I have no idea why this has to be so gender specific. Every argument works equally well in terms of fathers as well, yet she doesn't even take that second to even consider the issue. She doesn't think to write about people, but only about women. You get the feeling that the author has spent so long thinking of women as 'us' and men as 'them' that she actually sees the two as two completely separate species.
Terribly sad, maybe the next generation of feminists will be able to break out of the box they've made for themselves, and devote themselves to more general philosophic introspection.
> Terribly sad, maybe the next generation of feminists will be able to break out of the box they've made for themselves, and devote themselves to more general philosophic introspection.
And maybe the next generation of people who get riled up about Aaron Swartz and Weev will spend equal effort and bluster getting riled up aggressive prosecution of kids in the Bronx. And maybe the next generation of people who have online protests about SOPA and PIPA and CISPA will exert similar efforts opposing laws that make it easier for companies to pollute.
Or maybe people will continue to be people, and have issues near and dear to their heart that affect them and not feel like they have to fight for every perceived injustice out in the world.
okay, but if you campaign for the well being of women by appealing to notions of gender equality, you must ultimately equally believe in the well being of men.
whether you expend equal energy on both causes is up to you. it may say something about what you really believe though.
That doesn't make any sense. Are people who believe that gays can be equally good marriage partners and parents as straight people obliged to spend just as much energy on causes related to marriages among straight people? Does their focus on marriage issues for gay people mean that they somehow think that straight people aren't as suitable for marriage?
You missed the point and created a strawman to argue against. Gay marriage has no bearing on straight marriage so your analogy falls flat.
Men and Women (gay or straight is irrelevant) are inextricably linked as human beings that face the same problem of creating a future together that supports equality. To focus on one group ignores 50% of the solution.
> Men and Women (gay or straight is irrelevant) are inextricably linked as human beings that face the same problem of creating a future together that supports equality.
Exit claimed: "okay, but if you campaign for the well being of women by appealing to notions of gender equality, you must ultimately equally believe in the well being of men."
The fact that women fight for women's issues on the basis of gender equality is no different than the fact that gays fight for gay issues on the basis of equality w.r.t. sexual orientation. In neither case does the implication follow that just because people fight for their own group on the basis of equality with other groups that they should necessarily be concerned about the issues of concern to those other groups.
I believe strongly in environmental justice, and think poor people deserve a clean environmental equally with rich people. That doesn't mean I care or spend much time thinking about pollution in the Hamptons.
> The fact that women fight for women's issues on the basis of gender equality is no different than the fact that gays fight for gay issues on the basis of equality w.r.t. sexual orientation.
Yes, it is. Men and women are two halves of the whole that makes up Humans. And any progress in the area of equality among Humans must ultimately involve both.
Exit's argument was a continuation of the original argument posited by RyanZAG, for which he was down-voted in spite of a meaningful contribution to the conversation. Down-votes are for useless or off-topic replies, not for when you simply don't agree.
From RyanZAG's original comment:
> I have no idea why this has to be so gender specific. Every argument works equally well in terms of fathers as well, yet she doesn't even take that second to even consider the issue. She doesn't think to write about people, but only about women.
It really doesn't, and this part is bullshit: "it may say something about what you really believe though."
If I'm a gay guy fighting for marriage equality, my lack of efforts to fight for marriage issues affecting straight people does not "say something about what [I] really believe" about whether gays and straights are equal.
It's an utterly bullshit argument. Women are pretty much the only group where people say "well if you believe men and women are equal, why don't you fight for mens' rights?" Nobody says that to gays fighting for marriage equality, or blacks fighting for racial equality. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say it harkens to sexist notions. Men are expected to watch out for #1, but women are expected to be motherly and crap and care about the welfare of everyone.
>Women are pretty much the only group where people say "well if you believe men and women are equal, why don't you fight for mens' rights?" Nobody says that to gays fighting for marriage equality, or blacks fighting for racial equality.
What? You get pretty much the same argument against affirmative action. "If you care about black children in poverty then what about white children in poverty" etc., and all the (in many cases quite sensible) arguments that aid should be based on need rather than race.
People might say "if you care about black children in poverty then what about white children in poverty" but people almost never say that to black people. It's always a statement of policy in general terms, not a targeted criticism to black proponents of a policy.
In other words, people might think that we as a society need to care about poor white kids as much as poor black kids, but nonetheless black people generally don't need to make excuses about caring more about black children than white children. Nobody accuses them of secretly thinking that blacks are better for doing so.
The difference is that men's issues and women's issues are really tightly intertwined. You cannot put pressure on men not to have work-life balance and not to be the one looking after the kids without also pushing women into becoming the main carer for them, and likewise you can't lift that load from women without some way for the men to pick up the slack.
Sadly, what generally happens is that once activists for women's rights have categorised something as a men's issue, they stop caring about it. So you get articles like this one which never question the underlying assumption that women are the ones that need to compromise their careers in order to raise a family, and that men have no interest in doing so. The article talks about women being locked out of positions of power because of this - if we could change things and make it just as normal for men to put their career goals aside to raise kids, that'd have huge implications, but that's a men's issue and hence ignored.
> whether you expend equal energy on both causes is up to you. it may say something about what you really believe though
The clear implication is that focusing on issues pertinent to group X (e.g. gay marriage, society's insane expectations of women), it means that you must care more about people in group X than people not in group X. Which makes no sense; if you have a buggy codebase, you focus on fixing the bugs, not dividing your time equally among all the mostly-already-functional bits.
>if you have a buggy codebase, you focus on fixing the bugs, not dividing your time equally among all the mostly-already-functional bits.
In this case that's the point -- work/life balance is not a problem for "women" but a problem for "humans" -- so why concentrate on solving it for women or framing it as a "women's issue" if the same analysis and solutions go for men too?
