so unnecessary and gratuitous, and I didn't want to spin my wheels fitting into a nonsensical system.
The Swedish government order a study a few years ago in order to explain why the teacher profession are so gender segregated. The study found that initially the applications are almost 50/50 men and women, but then every year men start to leave. Once graduated and starting to work, every year men are a few times more likely to leave the profession than women. They even called it a leaky pipe.
They had multiple explanation in order to explain it, like how more academic focus rather than pedagogic helps retain men, and how higher salaries might help, and they also did similar to this study and asked the men who left why they did so. A lot of answers were that the profession did not fit their life, they felt the environment to be alien and uncomfortable, and they didn't feel like they fit in the work culture.
What the study also found was that the remaining male teacher that did stay tended to enter specialties such as PE and STEM subject, and away from subjects like langue and social studies. Many who left did so for similar profession outside of the education system such as sport.
So here we have women and men, both being described as a leaky pipe, both leaving at similar rates, both describing similar reasons for leaving, both finding specialties where they are not a minority. Could there be a common theory rather than two separate theories to explain this?
And the government study had such suggestion. There is research that is now about 50 years old that observed that people who are in an environment as a minority does not feel same confidence in themselves as those being part of the majority. When faced with a failure such as a missed exam, and making a decision to continue, being part of a majority increase the probability of the person continuing. The government study suggested that if you apply this theory over the time frame of a teacher career from the point of student to being a long term employee, what you get is a leaky pipe. It also suggested the solution that mentor ship programs helps in reducing this.
I also recall that a while back a women in IT imitative that said that of all their work, what had actually produced results was their mentor program. Seems like a pretty good evidence to me, and as a universal theory it seems pretty good explanation to explain the situation for both men and women.
That being said, as someone not in academia, it seems like a crazy path for anyone, male or female. As the article said, you're usually 34 before you have a lab established and the research program really gets going. Is there any way the system could be changed/simplified so that talented researchers could start earlier?
So, pursue men involved in "child friendly" careers. Nurses instead of doctors; teacher aides over academics; tax preparers over management consultants. Or even men who are passionate about the idea of being a stay at home dad.
A big part of strategy in marketplaces is choosing something that has a lot of participation so that you can find enough counter-parties to make your strategy work.
There's also a biological asymmetry in terms of age and fertility. A man who is single until age 45 and then gets a lot of economic success can marry a younger woman and have children.
Sure, the positive way to change this, is to reduce the unpaid work (child care professionals are paid, cleaners are paid etc) - that is, to acknowledge it as work that needs to be done, is productive, and should be part of what society rewards/share resources to get done.
But the equal rights / equal opportunity path indicates that we also need a (bigger) culture shift so that the unpaid work of running a home is more equally divided.
If it’s not paid, how do those doing it live?
Tax documents call the salary worker + home maker combo “household income”, which may be an appropriate way of thinking about the household getting paid and the household looking after the home.
This applies regardless of the genders of the happy couple, so I’m not sure it’s ‘sexism’.
And: why is one sex doing less paid work and more unrecognized work?
Presumably the work is recognized.
Women are often pushed towards professions involving some kind of care -- and it's expected that they'll want it because they have an emotional attachment rather than for money. Being a homemaker is the limit case: absolute attachment and zero pay.
I wonder what would happen if we simply made the purely numerical correction of counting homemaking in GDP. Would we value it more? Would it make it more attractive to men? Would we develop better infrastructure?
The behavioral stereotype that I'm seeing is that when a man considers a job that they might like, that has some socially acceptable status (teacher is considered a respectable profession compared to running a garbage truck, at least for an educated middle class family) but that pays lousy, then they more often than not discard that option as unacceptable and taboo and go looking for a job that sucks in other aspects but pays better e.g. driving a truck or building houses; women in the same situation more often than not stick around with lower pay.
If a stereotypical man needs to choose between money and reasonable hours that are compatible with seeing your family, they tend to choose money, the sterotypical woman often chooses the opposite (part of which is the argument in this article for the years after childbirth). A particular local example that I see is that the municipal public transport drivers are mostly women and long-range (both scheduled traffic and tourist trip) bus drivers around here are mostly men. The municipal transport pays much less, so men don't apply there; but the long-range drivers work obscene hours and are away from their families for most nights, so women (who have the needed experience qualifications since they're driving the same machine, just locally) don't apply there - there's a self selection.
In management, we can observe a pattern of increasing divorce rates (for the same age) as men reach higher levels of management; suggesting that there may be a pattern that when choosing between a possibility of promotions and not wrecking up your marriage, more men choose to prioritize their work and more women choose to prioritize their home life (which IMHO is the sane choice). The same applies for physical health - women tend to avoid many of the physical jobs that screw up your body or risk your life. E.g. roofing is a job that can be done well by women, but is one of the more lethal jobs in USA - and it has about 0.5% women in there. It's not a well paying job comparing to skilled jobs (e.g. a registered nurse) but it pays significantly more than childcare, but we're not seeing the poorly paid women in childcare joining up roofing just for the money.
Also, if a stereotypical middle class man needs to choose between doing a lower class job and sufficient money, they often choose sufficient money; the stereotypical middle class woman chooses otherwise. I have an observation from some time when our local economy was doing badly - if a man can't get a respectable job that can sustain their family, they'll often get a 'disrespectable' job below their skills or even occasionally commit suicide if they fail. On the other hand, women actually do overwhelmingly continue work in female-coded low-paying jobs like you describe even if other options exist; e.g. we had a local situation many years ago when schoolteachers were very, very poorly paid, but a construction boom (or bubble) had a big need for all kinds of workers. This resulted in almost all male teachers leaving schools and getting construction jobs, including very many that don't have a strength or skill requirement as e.g. painters, and very few female teachers did so (though I know some), resulting in the gender gap in school teaching becoming even more extreme. The same happened for university students picking their course subjects - because of the known problems with teacher pay, boys absolutely refused to study pedagogy degrees, with the gender ratio dropping from something like 30/70 to 1/99, but girls still enlisted. Another local observation is that boys treat the local med school entry conditions as all or nothing - if they can't get in to the doctor's "full medicine" study track, they refuse to go to med school at all and do something else; but girls who apply tend to choose both "full medicine" track and nursing as options, so if they want to be doctors but don't make the cut they consider the lower paying carreer path as acceptable. For career paths that pay poorly at the bottom and well at the top, young men will face an 'up or out' pressure from their families; if it doesn't seem that they'll reach the "good paying" level, then they'll be pressured to drop out of the career and do something menial but better paying; while for women its considered acceptable to stay there and hope to get supported by a spouse.