Yes, exactly! I think the piece is excellent -- perhaps the best I've seen on the issue -- and my only criticism is that it doesn't speak at all to men, to whom essentially all of these insights apply. That said, men do seem to be much closer to have figured this out for ourselves: generationally, we seem to have (quietly) decided that we don't want to be like our absent fathers -- that we want to be home for dinner and available on weekends. Work is important, but family is essential.
Speaking personally (I am a VP of Engineering at a startup and a father of three), when I have needed to forgo a work commitment for a family one, I have enjoyed nothing but support from my CEO. He's a generation older than I am (his kids are young adults), and he is surprisingly blunt about wishing he had made different choices when they were younger. He knows that I work my tail off -- but he also knows the importance of making the right decisions at the right moment. So I can't help but thinking that the Sandberg-esque way of thinking strives for women to become like work-consumed men from a generation ago -- rather than modern, balanced parents as advocated by Walsh.
> "generationally, [men] seem to have (quietly) decided that we don't want to be like our absent fathers -- that we want to be home for dinner and available on weekends."
Maybe we're not as physically absent, but I'm having a hard time seeing the younger generation of fathers as being any more present in a practical sense, given the "online and accessible" work-culture we've pioneered.
Whereas Boomer fathers sometimes worked nights and weekends, at least when they showed up for the big game, they were more-likely-than-not watching it. X-ers are barely watching even when we're recording it. And I think it's open question as to whether "sometimes dad has to go in to work" is necessarily worse than "whenever I'm with dad our time is likely to be interrupted by his having to deal with work".
Maybe by raising a generation of compulsive messengers this will just seem normal to them and not like a plague on family time. But for me? I don't see it as an improvement at all. It looks like a step backwards.
(And truly, not every X-er gave into this culture but -- generationally -- always-on is certainly the trend and looks to be the norm from where I'm sitting.)
I don't know, personally I think I would have benefitted from being able to see a father-figure-type-person doing their thing, even if that meant having to check his phone during the big game, etc. Hopefully a good parent would do so in a balanced way, and the kid would pick up good habits and expectations about what it really means to be a polite and functioning person of the time. IOW, my vote would be for my father (or any theoretical parent) to have been present and leading by example, even if part of that leading is about the necessary evil of being "online and accessible" all the time.
A "good" old-school parent would ideally have limited after-hours work as much as was reasonably possible and imparted solid lessons about meeting commitments without compromising family values as well. All of that sounds like a separate consideration.
The question at hand is more: assume X hours of 'overtime' work needs to be done: would we rather have that chunk be composed of unpredictable interruptions of unpredictable length through any and all 'family' time? Or gathered up into larger, fixed chunks of extra 'at work' time with advanced warning, discrete start/end times, etc?
The Last Psychiatrist has an excellent article about why women are encouraged to become like "work-consumed men from a generation ago". You might find it interesting.
My personal vote for Lean In valedictorian is the woman at the bottom left, I don't know her life or her medication history but she has the diagnostic sign of her cuff pulled up over her wrist in what I call "the borderline sleeve," that girl will have endlessly whipsawing emotions and a lot of enthusiastic ideas that will ultimately result in a something borrowed/something blue. Hope her future ex enjoys drama, he's in for seven years of it.
What? Awesome, the authoress is judging a person in a PR shot from a cut-off view of their arm from behind. OK, I am done reading these articles for today.
Not the OP, but thanks for the link. As a guy I was a little bit saddened by the "choose a husband very carefully"-part, I see that the Last Psychiatrist addresses that in a very compelling way.
Your response reflects more on you than the author - you are a 20-something who has no experience at all with children/job pressures, and you probably believe in sexism as much as you believe in the tooth fairy.
It's not the same article to talk about this in a gender-specific way - men don't face the same type of conflicting pressure from society to raise children and be a career success. As a fairly recent dad, with a lot of fairly recent dad friends, it's way different for a man than a woman. Everyone just by default assumes the woman will hold the baby all the time, and they catch flak for using daycare, and a million other things you'll rarely experience as a dad. Dads get kudos for doing barely acceptable jobs with their kids and focusing on their career, while women get trashed for the same behavior.
There is this one fundamental physical thing that tends to make me think there is some natural logic to this order - that the woman has to be up at night breast-feeding, and so it's hard for the man to assume the default caretaker role without bottles and other nonsense. But this gets extended to all parts of a woman's life, and I think even today there is undue pressure on women to raise the children (and if you want to do some work, schedule it around your babies).
Would add to what you've written above that "house husbands" are not necessarily revered in a positive way by popular culture (like business titans, celebrities, athletes etc.) as important high achievers. Nor do women (anecdotally over many many years) seem to give high social standing to house husbands. I mean sometimes they talk a good game or use semi patronizing words. But in the back there is always an underlying "couldn't cut the mustard apparently" floating around. Women in general want men who can slay the dragon and bring home the meal and make a comfortable life (which of course varies greatly on the woman).
I would caution by the way anyone who is "young" who has a spouse, girlfriend etc. that tells them "money isn't important to me I want you to spend more time sharing responsibilities around the house and helping with the kids" to wait until later when you aren't living in the right school district or can't pay the bills whether all that means anything that is when idealism collides with economic reality.
>Would add to what you've written above that "house husbands" are not necessarily revered in a positive way by popular culture (like business titans, celebrities, athletes etc.) as important high achievers.
Would you say that "house wives" are? Plenty of popular culture now portrays the woman who stays home to raise her children as a traitor to her gender who should instead be serving as an example to young girls by climbing the corporate ladder and achieving income equality with her husband.
>Women in general want men who can slay the dragon and bring home the meal and make a comfortable life (which of course varies greatly on the woman).
I think it would be more accurate to say that women want both, and when that doesn't obtain and it comes down to a choice between "has a stable well-paying job" and "never has to stay late for work" the man standing on the unemployment line tends to lose. Which modern society has caused to be increasingly the case for women as well -- hence the increase in demand for daycare but not the increase in demand for homemakers of either gender.