I could go on and on, but I've probably made my point - there seems to be a difference in preferences in job market. For men, decent pay compared to alternatives is a 'hygiene factor', and they'll sacrifice all kinds of other important job factors (hours, prestige, office vs outdoors, risk and health, family balance, abusive conditions) in order to avoid getting stuck in an otherwise decent but low-paying carreer. For a man, intentionally choosing the low-money path is essentially taboo, their family and society will shun them for that and push them towards various tracks where decent money can be made; but for a woman, it's not so, so they stay in low-paying areas that are otherwise rewarding.
You need resources and work to care for your family. The fact that in some cases you are 'paid' (i.e. you have to trade labor) is completely irrelevant. Beaver families are not paid by anyone to care for their home and family.
You could, and can, completely trade out your labor such that you 'care' for your family by being a couple of lawyers completely outsourcing the work of raising your own kids to strangers. At which point I think you've failed as a civilized society. You're only acting as economic agents maximizing profit, and your country is not a country anymore, but an economy. I think America is already at this stage, and that's not a good thing.
Just because housework isn't recognized, doesn't mean it doesn't add value to our society. But it's not priced, and it's not taxed.
At any rate - the interesting part is, if we say there's something like five hours of work every day to run a home - how come men seem fine with dropping that in favour of paid work, and women not?
There's a limited few months of giving birth to a child that only women can do, but we see that disproportionately women seem to end up doing much more. Sure, we can simply reduce the amount of unpaid work, by paying people to clean, cook and watch children - but that doesn't answer why not doing so affects women disproportionately from men.
One plausible explanationis sexism; that our society isn't equal.
Modern society is conflicted however because enlightenment philosophy, which is baked into everything, as well as some Eastern traditions teaches us that knowledge or enlightenment is the highest virtue.
So when it comes to agreeing on how to align society from the perspective of governance, time allocation, what to promote socially etc.. we have this existential crisis where people try to saddle the fence between reproduction (aka "family") and enlightenment style "progress."
I'd love to see a startup tackle this problem: think a benefits platform that allows companies to offer daycare as a benefit, or a Wonderschool-like daycare for working parents. Even an improved work from home policy for new parents would go a long way to plugging the talent "leak" that's prevalent right now.
And once they reached a sufficient age (10 or 12), children usually helped the family with their craft.
Before the industrial revolution, what's considered norm today was the norm only for aristocrats.
This was the norm 25 years ago, it's how I grew up.
I don't know how large of a population that really is. I've found many people move away because their family lives in a place that isn't approachable for them to live in. (e.g. Grew up in the bay area but not with well to do parents - just ones that barely got by. They aren't in careers that afford them $2m homes)
And many move away because they despise them and never wish their children to encounter their family.
I really do think many people give plenty of thought about moving away from family in one way or another. It's their family - they lived with them for something like 18 years. Everyone gives that thought.
> think a benefits platform that allows companies to offer daycare as a benefit
Companies could offer daycare as a benefit today if they wanted to. It isn't their benefits platform holding them back.
In fairness, I can see why companies don't offer daycare as a benefit: it's enormously expensive (particularly in major metros) and it would be very difficult to plan what % of your employees would be utilising it at any one time.
Other countries have solved this problem by making it everyone's problem: the government subsidises it. I won't hold my breath waiting for the US to do the same.
And they aren't offering a benefit platform, they're running actual daycare locations. Their connection to employers is also most commonly providing "backup care", not solid day-to-day daycare. Nothing to sniff at of course, but that alone will not solve the problem for working parents.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3062792/patagonias-ceo-explains-...
I'd imagine many families are like mine, where our house is strategically designed for optimal childcare.
I have worked at places that paid for convenient nearby parking.
I worked at a university that had a daycare just across the street. Given the dramatic pay gap between there and elsewhere it must have been sticky enough for some.
Young children (under three) babble and screech and cry and explore and try to finger everything and put everything in their mouth and then screech when you take the thing away from them or try to restrain them from getting at that shiny object they really want. They play for a few minutes then come running over demanding attention and screech if you ignore them. They get hungry and cry, they fall and cry. And this cannot be trained out of them because they are too young for that.
None of this is a problem if you have baby proofed your house and they can wander and play with whatever they want, and if you are just doing chores and can give them the love and attention when they demand it and go back to your chore when they go back to playing again. But it is a big problem if you and other people are trying to concentrate and work.
Can you share any study/evidence to support that statement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradleboard
I wish we knew more about how children spent their days in pre-industrial societies. Maybe they played out of site of their parents, only coming home to eat. I had a pretty autonomous childhood.
If yesterdays woman could bring her kids to work and todays cant, then we are pressuring women to have fewer children, and dumping the blame on them to boot.
What does todays idealized woman look like? Who are the role models we assign to our daughters?
Daycare only become necessary once transportation, tools that could cut, and exposed toxins became abundant.
Imagine a world were all parents let their children roam the streets from dawn til dinner, child-right-of-way, and any harm befalling a child was universally met with public outcry against the adult responsible for creating unsafe conditions. (If you left a can of gas unlocked and Jimmy burns thing down, you are responsible, not Jimmy or Jimmys parents. Rational precautions etc.)
Kids would be barred from factories sure, highways and other necessarily dangerous places could be fenced off. Contrast this with our blame-the-parents instincts, now.
Can we collectively consider taking a step in that direction?
When our workplaces have a spot for our cars and not our children, should be surprised that car ownership climbs and fertility falls?
I would disagree: historically, kids had to cope with other threats - illnesses, toxic or otherwise deadly animals, general accidents that are "tiny nothings" today could cripple or even kill you back then because there were no antibiotics...
Back 200 years ago, this only worked because people bred like rabbits. Partially of course because there was no birth control (or its usage, e.g. intestines as condoms, frowned upon by the church) , but also because if you had 10 kids it didn't matter if all survived and losses were expected/built in. Now with people having only one child or two, these must be protected to ensure family survival, and that is where helicoptering comes from.
> When our workplaces have a spot for our cars and not our children, should be surprised that car ownership climbs and fertility falls?
The other idea would be to provide livable wages again. I am 28 now, my father was barely 20 and a fresh police officer when I was born - but he could solely fund me, my sister, my mother and himself, saving enough on the side for a downpayment on a 100+ m2 flat.
Today? Many young policemen have to work side gigs to make rent, and my s/o and I plan for the first kid in 3 years from now because without us both working (she's finishing her MSc) we don't stand a chance to financially survive, and forget about saving anything or buying a place to live if our parents would not support us financially. And that doesn't even include the question "who will stay home for how much time/reduce their hours".
Provide real wages, limit workdays to 4x6 or 5x6 hours a week (and ENFORCE this) and whoops, there are the children that have been missing. If people don't feel safe they don't have kids.
Housing, healthcare, and actual-cost-of-food (because eating out is on the rise) are all increasing beyond any realistic hope of political reform. Best to optimize for children at the expense of any dream of middle class comfort.
My parents had a low income and made 2 kids work. I expect to stretch things thinner than they had to even with our middle class-ish income. (Most meals are homemade and vegetarian for example).
* most mothers were still with their infants and very young children. The babies weren't being taken care at a daycare where you can have one staffer trying to deal with 4 crying newborns.
* mothers were doing active work, not work that requires sitting in one place, not work that requires long-term concentration, not work that requires being on someone else's schedule.
I have noticed it is no problem doing active work like cooking or the dishes or grocery shopping while bringing along an infant. But I cannot do computer work -- baby goes crazy from lack of stimulation.
Also, being on a schedule while trying to take care of a baby causes immense stress. What if you have a client meeting while baby is crying because he needs to be fed ... or is crying just due to lack of comfort and attention? Or sometimes (oftentimes) baby has a bad night and keeps you from sleeping, but you still need to be up and at work at a given time, instead of being able to nap when baby naps?
Both parents doing a schedule-bound, desk job while raising a newborn baby is not how we evolved to do things, and it's always going to be a source of stress and problems, even if you have "high quality" daycare available.
One of the nice things about being in charge of a remote company is that when I bring the baby to our weekly video call, no one says anything, and of course they all feel comfortable doing the same (although right now there are only fur babies).
If I need to take a nap because the baby kept me up all night, I can, as long as there is no meeting scheduled.
We try to do things as asynchronously as possible, mainly because being remote this is a better way to work, but the nice side effect is not a lot of scheduled meetings.
The hardest part honestly is saying no when my son asks, "Daddy, do you want to play trains with me?!"
But my point is, I think remote companies with family friendly policies will help a lot in this regard. There is still the issue of "I need to concentrate for two hours uninterrupted", but a lot of the other issues aren't so bad when people understand you have kids and they might come to a meeting and that you may not be available instantly.
[1] https://fbe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/80599...
Anecdotal evidence/sample size one story: My wife has a doctorate in chemistry and 2 postdocs under her belt, but she had to leave her field purely due to sexism she encountered during her post docs. The PI (her boss) was quite abusive, outright sexist and a horrible racist. My wife wanted to move on to industry jobs but her wouldn't let her leave. So he kept giving bad references. We didn't know about this until after my wife looked into why she got rejected.
My anecdata suggests women are less willing to allow a single aspect of their lives to entirely dominate over all others. Child bearing happens to be one of the bigger alternative endeavors, but it's not the only one.
Supporting women (and men!) who want to pursue an academic career in STEM while raising a family is a laudable goal. I hope it is more effective than I expect it to be.
Every time there was a contractor that they needed to have someone at the house for, or every time their kid got sick and/or couldn't go to school, guess which of the two of them always took the time off work to handle it?
Now I had no insight into their family dynamics, and it felt it wasn't my place to pry. But over dozens of "time off" incidents through several years, it was very clear to me that my female employee was the "default caretaker" for anything relating to the house or the child that came up. This was despite the fact that she had a higher-paying position than what he had (based on what I can now see on levels.fyi).
Or it could be an insufficiently high IQ test at present; dumb people get in the way and cause problems.
In business, one thing that I have seen a lot of people crash aground on a reef on is that working in professions that require STEM credentials is a night-and-day difference from the process that one goes through to acquire those credentials. I've known a lot of people that loved their computer science programs in university, and then found actually working as a programmer such a shock that they noped right out into something else.
Many factors are at play here:
* Most Indians tend to marry young and have kids before 30.
* most families have either one or two kids only.
* Parents support their children for life, i.e, grandparents have a major role in supporting the care and rearing of kids.
* Daycare isn't expensive.
* Government mandated maternity leave with full pay and no loss of seniority.
At least in america women are, in this way, almost always asked to choose between their career and having children. This is asymmetrical with men's experience because whether or not they are comfortable with it, its considered normal for them to spend most of their time at work even if they have a newborn.
I'm not sure what else you'd call this status quo aside from "sexist." It's a systemic sexism that has deep roots in how we organize the aesthetics of our society.
Or it's a systematic sexism that has deep roots in human biology and thousands of generations of sexually dimorphic specialization, and I can't believe we've successfully convinced multiple generations of westerners now to pretend that men and women are equally suited for all roles, including child rearing.
Now we need an article which takes an honest look at the possibility that gender imbalance in STEM (and other fields) is at least partly a result of similar specialization for cognitive tasks, where researchers like the author of the article are closer to extremes of an ability distribution. But I'm relieved to see a take that questions the tired, pervasive assumption that STEM is simply not welcoming to women because old white men are sexist.
Are you saying women are naturally more nurturing than men? And more inclined towards childcare?
Because I vehemently disagree.
>I'm relieved to see a take that questions the tired, pervasive assumption that STEM is simply not welcoming to women because old white men are sexist.
It can definitely be a factor. And even a more important factor is the fact that women can feel unwelcome in tech. At Oxford only 10% of the undergraduates accepted to study computer science were women. Now imagine being a woman in that class. You might feel like you don't belong, although you might be friends with your predominantly male classmates. Some of them will make jokes at the expense of your gender, others will hit on you, and the list goes on. Obviously not all of them will treat you differently, but some of them will, and that's enough to feel unwelcomed. And thus, you might be more inclined to leave tech for a field with more women, like biology.
Their resentment is quite real. Their actions looks like choice, until they trust you well enough to vent to you.
With some of the women I had in mind, I know for sure they strongly did not wanted next kid while husband suggested that, so it is not the same (in the sense that he did not wanted kid and therefore it should be all on her).
Women and men both have to choose between their careers and spending more time with children, and their choices reflect their preferences. One can make the argument that this is indirect sexism - that women's preferences stem from sexist social influence. But the fact remains: most women don't want to work full time, and the lower rates of women working full time after having children is reflective of women's preferences.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/...
For some reason men don't get asked whether or not this is true. It's simply assumed that men will dedicate their lives to work because it's the only way to pay for a family.
It's not people just graduate along the path from A to Z - it's viciously competitive.
Issues of maternity et. al. I think are just one important artefact of the nature of competition which for whatever reason I think is still going to favour men. Risk taking, hubris, aggression, physical endurance, combativeness, a certain kind if confidence, social expectations, possibly even the acceptance of those things by others - these things mean a lot at those later stages.
The best time to have kids is when you are getting your undergrad degree.
High quality parenting is the goal. We could provide adequate time off for anyone wanting to spend their time parenting THEIR child. Will they lose their job? No. Will they not get a raise or promotion? Yes.
That one word 'just' speaks volumes. People grow up. People change. Perhaps they want a different challenge than what academic achievement can provide. Raising children is challenging, daunting, and rewarding.