"who should instead be serving as an example to young girls by climbing the corporate ladder"
Agree that seems to be the case.
"I think it would be more accurate to say that women want both"
Agree once again but I'll add this to that thought.
People (men are probably just as guilty) want to be able to combine the best qualities of many different people in one person to come up with the uber human. Using the example of women my ex wife comes to mind. She would take the best qualities of several different husbands of her friends and hold me to the standards of the combined person.
Because it's possible that the way our society behaves and judges success is modelled more after men's natural inclinations and needs than women's, and that the liberation of women was seen as women pursuing the same goals as men do, when perhaps it should have been women pursuing slightly different goals.
It's possible that feminism as a movement overshot, a mistake that's easy to forgive. Women needed to be made free, badly, and in that feminism drove incredibly important changes. However, many have come to believe that applying equal success standards for woman actually doesn't pay enough respect to women's distinct needs. It's possible that men and women, on average, just don't experience well being and meaningful lives from the exact same things.
In a way, the historical ideals of feminism may be another act of chauvinism - applying the standards of men to women (instead of say, applying the standards of women to men). Perhaps "real" feminism should acknowledge that men and women have distinct enough needs to not be judged according to the same standards of "success". Perhaps, it should be acknowledged that equality means equal rights, not equal needs or equal desirable outcomes.
I think you hit the nail on the head in the way our society behaves and judges success. Even for men, goals are different. My definition of success may not necessarily be the same as yours. Yet in society, in the media, a successful person is someone who has made it career-wise. If I started a small business and manage it well that I can support a family, should that not be considered success as well?
The same can be said about happiness. Everyone talks about how we need to save people in less developed nations and bring in new technology to do things the "better" way. I believe that developing nations have far greater things to teach us developed nations about what life and happiness is about.
“Can’t you see this game is crooked?” Devol asked. “Sure I know it, George,” sighed Bill with resignation, “but it’s the only game in town.”
Prior to the rise of feminism, a male dominated workplace was arguably the only game in town.
From talking to my wife, the notion that you're obligated by feminism and by your sex/gender to pursue success seems distinctly second-wave feminism, whereas I suspect the likes of third-wave folks' opinions are a lot less uniform.
(As an aside, I find these differences kind of fascinating. Supposedly the word "ladies" carries different connotations depending on your generation; older generations are likely to see it as patronizing, whereas younger ones are likely to see it less negatively.)
Anyway, the bottom line is that as far as modern feminism is concerned, it's more important that you are empowered to choose whether you want to climb the ladder; be a stay-at-home parent; have a child without being married, etc. It's more about empowerment of choice, for women in particular but for individuals in general (e.g. more time at home for parents, better childcare options, and so on, would all improve quality of life for men and women).
That's exactly as it should be, but not everyone has jumped on that wagon yet. I've heard a "a woman mostly taking care of her kids at home could not be truly happy" sentiment expressed often enough.
This is true. There's a ton of debate about it in third-wave feminist circles from what I can tell.
There's a Catch-22 goes something like: as more women join the workplace, they act as role models and (for lack of a better term) envoys. If/when little girls see women doing things, it'll seem that much more realistic a choice.
But if feminism is about choice, doesn't that limit your choices by declaring that staying at home to raise kids is in somehow immoral or degrading?
It's also difficult because how do you distinguish your example woman, who made a choice, with a woman who did not have the choice, for (e.g.) socioeconomic reasons? How do you distinguish between someone who felt empowered to make a choice and someone who was socialized to accede to others' needs first?
In general I'd probably be skeptical of someone who said that raising children was more fulfilling than any other pursuit, but what's more important than that is that there should be a choice in the first place. Quite frequently there isn't.
"I have no idea why this has to be so gender specific."
Because it is a reaction to coverage and pressures on women to be overachievers for the sake of feminism and related causes. Other than that, no reason.
I think, though, the conversation regarding women's equality has become so mature that now it's sharing an unignorable overlap with men's struggles. In fact, to ignore the fact that it's universal is to do the argument a disservice, and undercuts the entire point.
Exactly. There are a shocking number of comments making the same point as this comment. Seems like they had missed the context of the article and started pointing at the gender specificity of it... but why?
I don't believe I missed the context of the article - I believe I tried to address that exact issue. The article - and the whole context surrounding the article - are discussing the issues of 'getting ahead' and work-life balance in a way that is very specific to women. They're certainly free to do this, but I believe they consigning themselves to a type of echo-chamber and missing out on incredibly useful philosophy on the subject by trying to constrain it to only women.
When I say that the situation is sad I'm referring to the loss to everyone involved by not realizing that the issue of work-life balance is a truly global issue, and by boxing it in with specifics (such as women only, tech worker only, etc), the debate is far shallower and loses out on a lot of important history.
.. but why?
The reason is that there should be no 'gender specificity' at all in the article. Including it is a mistake and detracts from the very important message and makes it difficult for male experts in the field to enter the discussion as well. It's a loss for everyone involved.
I wouldn't decry the article addressing mostly women, because IMO, work life balance is more an issue for women esp those of us who harbor carrer related ambitions.
In spite of men treating women as equal and sharing responsibilities, in my experience, most of the time women carry the greater part of the daily load related to running a household and tending to children.
Women feel an unspoken pressure from society to have a clean beautiful well run house. Add to that the pressure to look good, be in a good shape and dress well.
They are bombarded with images of professional women in business attire and women in aprons cooking gourmet meals with children frolicking around. They are constantly struggling to be both these type of women.
On the other hand, society and media don't put out so many conflicting images of men. Men have been consistently expected to be bread winners, be successful in their professional life.
I am not saying, men don't understand that with a working wife, they have to lend a helping hand at home, but from what I have seen, women end up carrying most of the daily brunt and they feel like they must because of what they see on tv and thousands of years of history.