Could the drop-out rate simply reflect the higher share of men who are able to fulfill the functions that are required at those higher positions?
Maternal Age seems like a boogie man story to scare women.
Perhaps STEM women who are early career (24-28) would benefit from meeting mothers (both who are in STEM and not in STEM careers) who had children at age 35+.
> ...Women who stay in academia expect to marry later, and delay or completely forego having children, and if they do have children, plan to have fewer than their non-STEM counterparts (Sassler et al 2016, Owens 2012). Men in STEM have no such difference compared to their non-STEM counterparts
I would love to see the figures regarding the partners of STEM Women vs STEM Men. Is it due to the old sexist notion that women must "marry up" so a woman with a successful career have partnered with someone who also has a successful career?
Having family shifts perspective. Perhaps some of these women no longer felt a strong desire to further their career, and family matters became more interesting?
As a father, I love my job, but I gladly set aside my career to raise my kids.
It's just a biological reality. It is certainly possible to have a healthy birth after the age of 35 but the rate of health problems and birth defects don't go up linearly with age. The rate of pregnancy loss is 35% after the age of 35 and is above 50% after the age of 45. This is just reality. If women want to have multiple children it is wise to start before age 33.
A reason I suggest young women speak with women who started families mid-late career would hear actual experiences, giving perspective that it's not as bleak as the statistics show.
We had two children, both healthy, after mom was 35.
We also had a pregnancy that didn't go to term.
I surmise women might take some comfort in knowing that pregnancy complications are normal.
A woman who gets pregnant at 25 is less likely to have issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 35 and much less likely to have issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 45.
That's the reality.
The fact that some women have successful pregnancies at 45 doesn't change it. Nor does it suggest that women should simply ignore the facts and hope for the best.
Some drivers make successful journeys while drunk, without killing themselves or anyone else. That doesn't mean drunk driving is a recommended personal choice, or that the element of choice somehow makes the risks disappear, or that drunk drivers who happen to beat the odds and survive many journeys should be sharing their lifestyle choices with others.
You are equating to "issues" to mean "no healthy children"
> The fact that some women have successful pregnancies at 45 doesn't change it
Is a straw man.
Plenty of women have successful pregnancies at 35. And 25 year old women debating that choice should hear from them.
Said differently:
Can you wait too long to have children? Yes. Is 35 too long? No.
> In this preconception cohort study of North American pregnancy planners, increasing female age was associated with an approximately linear decline in fecundability.
The opportunity cost was enormous but now that the kids are grown it sure seems like it was a great plan for us. My wife did get a lot grief from her family for dropping out of the workforce ($$) until they started having their own kids.
We have two daughters. The youngest is in college for CS, she has made it very clear that she does not want to have children. The older daughter is not STEM -- she is an Army officer (Westpoint Grad) who does want kids someday.
One of my in-laws is using nannies and such even though they easily could drop to one income (MD specialist dad, pharmacist mom) -- it hurts my heart to see how much time they voluntarily spend away from their kids, including weekend shifts, holiday shifts, etc. But it is their life, and their kids seem to be thriving so what do I know.
And, as I remember it, my wife intended to go back to dev work after a couple of months. But her return never materialized. It didn't seem like a reasonable option to us when the time came.
Actually not. It's not just the genetics / pregnancy problems that are proven to significantly rise with age... but also that the time of menopause can neither be forecast nor the effects reversed (some hit it with 40, some with 60!), so there is a significant disadvantage (=no kids at all) for waiting too long.
Additionally: do you want to deal with a baby when you're 25 or when you are 40 or, worse, 50, that keeps you awake all night? It's a massive toll on your physical and especially mental health - the younger you are the better you cope. And your kids will be happier to have a dad/mom who can actually do things with you when they're 15-25 years...
And, I should clarify, I was speaking about the authors range of starting a family around age 35.
> Additionally: do you want to deal with a baby when you're 25 or when you are 40 or, worse, 50, that keeps you awake all night?
I see that as personal choice, and each family should be able to make that choice for themselves by understanding and weighing the risks.
Not be scared into making a decision with misleading statistics.
Me personally, I had the means at age 38, that I could hire a night doula (and nearly did). Infants usually begin sleeping through the night ~6 months, coinciding with them starting solid foods (breastmilk tends to go through a baby quickly) while solids take longer to digest. As I was on the cusp of my little guy starting solids, I tried a couple different things first:
* Used a sleep sack
* Moved his pack-n-play outside my room
Both helped him sleep through the night.
So ~6 months wasn't terrible. I also have a unique situation that helps me cope with elevated levels of stress.
For our first child, we had a live-in nanny.
I got to enjoy living for myself from 25-35, that when I settled down to start a family, I was able to focus on that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age#Risk_of_...
You’re going to need some money when they get to be old enough to go to college.
They're 3rd generation immigrants. They need to learn to struggle.
Men and women also pair up with the man being older. So this isn't going away until the government forces equal-age mating.
But the problem is that they ended up being single parents, at least for a while.
I believe there is an obvious difference men and women which, on a general level, incites women to weigh family responsibilities over career prospects. However, industrialized nations exacerbate that difference by making it very difficult for women with children to spend the time necessary for career advancement.
The key here isn't necessarily throwing your hands up and saying there's nothing you can do about it, but more robust programs for parents to help lessen the load of parenthood.
Surveys like this are not necessarily honest as the participants are not necessarily being honest.
Wait what....you mean by STEM you just meant academia?
So maybe the problem is that industry STEM is offering an overall better benefits package than academia? We're seeing the same thing in fields like AI, where academia can't retain top talent.
But what I can say is that I don't hold all of the values that I did as a young man. I'm not excited about the same things, and today I find some of those ideas uncomfortably naive or even off-putting.
As I've engaged in more activities, as I've socialized with more people, I've encountered many more ideas and a lot of nuance. Nothing has simple answers and there are other solutions to problems besides code, or tools, or pills, or surgery.
And one of the consequences of this is that I'm not confident that if I show up to interview at a startup that I'm going to exhibit the degree of 'passion' they're looking for. I have plenty of passion. Too much, some will tell you. I just know beyond all doubt that your new iOS app is not going to save the world, and quite bluntly, that you have some unresolved issues that you need to work through if you so desperately need to believe how transformative your work is going to be. And I know that's not just STEM - all the 20-somethings who I've seen doing volunteer work - and bless you for showing up - feel exactly the same way. I'm gonna change the world. I have to change the world. Otherwise my life is empty and I am nothing.
It can be discomfiting to be around and I'm sure I telegraph it.
They say that young women socialize a little ahead of young men. Maybe they just get a whiff of my reality before all the rhetoric gets piled on so thick that's all they can see.
This is good, though. If you faked the passion, you might wind up surrounded by lunatics who actually believe their iOS app is going to save the world.
Also, this "passion", most of the time, is just a word that has been co-opted by the owner class to mean "working nights and weekends".
Coworkers know that they can come to me and say, "hey dude, your code is busted and 4 people can't get work done," I'll drop everything and fix it if I can't give you a workaround (and it'll bug me until I do fix it). I like that passion in others. I get into a little trouble when that passion is about completely fixable things that are dragging down productivity and morale. I'm not particularly repentant about that either.
But when it's some tie telling me we have to work weekends because they didn't listen when we told them "shipping this functionality by April 3rd is a dangerous fiction and you need to come up with a new plan?" you're on your own pal. If you can't hear 'no' then you can't make useful contingencies. Also it probably means you don't respect the people I respect and that's gonna be a problem.
My passion rears its ugly head when my team is asked to take shortcuts and ship garbage to meet deadlines. It also comes out when we're asked to implement half-baked ideas without having the chance to meet and question the ideators and refine those ideas into something workable.
I think it's perfectly fine to not care about your job to a higher degree than necessary, and I also think it's fine to seek out work based on social impact rather than salary. Most people can't have it both ways, and end up having to make a choice at some point.
Maybe the real problem isn't even technical. Maybe Jim and Tom just hate each other because something happened when they first met. We can keep arguing about haproxy vs nginx 'til the cows come home, or I could say to myself, "Hey, they both listen to Kevin, I'm gonna go ask him for a favor..." but that's kinda passing the buck.
My biggest success not falling back to other people for this was Ben, who yelled at me - in an open office plan - the first time I asked him for help. It took most of a year of me making smalltalk at the coffee machine before he was happy to see me coming, instead of avoiding eye contact. I think at some point he figured out we think alike on certain BS technical limitations, and then I started getting smiles.
If you can't tell from this that I'm fond of cats, especially shy or cantankerous ones, well...
My problems, of course.
What leads you to think primarily about "passion" & socialization? It seems almost as though we read different articles, I didn't see anything about that.
I don’t think we would build “science towns” like Los Alamos in this day and age, but that would probably help as well.
Dad's are paid more, more sympathetic and even cheered on when they leave early for the talent show. Women on the other hand are considered less committed, less capable and less flexible.
The risk of a medical error rises by about 1% for every year a doctor is out of school.
Either AMA's continuing education requirements are lacking, or something else is at work.
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/should-doctors-age-ma...
In academia, you have a set amount of time to get tenure. It is not extended for pregnancy. If you don't get tenure, your career is basically over.
While the article talks about leaving STEM it focuses on PhDs and academia. This is an academia problem, it's not specific to STEM.
There exists plenty of gender disparity within these fields. Many more women in pediatrics, obgyn and family law, many more men in surgery, for instance. I'd like to see a study of these disparities to see if the subfields women choose have the benefits this author suggest is a major cause of women leaving STEM.
Compare it with e.g. big tech - a hypothetical female PM who has just completed a big project can go off on a maternity leave and return to the memories of her success slightly faded, her contacts gone slightly cold, but otherwise she can start more or less where she left.
She's talking post-engagement, I wrote about pre-engagement, but was thinking about both. People get it coming and going.
We have this not-at-all accurate mindset about professionalism and self-sacrifice, that 'everybody is doing it' but 'everyone' is mostly young, unattached men with something to prove. It's the Prisoner's Dilemma and young men defect. Immediately.
One of the things I value most about trying to get men to look at toxic masculinity is pointing out the self-harming aspects, showing how it's not that great a bargain. To demand better for themselves, and of themselves. I think the unattached bachelor who can work 60 hours a week 'with no consequences' is toxic, at least a little bit. We should all say 'yes' to anything that is not that. Travel, partners, relatives, children, volunteer work. Hell, throw pinball games and scifi conventions in too, not because I equate those with the first things on that list, but because I have taken the long way around to find that "there's work to do" should be a lower priority than self-care. Adjust your own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs. Advice I need to follow better myself.
I just spent a bunch of time writing down some specific examples, but it was starting to feel like a cherry-picked narrative about myself, which my partner teases me about, so block-delete. Suffice it to say that at the bottom of it I came away with this thought: I think 'treating people the same' but still volunteering yourself for things you shouldn't expect from others is not actually 'treating people the same'. If you never say, do, or look away from a single directly disrespectful thing in your whole life there are still a dozen ways you can contribute to a hostile environment.
In child development I think they call this 'bidding'. The child observes differential behavior from their guardians and tailors their interactions to maximize their returns, and things can get pretty out of control unless the parents communicate with each other, respect each other's concerns, and agree on boundaries.
Solidarity counts a lot. Maybe more than anything. And solidarity will, I believe, give you family leave, gap years, partial leave, childcare near work, hobbies... but those things without solidarity are just salves on a wound that never heals.
I think those issues are called narcissism.
You're basically attaching your identity (being okay with who you are, really) to a future event. One that you can influence but not really control. And I suspect it makes you easier to manipulate, and burnout all that much more powerful when it doesn't happen.
Women are not rewarded biologically for being the top 2% in their industry. It's almost as if the higher women climb career wise the fewer dating options they have because women tend to want men that are even higher on the totem pole.
Outside of a score keeping system, each additional dollar is less rewarding very quickly once you pass $150k in income.
There is more than one hierarchy of competence. For each occupation, hobby and skill there's it's own hierarchy. So if there's ~30 hierarchies, approximately half of competitors are going to be in top 2% of at least one.
Edit: and if we're talking about purely monetary measures, have a read: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704409004576146...
The world doesn't revolve around dating.
And what about lesbians? Do they benefit from being in the top 2%, according to your logic? They would still "access all the women"
It is also a bit disturbing that yoh believe being a billionaire gives you access to all the women.
Why not? All of evolution is derived from it.
But I think you know that already.
I think you misrepresent startup founders. Most I've met are generally very smart people and they've read The Remains of the Day too so it's not like they're this nerd-in-the-basement fantasy you get from the movies. The Hollywood fantasy is dead.
I'm only saying this so that young fellows browsing HN from their computers at university aren't immediately discouraged. To them: The world is very exciting here. You can find a team and work happily and passionately on something you care about. You will be fine. It is probable that you will be better for it. Good luck!
Good teamwork is just about my favorite thing (I even prefer co-op games to solo). You might find it, for sure you can build it, and even when you have to work your butt off for it, I think it's still less work than killing yourself 60+ hours a week.
The article is about women in STEM academia which is a tiny subset of women in the STEM workforce. Some STEM professions do a better job of retaining women than others.
Is it really? That’s disappointing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21774299
This one, I saw also today ..