In this regard, to make it less gender specific, we would have to assign the term 'second shift', which, although this term is historically used in regard to women, it can also be used for men that have to do the majority of child raising and housework in addition to working full time.
So, if anyone, a man or a woman, is doing the majority of the housework and child raising ('second shift'), this article speaks to them.
> Terribly sad, maybe the next generation of feminists will be able to break out of the box they've made for themselves, and devote themselves to more general philosophic introspection.
This article was written by a women about a book and recent news story about middle class women and work. There isn't an active conspiracy to not include men, this is a woman talking about her experience as a woman. We should expect in this context that men are not a focal point of this story.
To be fair, it was adapted from a speech called "Notes to My Daughter: On Becoming A Woman" delivered at a historically women's college (it appears to be co-ed now) co-sponsored by the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies department. Some context is lost when linking to print only versions.
> You get the feeling that the author has spent so long thinking of women as 'us' and men as 'them' that she actually sees the two as two completely separate species.
That cuts both ways. Maybe you see gender in terms of "us" and "them" which is why you felt that article didn't apply to you. Just because the subjects are a different gender doesn't mean you can't relate to them.
> Terribly sad, maybe the next generation of feminists will be able to break out of the box they've made for themselves
That's a mighty broad brush you're painting with. Does the author speak for all feminists here, or just herself?
The article is about issues that affect women from a woman's perspective. The article is written in response to another article in the same vein. Moreover they're written to show the change of the author's perspective over time. If what she describes is so gender neutral, do a bunch of pronouns really matter so much?
These are very contextualized, very human conditions. Removing the gender perspective would greatly change (and cheapen) this piece of writing and for what? I'm a man and I can take lessons from a woman's experience. I think it's a good exercise in being flexible and learning more about the self-identity of others.
I found this article illuminating. Women face different social norms and expectations than men do. Maybe some of them don't like this. Maybe some of them do. Regardless, they should be able to write about it from where they are and not to please an audience.
Two problems:
1) I haven't been around for a couple of thousand years, neither have today's women.
2) Overcompensation is the most common of human traits. Ought we not strive for what is fair today?
I really don't mean any offense because I think you are well-meaning here, but your response reads like "Why wasn't this article written with me in mind??".
I think the answer to that question is: because you are not a working mother.
Sometimes it seems like men are used to being the default audience for everything (probably because for most things, they are), and are surprised when someone writes something without considering their perspective. You see this all the time with boys on Reddit; they are constantly shocked that some of the content there is submitted by women (even Hacker News is guilty of this on occasion).
Yes, you could benefit from some of the key points of this article, and yes the author does think of women as a group with unique interests.
That's because they ARE a group with different experiences. I tried to pretend this wasn't true for a long time, because it is quite inconvenient, but eventually I had to give up and admit it; our society holds women and men to different standards and expectations. I think women are much more likely to notice these differences and become frustrated by them (though not all will, of course). Gendered advertising, objectification, and media failing the Bechdel test are things I notice on a daily basis. It's not surprising to me that a woman would want to write about her experience as a working mother.
"She doesn't think to write about people, but only about women."
Women are people, my friend. It's ok for them to write about their unique experiences.
I had this exact same thought. She laments the fact that women made so many strides in their professional place, but not in demanding a cultural shift to accommodate work/life balance, and yet this is something men have been suffering from since before women's rights were even considered.
When these conversations get to this point, I would love for us all to stand together, rather than split by gender. It would certainly make the working class that much more cohesive and strong.
This is the shallow perspective of many men who dismiss modern feminism -- while feeling morally superior -- because they believe that we live in a post-feminist world where circular logic like 'modern feminism is self-defeatist because it focuses on women's issues' can actually appear to make sense.
You can _only_ approach these issues from the context of a society that is just now beginning to reflect and change with regards to concepts like female CEO's, binary genders, and male sensitivity.
Ignoring this social context is counter-productive, naive, and revealing of the issues that exist in modern gender AND race relations with the still-homogenous-but-slowly-declining social group of the middle class white male.
For that matter, it doesn't address the work/life issues faced by the poor, or immigrants, or non-whites, etc.
I agree with you that men also face issues of work/life balance, but it seems unreasonable to expect everybody, every time they speak about a topic, to address all tangentially related topics.
It's not a zero-sum game. By addressing work/life balance issues for women, a topic which she has personal experience with, the author is not depriving other related issues of oxygen.
I think it's okay for a person or group to tackle one issue at a time. Other individuals and groups can tackle other issues. No harm done.
Is no one anywhere on the internet allowed to write something that doesn't speak directly to you?
A genericized article, while perhaps (or perhaps not) being able to make "every argument equally well" would not have been nearly as interesting or topical.
>You get the feeling that the author has spent so long thinking of women as 'us' and men as 'them' that she actually sees the two as two completely separate species.
As is the case with most feminists of today. This is sexism by itself which they don't understand well and the main problem arises simply because they look at things in an extremely binary fashion - If 'something' is sexism or not or if it offends them or not. This is the reason why I am extremely scared (not exaggerating) to sit next to women in tech conferences these days - Simply because I fear I might end up offending them in one way or the other, by doing something I do regularly (like talking about a USB pendrive or a Mac mini) which might have sexual double meanings, which they would then create a huge drama about.
It seems like you think of women as "them" as well. Have you tried listening to what women are trying to tell you, rather than assuming that half the population is so fundamentally irrational that you need to avoid them in public?
I am a woman and I feel disadvantaged compared to men in two ways when it comes to family life:
1) TIME LIMITATION: I need to finish the child-having process by age 36 or so. I want to have a large family, so to have 5 kids, I should start at 28, one kid/2 years. Tracing back, that means I should get married at 27 and find "the one" at ~26. The upper limit of ages to have kids is greater for men, by a decade.