Institutions in the country introduced gender quotas for internal committees and boards in an effort to reduce bias during hiring and other inequalities, but such measures themselves are now being labelled potential hindrances to female progression because the roles cost women career-crucial research time.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/germany-mulls-extr...
Break out the tiny violins.
The article does a good job of identifying the funnel. It reiterates what we already know about society: women are aware of their biological clock and people desire to make children. But it does make an assumption that the women that stay in the funnel are childless victims, or at least portrays them that way. "Meanwhile in the Netherlands, woe!" This is hyperbole, but barely. It is okay to assume an even distribution of wants and desires as the non-STEM women, but what if there isn't? Let's get some perspectives.
Additionally, freezing eggs, surrogacy, and adoption are options followed by additional help with nannies and au pair, costly options which could be supported and subsidized by the very arguments that this article is making.
I think the case would be even stronger if we added the perspective from the child free women, along with a perspective about cultural tweaks that women could also consider. Distinct from only pointing out what organizations do not do to address the maternal wall.
It's a divisive topic, so fractiousness is not easy to avoid, but everyone should make sure they're up to date on the site guidelines before posting. They include: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
1. Pregnancy is very hard on women's bodies. It is not uncommon for health effects like high blood pressure, joint inflammation, and gestational diabetes to become temporarily disabling for expectant mothers. 2. Infant childcare is incredibly expensive. Even at professional levels of compensation, the expense is likely to outweigh the added income from continuing to work. Costs drop significantly once children are potty trained, but remain quite high. 3. Three months of paid maternal leave is very rare. Even with saved time off, taking large amounts of unpaid leave is hard on a family. 4. Breast feeding a child while working full days requires a huge amount of work, above and beyond the exhausting labor involved in having a new baby. If a nursing room is not provided, women often resort to spending a large amount of time pumping milk in the restroom. Which is uncomfortable, unsanitary, and disheartening.
Just because some women have the resources or the stark need to return to work so early does not mean it is possible or desirable for everyone.
We need to have better maternal leave and accommodations. Fathers need to step up and do more of the work. We need to have better paternal leave and accomodations. We need to support affordable child care options. We need to make the above 4 items available to everyone.
Fair enough- but how often has Aaronson published, or publicised, an opinion from a woman who disagrees with his view? Er. Not often. Probably because he disagrees with them and so will tend to find that they do not marshal "data, logic, and [their] own experience in support of an insight that strikes me as true and important and underappreciated".
So what have we learned from the fact that Scott Aaronson has published this opinion on his blog? Absolutely nothing. We knew his opinion, he still has the same opinion. We know there are other people, including women in STEM, that have the same opinion as Scott Aaronson. Here is one of them and her opinion. We have learned nothing new.
This is just preaching to the converted.
[0] https://medium.com/@kjmorenz/is-it-really-just-sexism-an-alt...
I implore you to consider the well-founded facts on both sides, not to claim this piece has absolutely nothing worth saying.
Technocratic twitter after reading this article: We must solve the “maternal tax” gap!
Normal people after reading this article: "yes, this is what we have been saying for years. Promote the family."
This seems like violent agreement. I think Scott was trying to dismiss the people who criticize them by inviting Morenz to make a guest post. Perhaps his dismissiveness is the reason why this is so acrimonious.
What is the alternative position you're suggesting?
I think the effects of evolutionary biology need to be considered when looking at behavioral differences. Evolutionarily speaking, women invest much more energy into growing, giving birth to, and caring for children than men. This leads to innate differences in behavior separate from social forces you are describing.
The reason why women are more involved in childcare after giving birth/nursery years is purely societal factors. It's expected of them to behave in that way in more conservative places and it's strongly implied in other places.
IMO dads don't achieve the same level of bonding as women do to their babies and therefore we are able to tolerate less of the crap babies get into during the day.
Its not sexism, its just biology.
If I had a project I worked on for 9 months I would have more desire to continue working on it into the future. My investor is an interested party, but ultimately its entirely my drive which moves the project forward
You seem to be making a fairly subtle point here that I think others might be missing. Which is not that women choosing to take on the burden of childcare represents sexism (which is an argument some people make), but rather that the fact that their making this choice impinges upon their personal economic future is sexist. That is maybe a more interesting point than the former, but I don't think it really holds up to scrutiny. Choosing to take on the burden of childcare is choosing to spend less time working. In any other context, if a person chooses to work less, that negatively impacts their earning, and we consider that perfectly reasonable and fair. If I choose to play video games for 8 hours a day and work part time, basically everyone accepts it's reasonable that I make less money.
Now, if women are being pressured or forced into accepting this childcare responsibility at their own economic expense, then yes. That is 100% structural sexism. Also, if society would have treated men making this choice differently than women, then that too would represent structural sexism. But there are men making this choice, and their careers are generally just as negatively impacted as the women who make it.
I'm not arguing that childcare isn't valuable. I am arguing that it isn't valuable to any employer of the person doing the childcare, and as such, they shouldn't pay for it.
edit: e.g.,
> "Choosing to take on the burden of childcare is choosing to spend less time working."
why don't we instead have a society where all childcare is paid labor and we just "pay ourselves" for other self-benefitting labor (growing food, for example)?
(collective) assumptions like these are the systemic sexism. note that this is different from calling a specific person a sexist.
Who is it you think ought to be paying for childcare? It's clear who pays for wage labor. The employer pays for it, because they value it.
> why don't we instead have a society where all childcare is paid labor and we just "pay ourselves" for other self-benefitting labor (growing food, for example)?
The answer to this question is "the entire history of economics and every lesson ever learned about how to structure effective civilizations for the entire history of humanity". I'm not really sure how else to respond to that.
Obviously contractual childcare is work.
Seems to me more similar to voluneer open-source development. It may be productive and useful for others, but that does not entitle anyone for compensation.
I don't think this claim holds up to scrutiny. Yes, there are men out there whose careers are negatively impacted by starting a family, but by and large the expectation is a man continues working while a woman drops everything. That's part of the reason why family leave for men is less common.
Which boils down to structural sexism being an issue for both men and women. Men are not allowed to spend time with their family and women are expected to drop everything to take care of the children. In a more equally balanced situation, men would have the opportunity to be the full caregivers while women could continue their career in their field of choice. But right now a lot of options for families depend on your gender.
That isn't what I said though. Obviously men who start a family but don't do the childcare won't be negatively impacted. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the ones who do curtail their careers to do the childcare. This is a less common arrangement to be sure, but I know more than one heterosexual couple who has done this (usually because the woman has a better paying career).
That's my entire point. They're not equally impacted because there are larger societal pressures designed to punish women who want to continue their career and men who want to spend time with their children.
Read what I said more carefully. I didn't say all men are equally negatively impacted. I said the men who choose to take on the burden of childcare are equally negatively impacted.
And I think you need to reread my argument, which is specifically talking about those men who do take on the burden of childcare against the societal pressure to do otherwise. I think it would do you well to reread my argument from the top because it's starting to seem like you're arguing against something entirely different than what I'm saying.
What does raising children have to do with society? Decision of having and raising a child is a fundamentally personal, not societal decision. Each pair should decide how they want to split responsibilities of raising a child before its conception, based on their preferences, and society should not force them to any model.
Also, it seems to me that society already prioritize child-raising too much compared to other non-work activities. If people would leave STEM/some other field due to work-life balance for some other personal goals than child-raising (say part-time working in a non-profit), would anyone care?
Of course it isn't. Every society needs an up and coming younger generation as the older generation stops working. That is absolutely a problem on a societal level.
Also, if a societal stability is a goal, then having more than replacement number of children is as problematic as having less.
Yes, but the success of those children is still a societal concern. You want some of those children to be a new generation of doctors, teachers, etc. etc... without supporting them at a young age (i.e. providing education, a welfare safety net) there's no guarantee that would ever happen, and they might end up being more of a drain on society than a productive member.
What if that isn't true though?
Fertility is universally falling in rich countries.
Could you give me a number of births-per-woman that would motivate your concern? I think 1 birth per woman is a reasonable number for national concern. South Korea is already at 1.0.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/KOR/south-korea/fertil...
Without a future generation long term concerns evaporate from concern. Maybe this has already happened in some peoples minds with regard to national debt, and the long-term sustainability of social security.
But note that this situation is relatively new, while natality was praised even during times where population was expanding. My point in this thread is that natality is not intristically good (or bad) value and it is for country to decide on which level want to motivate individuals to change their behavior, but having a child is still fundamentally individual decision.
That's what I was getting at with the comparison to the movie Bird Box.
It's important to think of ourselves as biological systems first and thinkers-as-choosers second.
I suspect that an increase in the virtualization of our lives will lead to an equal increase in the will-full termination of our lives. Suicide. As our lives become less biological we will end them with greater intensity and frequency.
You may not be convinced, but ask yourself what would that road look like? Would you recognize the indicators? Could you and the people you care about hop off the ride in time? Why did so many Westerners join the ranks of ISIS?
I'm sorry? Maybe the continuation of society?
Great.
But my personal experience is that this notion seems to vanish as soon as we look at things like rates of workplace deaths, life expectancy, hours worked, imprisonment, or numerous other areas. And even if they don't vanish, the level of attention devoted seems to be remarkably different. Would the way we structure society in regards to structuring our attention for social ills also possibly include sexism?
And I guess such notions can be dismissed as being off topic. As they aren't relevant to the actual issue under discussion. But when we start viewing larger more structural things as sexism, then wouldn't even such dismissal potentially qualify as sexism?
I have never met people more passionately invested in the wellbeing of men than the feminists I read and live with. It is a shame to me that decades of propaganda have buried those voices and raised the voices of those who insist that feminism is a zero sum game.
As in, no criminals go to prison? I wonder what these feminist feel should be as the punishment for rape.
>I have never met people more passionately invested in the wellbeing of men than the feminists I read and live with.
Many of those who want to ban abortion are very passionate about protecting the women seeking such, as they believe it is far better for those women to be denied such an opportunity (such as saving them from doing something they will regret, at least per the belief of the people supporting anti-choice legislation). Intentions and passion shouldn't be ignored, but neither do they provide a complete picture.
Is this injustice? Perhaps you could characterize it this way, but since the perpetrator is beyond reason and lacks expression, I'm not sure how youre going to fix this.
In reality, men and women’s roles are arbitrary, and the sexist structures present today are not the result of children asking for it. You are overestimating the intrinsic qualities of human social and family interactions, which are not as set in stone as you claim. Even the concept of the nuclear family - with one possible nurse and mother figure - isn’t a universal construct of human societies.
For those of us on the other side of the debate, there is always this vague sense of some people are underestimating the impact of these intrinsic differences.
Nailed it.
My point isn’t that men and women aren’t at all different, it’s that institutions use the “it’s human nature and it can’t be changed” argument to hide oppressive/coercive practices that are avoidable and able to be removed.
Enhanced emotional bonding due to emissions of oxytocin during breasfeeding? Make men sit with children several times a day while getting oxytocin shots and perhaps they would have much stronger bonds with their children.
From Wikipedia: Maternal behavior: Female rats given oxytocin antagonists after giving birth do not exhibit typical maternal behavior. By contrast, virgin female sheep show maternal behavior toward foreign lambs upon cerebrospinal fluid infusion of oxytocin, which they would not do otherwise.
> Even the concept of the nuclear family - with one possible nurse and mother figure - isn’t a universal construct of human societies.
Yes it is. The only people who claim this are people who've never lived in an extendend family situation. You still know who your mom and dad are. They are still the primary care givers, and babies still have a primary attachment to their moms when born that self-reinforces itself unless there is some major disruption.
Men and women can both program, sure, but only women can make people. Society simply reflects this.
It was even more obvious before the establishment of the nuclear family that a whole bunch of people should work together to raise children because not only does it improve the outcome, it's more efficient.
I'd like to get your perspective in 18 years.
I suppose we could bottle feed. But my wife doesn't want to, and it is linked to worse outcomes for kids so asking moms to do this for the sake of their career is like asking them to cut their nose to spite their face.
> It was even more obvious before the establishment of the nuclear family that a whole bunch of people should work together to raise children because not only does it improve the outcome, it's more efficient.
Of course, but there's only one mom still. My parents were raised in a ' non-nuclear family' where aunts and uncles lived next door. Hell, I was raised by my mom's family and my parents often living together. Do you think the mom wasn't preferred out of all these people? You have to be joking. The only people who ascribe 'the nuclear family' as a bogeyman are people who idolize extended families. Believe it or not, even in an extended family situation, with grandma, grandpa, aunts and uncles... babies still prefer their mothers.
People want reality to reflect their world view but biology is biology. It's not an indictment on society that only women perform certain biological functions.
Can we, though? It seems that there is some amount of time that women are unable to work due to the physical rigors of pregnacy, child-birth, and (in many cases) infant care.
Taking time away from work, no matter what the reason, necessarily affects the trajectory of your career. We can try to minimize that in various ways (as the original article discussed) but it seems impossible to reduce it to zero barring sci-fi tech like artificial wombs.
It might be reasonable to say that we can structure out work so that women are disadvantaged _as little as reasonably possible_ for having kids.
And I don't understand why people absolutely need to have biological children. I think more people should just adopt if they want to raise children.