2) ASYMMETRY IN NUMBER OF POTENTIAL PARTNERS: Say, I decide to have a smaller family with 2-3 kids - that would mean I could get married at 33-34 and still be in my productive zone. Well who am I going to potentially marry when I am 33: guys who are 32+ who are not married. Who will unmarried guys 32+ marry: women ages 24 and above. It's not a self-imposed limitation - I might be fine dating 24 year old guys, but would a 24 year old guy date a 33 year old woman, with the intention to get married if all goes well? I doubt it.
So small family or large family, I need to get married by age 27, where I have the maximum number of options to find my soul mate from. Men can get married at 37 and still have many options in choosing their partners.
And the extra decade without family responsibilities without limiting your options for spouses, I would argue, is the biggest differentiator in the workplace successes.
I am a woman and I feel disadvantaged compared to men in two ways when it comes to family life:
Just a completely ridiculous attitude and an example of the article.
Very few men, especially in this day and age" get to say "I want to have 5 kids" or "let's stop at 2 kids" or "I do not want to be a parent".
You are not disadvantaged compared to men in this way, you are incredibly advantaged. Literally have authority over this in a zillion ways men do not.
And the extra decade without family responsibilities without limiting your options for spouses, I would argue, is the biggest differentiator in the workplace successes.
And that's the reason for the article. Women have been told they can have it all: 5 kids and workplace success.
What? Do you only engage in relationships where you're stepped on?
Plenty of men I know have the conversation about how many kids to have or not have. Yes, biologically women do the child-bearing, but it is -- for most couples -- a conversation, a joint decision. Like deciding whether to move to Florida or take care of the aging parents or which career to prioritize.
As is so often true of the poor-me-I'm-a-disadvantaged-man crowd, it sounds like you are choosing to associate with unpleasant people. Respect yourself, and find someone who respects you. Sounds like it would be a nice change.
I am a male and I feel disadvantaged compared to females.
My average life expectancy in the United States is 75.35 years. Female life expectancy is 80.51 years. I can expect to miss out on over 5 years of life as compared to females. This would be the time I would expect to spend as a grandparent. It means I will miss out on a significant portion of my grandchildren's lives. I will probably not see my great grandchildren. Additionally, because of this life expectancy issue I never met one of my grandfather's. The second was experiencing late stage dementia by the time I was old enough to communicate with him. Thus, as a male child I never was able to share the experience or gain examples that female children had with their grandmother's.
It seems to me that commenting on how many kids somebody wants to have is incredibly rude. That's their business, not yours.
I think that history will show that you're on the wrong side of this debate; we should be encouraging good parents to have more children, not less. We're facing a demographic crisis, her kids are going to help maintain the social safety net during your retirement.
And adoption is not a panacea: just ask anyone who's trying to adopt children on just how hard it is.
It was utterly rude and a bad way to treat any commenter, but especially a new one who was trying to add something very valuable—a fresh perspective—to this site. If I were anxx and that were my first impression of HN, I'd think [something that probably shouldn't be printed here] and just go away.
Edit after quick glance at comment history: luckily this isn't anxx's first impression of HN, and hopefully she'll be sticking around.
Hey everyone! Thanks for the concerns, I am a new commenter, but like <<gruseom>> hinted, I have been reading HN for years, so this is not my first impression of the community. I also come from a culture where "gee why aren't you married yet" or "why don't you make more kids" are considered "safe" questions to ask to people, so the deleted-but-quoted comment was not offensive to me (but having also lived in the US, I understand that it could have been).
Anyway, just to reply to some of the comments: I mentioned the # of kids to present some reasoning behind the biological limitation to get married at 27. But kids and family are still fairly distant in the future for me, so it can change, I recognize that (i.e. haven't totally boxed myself in).
But let's even look at the more interesting side: men who want families have the OPTION of staying single well into their thirties without limiting the number of people who they could statistically find a match from. A 35 year old man has many more potential marriage partners than a 35 year old woman. And I think that is not going to change until it is as common for a 35 year old woman to date and marry a 5+ years younger man as it is for the reverse case.
I should mention that I am super open minded about these things - I am just observing some realities around me, not commenting on whether they are good or bad.
I think you have a valid point, but my experience is that it is not nearly as rosy a picture for men.
Most women I came across while dating in my early thirties were not open to the idea of a 5+ year difference. Many women in their mid-twenties consider 30 a magical number that some how makes you "too old". Less then four years of age difference seems to be more along the norm that women looked for. I've seen articles that confirm that as well.
That said, it is true that the exceptions for age difference favor men over women. Not sure what could be done to change that, but having a realistic expectation and timeline of your goal will go a lot further to it success then anything else. You realize you may have to hedge your bets to make it happen. Unfortunately many women will not pay attention to that fact until it is too late to make that choice.
I'm glad you were not offended. One thing, I'm 35 and were I not married I cringe at the thought of dating most 24yr old women. I'll say that in the personal cases of older women that married younger men I know, the men had finished school, had a stable career, got a house, and just got fed-up with all the drama of dating women near their age. But again, sample size may be too small.
> In regards to having 5 kids yourself - please reconsider this. If you do want a large family, rather consider adopting a few to round out your natural child birth. Society could do well with more good parents and a few less unwanted children.
I'm horribly offended you would say such a thing to someone directly. It's not your body, it's not your business, and it's silly to assume she hasn't already considered something like this.
It is not a body and personal choices that is under the question, it is sheer number of people and problems it carries. That does make it everybody's business and easily allows for disapproving statements if nothing else. Population density is a problem for the environment and eventually for people themselves, lowering average quality of life both due to deteriorated environment and strain on resources.
The strategy of relying on expansive growth to support the social net is easy, but ultimately unsustainable (not that I have better ideas though).
Naturally overpopulation is controlled by famines and diseases, technology just moves the mark, it doesn't eliminate it yet (there are still famines around). So everything will work out in the end, but it might be rather unpleasant.
Your comment makes talking about population control feel like a taboo (I'm not sure, is it normally considered as such?), and at first one might oppose it on the same principle one would oppose regular bigotry-of-the-day (homophobia, xenophobia and what have you). I think it should be treated instead akin to telling people they can't just dump industrial waste into a river even if the river is on their own property (for a lack of better example...).
Population taboo isn't the problem. The problem is pleading and attempting to dictate to a person what they should and shouldn't do with their personal life. Considering the USA has actually had the fertility rate drop below replacement levels recently, I think it's a bit silly to tell someone to actually have less babies, and at the same time suggest adoption as a (more costly) alternative.
I'd sincerely suggest you reconsider looking into adjusting the quality of life in countries where high birth rate is actually a problem before telling someone how many babies they should or shouldn't have in a country with a fertility rate below replacement levels.
In a world of scarce resources, frankly it is all of our business. The taboo of openly discussing how many kids one chooses to have should be done away with.
FWIW the vast majority of my friends married in the 20-28 yr old range, as did I. I don't see it as much of a time limit practically really. The ones that married later, I don't know if the sample is large enough at that point, but they all had careers that had them moving from one city to another, so maybe avoid that so that you can stay in one place long enough to make meaningful connections I recommend.
For your second point, yes there is an asymmetry, but I say it's more that the vast majority of everybody I know, their spouse is +/-2yr of their age. I know more couples where the wife is at least five yrs older than the husband than the other way, though the men were in their late twenties when they married. Again the sample size may be too small to draw conclusions from.
> FWIW the vast majority of my friends married in the 20-28 yr old range, as did I. I don't see it as much of a time limit practically really.
There's another angle on this issue. Evidence is accumulating that the reported big increase in autism-spectrum disorders is correlated with late marriage. No one knows why, so it's only a correlation at this point, but it's pretty reliable -- late marriage and late childbearing equals more autism disorders.
Quote: "In unadjusted analyses, both mean maternal age and mean paternal age were significantly higher for ASD cases than for the birth cohort as a whole."
Don't take this in the wrong way, but if spend a lot of time thinking about how unfair things are when there is nothing you can do about it, its going to cause a lot of unnecessary stress in your life.
I think its better to acknowledge the limitations of life and do the best you can.
She's speaking theoretically. But it's the cold fact for women: have kids before you're 40 and disrupt your career (if you're going for an intensive career where goals must be met) or don't have (your own) kids. I'm a woman and whatever way I look at it, it sums up to that.
I'm a man, and I have observed a similar situation ("disrupt your career") holds if I take into account my own vision of how I want to raise my kid. I have had to make some re-adjustments, compromises, changes to the objective function of my life. And that's OK.
If I didn't want to deal with difficult-to-foresee, potentially life-altering consequences of factors outside my control, probably having a kid would not be a good idea.
This is serious stuff, but I don't understand the sense of gloom that seems to pervade these choices, which are, after all, rather joyful in both cases ("fully-realized and consequential career" vs. "parent of a child"). Is it the pain of saying goodbye to a version of yourself that will never be actualized? What about the version that will be?
That's a really good comment you make, and in the exact spirit to the article. She's right - you do have to just decide not to 'play the game'. We, as a society, can make a difference here by hiring parents with young children or ready to have families, being generous where we can, and making time flexible. The issue at hand really only applies to the status quo which we know can topple at any moment given the right circumstances.
"Let's say gravity suddenly shifted a little making everyone a little bit lighter. It would likely make the news circuit for a while and make movers and other professional lifters particularly happy. But after the scientists had explained again and again why it happened and all the potential story lines had been exhausted by newspapers and television pundits, religious zealots and idle conversationalists (“How about that gravity?”), we would accept it, perhaps with a individual joy all our own.
Which is to say, even though a slight shift in gravity on Earth literally changes everything on our home planet, after awhile we’d adjust. Occasionally we might think back to the days before gravity changed with wonder and even nostalgia, but we’d know that everything being lighter is just better on one of those annoyingly and truistically difficult-to-communicate levels and continue with the practice of everyday life, with appropriate changes to this new state of lightness.
Yep. And if you have kids and disrupt the career you're an argument for why women shouldn't be paid as much or selected for the leadership track and if you don't have kids you'll still be judged as if you could pop one out at any moment (and so be paid less and not selected for the leadership track).
It is kind of odd to work for something for years and then feel like you're pouring gasoline all over it and throwing a match: that's how I feel about my career and its collision-to-come with kids. It sucks. Oh well.
The corollary, of course, is that men should also embrace the "good enough" life. If one cannot be successful working 40 hours a week, if taking a sabbatical or two destroys a career then we as a society have failed.
It's win-win, too. People that are happy and do not suffer from chronic stress are much more productive employees. It's better to get a solid 40 hours out of an employee than a poor 80.
I've noticed something happening to me since I've become an "adult". I'm so busy 9 to 5ing it that I don't look out the window anymore. Whenever I do, my pondering is overshadowed by a sense of dread -- that I can't day-dream for long because I've got things to do.
The sum effect of this is that I don't have any good ideas any more. Good ideas are the natural result of day-dreaming. Sometimes I believe the only thing that separates the "innovators" from the "workers" is that one group happens to have the luxury of time such that they can afford to day-dream without any sense guilt.
> if taking a sabbatical or two destroys a career then we as a society have failed.
Damn it, I keep doing this life thing all wrong. I thought taking a decent sabbatical was where careers went to flourish and thrive, not where they went to die.
Aren't sabbaticals usually when people start playing and new and marvelous things come out that they couldn't get done when worried about deadlines and stuff?
Not too long ago we had a discussion about an article which basically stated that anybody who has been unemployed for more than 6 months becomes basically unemployable. There may be a difference between a forced sabbatical and a voluntary one, but the line between the two is often very blurry...
I thought sabbaticals were where you took time away from everything work related and went travelling round the globe. Certainly seemed that way at a big corp I used to work for. Did it myself and know lots of others that did much the same.