I also think sexism in the US is the biggest factor for women leaving Academia or not entering STEM. In other countries more than 50% of the researchers are women and 40% of the students studying computer science are women.
As someone who has adopted 3 children, I assure you that the biological route is way easier and cheaper. It's not like rescuing a dog from the pound...
Consider these possibilities:
1. A best case scenario is that what you have expressed is a personal opinion that takes your genes out of the future in a Marty McFly fading away fashion as this opinion hardens.
Fine. Your choice. More pie for the rest of us.
2. A worst case scenario where this opinion accumulates in the market place of ideas and inevitably leads to human extinction.
Impossible right? Well, know that disgust with sex is climbing in rich nations (like Germany and Japan) and the number of births per woman is falling. Is this a function of wealth, or technology?
South Korea has fewer than 1.1 births per woman. That can only translate into a poorer, older, and smaller country for the future. [1]
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/KOR/south-korea/fertil...
(I tell people that this was the thickly veiled premise of the movie Bird Box.)
If that is true, then can it be called a choice? Are people actually choosing to have fewer sexual partners than their parents generation? Are people really choosing to feel disgust at the thought of intimate contact?
Maybe repulsion-to-sex is a bigger threat to continued human existence as nuclear weapons.
Another fun article:
https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-long-until-were-all-...
Source? People are having fewer children, but is that because they are too disgusted to have sex?
- https://www.rt.com/news/377342-sexless-japanese-marriages-st... - https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jun/23...
I remember seeing a similar headline for German women but cannot find a source now. (I think people expect weird think from Japan so it's good practice to compare to other countries)
Maybe social media and instant communication has replaced (or dulled) some of, what used to be, our sexual appetites.
Half the world is sub-replacement-rate: "As of 2010, about 48% (3.3 billion people) of the world population lives in nations with sub-replacement fertility"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility
What statistics should I look for the document disinterest in sex?
The Politifact article does involve aversion, but only aggregated with disinterest:
"The percentage of women who responded they were not interested in sex at all or felt an aversion to it was 60.3 percent for ages 16-19 and 31.6 percent for ages 20-24. Combine the age groups, and the average response was about 46 percent negative — the figure that drove attention-grabbing stories in Western media."
To interpret the numbers differently, a net 30% of Japanese girls aged 16-19 become interested in sex within 5 years.
I tried looking for the original report to disaggregate lack of interest and aversion, but I only found it on Amazon and don't feel like buying it. https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4930807085
Will you grant that this means that interest in sex has fallen?
The Politifact article says "In 2013 a whopping 45 percent of women aged 16 to 24 ‘were not interested in or despised sexual contact,’ and more than a quarter of men felt the same way."
Which matches my claim:
> Nearly half of young women in Japan are "uninterested in sex" or "averse to sex"
My claim was that disgust with sex is rising.
Another article makes these delightful claims:
https://time.com/5297145/is-sex-dead/
- More than 40% of Japanese 18- to 34-year-old singles claim they are virgins.
- the fraction of people getting it on at least once a week fell from 45% in 2000 to 36% in 2016.
- more than twice as many millennials were sexually inactive in their early 20s than the prior generation was.
- In 2016, 4% fewer condoms were sold than the year before, and they fell a further 3% in 2017.
- Teen sex is flat and has been on a downward trend since 1985
- The median age for first marriage in America is now 29 for men and 27 for women, up from 27 and 25 in 1999.
- the highest drop in sexual frequency has been among married people with higher levels of education
- those with offspring in the 6 to 17 age range were doing less of what made them parents
> What do you make of these data points? I think they successfully demonstrate that interest in sex is falling.
You're equivocating between disgust and lack of interest, but these are very different things. I wouldn't have bothered asking for a source if you had blamed falling interest rather than rising disgust.
My motivating concern is universally dropping fertility and whether the reasons are disgust and disinterest, they both cash out the same way. No babies.
So, yes, they exist as two distinct categories, both inside a larger category. I'm talking about that larger category.
Let's imagine that people want to have sex, but they can't find the time in their busy lives. I would lump that in with disinterest. Now, whether you would or not is a discussion about your language preferences. You are entitled to language preferences, but I'm more interested in the slow suicide of everyone around me.
I find this slow suicide fascinating.
Maybe everyone is too busy arguing on the internet about what words mean to have children. That's weird and bad. That's a future we should avoid.
I don't think it's bad to find sex repulsing. I mean, sex is inherently disgusting. It involves naked bodies and bodily fluids. You can'g describe sex in a way that doesn't sound repulsing.
Besides, people can have children without having sex through IVF. But if a woman is repulsed by sex, I can totally see why she would also be repulsed by pregnancy.
Especially smart women in STEM should have children because cognitive abilities like intelligence and conscientiousness are largely inherited traits (e.g. IQ is between 50% and 80% inherited according to twin studies).
But the thing is, it's a choice, no one is forced to go into super high status occupations. Those that choose so must be very bright and completely dedicated to one thing. I think most women know or realise later on that this level of competition is insane, and that's why they quit and find something that is not as high status, but is more enjoyable.
A very small percentage of men are willing to ditch everything else to be at the top, some get there, most don't, most women find out that it's not worth it.
Oh, and I think it's crucial for children to bond with their mother and skipping this and putting them in daycare early is not in their best interest. I also think that motherhood is more valuable than most engineering job or paper publishing.
Oh.
Up to this point I was keeping notes with my criticism of this article, but this caused me to stop and reconsider.
If I may advise the author, I understand how difficult it is to balance life decisions that seem to be at odds, but trying to deny the very reason why those life decisions are hard to combine will not make the choice any easier.
It is stupid and sexist that you have to think of pursuing a PhD and having two or three kids as an either/or option, when the (probably) man you'll want to start a family with will not have to do that, even if they are also a PhD in STEM.
This is part and parcel of the sexism that people complain about. It's not just inappropriate behaviour by senior male academics. There is no reason why a woman must put her career on hold to start a family when a man in the same career does not need to. There is no reason why women are expected to be the ones most concerned with the business of having and raising children when men are expected to be the most concerned with advancing their careers. How is that not sexist? How is that not the sexism that's keeping women from advancing their careers in STEM academia?
Why should the academy structure itself so that women who choose to put their attention into their families do not have a career impact? If academic positions are necessarily zero-sum, it seems impossible to correct for this without seriously unfair negative externalities?
How is it that the biases inherent in collective decisions of individuals within society are the responsibility of the academy to correct for (that men tend to choose to focus on career and women on family)?
Why should <organization> structure itself <in response to reasoned feedback from the humans who constitute it>?
Do you have some clear argument for why members of an organization aren't entitled to participate in shaping it?
The academy should structure itself in the way its members decide it should be structured.