Interesting; in academia it's usually thought of as leave from normal day-to-day responsibilities (teaching, supervision, running a lab) in order to enable you to undertake a significant project requiring some time to think, such as writing a book. But in academia the term "sabbatical" usually refers to paid leave, while it sounds like in industry it often refers to unpaid leave. If that's the case, it would make sense that unpaid leave comes with fewer assumptions about what you're supposed to do in the meantime.
Yes I think so. It's a long period you take to do stuff that's important to you, and know you have a job to come back to, but they don't pay you. That's the idea I have anyway.
The company I worked for let you do it for a period of 2 months-2 years, after you'd worked for them a minimum of two years, and at most every ... 5(?) years, something like that. All at management discretion, of course. I think if you wanted to disappear for two years every 5 then you'd have to be very good at your job to keep it. For me it was 6 months after ~5 years.
Interestingly, in Australia, there is statutory long service leave that accrues over 10 years in addition to ordinary leave, so if you work somewhere for 10 years you get about 8 weeks paid time off, which people usually take in one lump to go travelling.
That'd only be worth doing if the cost of hiring a replacement and getting them up to speed is less than just paying 2 months' salary. Sometimes true, sometimes not true.
Beyond that it varies by state. In New South Wales, from what I can gather, the employee can cash out a pro-rata portion of the benefit upon termination if they've been employed for longer than 5 years, unless fired for misconduct. So you'd have to lay everyone off after 4 years 11 months to keep from paying out, which would increase the cost of employee churn even more.
Strange as it may seem, some emplyers value their employees and replacing someone after ten years is going to be a hell of a lot more expensive (in terms of lost value an retraining) than 8 weeks paid leave.
Besides which, you'd probably get screwed in an employment tribunal (IIRC Australia doesn't have 'at-will' style employment like the US)
I always thought it was more along the lines of taking time away from everything work related so you can focus leisurly-ish on pet projects ... or invent a new programming language or whatever.
Wikipedia backs me up: "In recent times, "sabbatical" has come to mean any extended absence in the career of an individual in order to achieve something. In the modern sense, one takes sabbatical typically to fulfill some goal, e.g., writing a book or traveling extensively for research"
"Some companies offer unpaid sabbatical for people wanting to take career breaks; this is a growing trend in the United Kingdom, with 20% of companies having a career break policy, and a further 10% considering introducing one."
Backs me up too :)
Certainly at $large_corp I worked at before (in London) this was increasingly the case, with people taking six months to a year just to explore the world as a career break. I don't know if that counts as focussing on a side project.
Perhaps the term sabbatical is slowly changing from 'time an academic takes out to write a book' to 'I don't want to work my whole life away so I'm taking extended time off'.
Shouldn't everyone learn to embrace a "good enough" life? That's called being happy and appreciative of what you have. Americans especially are striving for more constantly; much of that has to do with the winner-loser nature of capitalism and the fact that the stakes are enormous in this country. Even the wealthy will stress about not being as wealthy as their richer neighbor. It's hard to take a step back and feel content with what you've accomplished so far because you always feel like you could be doing more, like Person X you read about in Blog Y who is founding his fourth successful startup while still managing to spend time with his 5 children.
From minor consumer decisions to fundamental issues like career, a lot of us struggle with painstakingly trying to maximize everything, which often leads to a less satisfying experience than accepting "good enough" for what it is: good enough. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing.
Or fathers, for that matter. I've had nothing but joy from my good-enough life of no scholarly career and no time to write code that will change the world — but all the time in the world to lavish on the two best little girls I've ever met, and a little boy on the way.
I think it's worth pointing out that the author recommends waiting to have kids, and she herself apparently had her first at 38.
This makes a ton of sense, but biology doesn't always care about rational choices like this. From painful personal experience: if you want kids, seriously consider having them by your early 30's, even if you're not completely ready. Otherwise you may find that no amount of money invested in IVF can help.
It may make sense for some, and if your accounting of life only measures money/assets than it may universally make sense, but there are a lot of benefits to having kids earlier. I've met people in their early forties with kids who were fully grown and out of their house. They are able to live as a couple without small children while they are still young and healthy. Also, they can more easily contribute to their grandchildren's childcare because they will be younger and healthier. There's definitely something to be said for that. I had kids at 31 and 33 and I find it really hard and tiring to care for them now at 37. I can't even imagine what it would feel like if I was over 50.
Personally I think younger is better, but it's different for everyone.
My wife and I started having kids at a young age with exactly this in mind. We weren't trying to live it up in our twenties, and we figured we'd enjoy our time together just as much in our 40's and 50's as our kids left the house.
Having more energy because we're younger is also nice. ;-)
I think "good enough" needs to be a guiding principle, but I hate that that light of introspection is never cast on child-rearing. Frankly, all the shit you do for your kids when they're young is for you, not them. They won't even remember most of it, other than the general feeling of being loved.
My model is really asian immigrant families. Those families where the parents work all day at a restaurant or dry cleaner, for far more than the "50 hours a week" the author here finds "not compatible with family life." And generally their kids come out great. Hard working and studious. That's "good enough" parenting.
pardon my french, but you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
this is not even remotely true, this is a trope, an outdated stereotype. oftentimes these kids come out socially maladjusted, suicidal and/or homicidal, or somewhere else on the human spectrum other than 'great'. this 'model minority' viewpoint is harmful in the extreme.
and for the past 20 or so years the 'restaurant' or 'dry cleaner' is more likely to be 'software company' or 'biotech company'. or even something mundane like "works for the port authority" or "imports couches from malaysia."
things have changed slightly since the 1960s, okay?
go to a University of California campus and ask how many of the thousands of asian kids you see if their parents owned a dry cleaner or a restaurant. you're going to either get laughed at, or punched in the face for asking offensive questions.
this is hackernews, i would expect a little bit more depth of thought than "asian immigrants own dry cleaners and their kids are so well behaved." are you SERIOUS?
> pardon my french, but you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Uh, I'm the child of asian immigrant parents and know tons of people who are also, so I do kinda know what I'm talking about.
> oftentimes these kids come out socially maladjusted, suicidal and/or homicidal, or somewhere else on the human spectrum other than 'great'.
Kids from all sorts of upbringings come out that way. Those are outliers. In my experience, kids from asian immigrant households are far less likely to suffer from more run of the mill maladies: aimlessness, lack of motivation, drug use that interferes with life, etc.
> this 'model minority' viewpoint is harmful in the extreme.
My super competitive east coast high school, which has a race-blind admissions system, has a freshman class this year that's 65% asian in a county that's only 18% asian. These kids are vastly disproportionately the children of relatively recent immigrants. Asian overachieving isn't an imagined phenomenon, and parenting style has a lot to do with it.
> and for the past 20 or so years the 'restaurant' or 'dry cleaner' is more likely to be 'software company' or 'biotech company'.
My comment was directed at asian immigrants who own dry cleaners and restaurants, it doesn't presume that all asian immigrants own dry cleaners and restaurants.
> go to a University of California campus and ask how many of the thousands of asian kids you see if their parents owned a dry cleaner or a restaurant.
Most of the asian kids at UCB aren't the children of recent immigrants (California has a very large well-assimilated asian population). Most children of recent asian immigrants aren't at UCB.
yeah, me too, and LOTS of my personal anecdotal evidence is 180 degrees opposite to yours, which is my point. you are describing the upper elite of our demographic group (of which i am also a member) as somehow the mode or the mean for 'asians', and i am cautioning you against that.
it's really easy to be 'proud' of achievement and cheerlead and go "look at us aren't we great" but you need to be aware of selection and survivor bias, especially in the context of your elite east coast schooling which you prattle on about so boastfully.
during my life i have known plenty of underachieving cokehead rich kid asians and struggling yet intelligent lower class inner city asians.
> you are describing the upper elite of our demographic group (of which i am also a member) as somehow the mode or the mean for 'asians', and i am cautioning you against that.
I'm not describing it as the mode or the mean. I'm saying that, per my anecdotal experience, asian kids at any given income level are less likely to turn out with serious problems than other kids at the same income level.
> it's really easy to be 'proud' of achievement and cheerlead and go "look at us aren't we great"
I'm not cheerleading. I don't even identify as "asian" in any meaningful sense. My point is to address the myth that raising good kids means sacrificing your time to go to their school plays and little league games and whatnot. I use asians as an example not to cheerlead, but because that myth is far less prevalent among immigrant asian parents.
> especially in the context of your elite east coast schooling which you prattle on about so boastfully.
There's nothing elite about it, it's a public school. I mention it because: 1) it's got a race-blind admissions system, unlike elite colleges, so the asian population isn't artificially deflated; 2) it's a pretty stark example of asian over-representation, in a county where the median household income for asians, while high, is actually less than that for whites by a substantial margin. I also specifically mention the "east coast" part, because in my experience east coast asians are far less assimilated than west coast asians, as there is a far smaller population of asians who have been in the U.S. for generations.
Again, this article was a criticism directed at Sheryl Sandberg, implying that she gave her kids a compromised upbringing by not making them her only priority. And I think that's a load of crap.
Asian immigrant parents produce just as many problematic first-generation asian kids. The middle-upper class asian bubble of a community I grew up in may have seemed affluent, filled with polite and studious kids, but the undercurrents of bored, overachieving, over-pressured teens lost to gangs and drugs are never talked about.
The asian kids that do come out hardworking and studious from our tiger parents are not all rainbows and sprinkles either, as many are stunted in emotional development and social communication due to the extreme discipline and pressure we had to deal with growing up.
Lastly, and most ironically, asian immigrant parents always push their kids to be the best, and being "good enough" is never enough. The pressure to achieve, the detached politeness of the traditional asian culture -- there are plenty of cracks that a misguided teenager could fall into.
"Good enough" can be applied to job, money, work, and any other tangible thing. But humans and emotions make the world go 'round, and when you have the future of an innocent, malleable human being in your hands, there is no such thing as "good enough" parenting. That is the entire dilemma being discussed here for women - compromising to be "good enough" at work so that they can be "good to the best of their ability" for their children. Not the other way around.
The idea that hard-working asians are "maladjusted" is mostly veiled racism. And the idea that there are no diminishing returns to parenting time invested is unsubstantiated hand-waving.
I assume you work in tech? I've encountered many "maladjusted" people in tech--I don't think a disproportionate share of them were asian. The only "maladjustment" I have encountered disproportionately among asians, awkwardness with women, has more to do with conservative cultural attitudes about sex and dating than anything to do with parents spending too much time at work or not giving them enough attention.
Besides that, the other stuff is racism or at least ethnocentrism. Contemporary American culture places a weird value on being "well rounded" that is alien both to asian culture and to American culture of years past. That's where a lot of the pressure on parents to invest time comes from--gotta take little Timmy to soccer practice and school plays so he'll be "well rounded." Gotta invest the time to help him cultivate a wide range of interests and hobbies, get involved in the community, etc. It's an upper-class pretension that harkens back to the days when having a variety of hobbies and interests was the mark of the elite who didn't have to work for a living.
A big part of your Asian immigrant model is centered upon grandparents and relatives helping raise the children during their early years while the parents are out working.
In a second generation Asian (or in my case Indian) family, the grandparents are still working full time, they live in a different city, and there's no family owned business which can provide a flexible schedule and avoid tax/labor laws for the immigrant model to work. Parents have to step up or pay for round the clock childcare.
I live in Vancouver. If the Asian "tiger mom" parent is producing "great kids", I want absolutely nothing to do with it.
This style of parenting - on a purely anecdotal level - is producing near disasters of people. Especially from a North American culture's perspective. I see a lot of these bad habits in Caucasian parents as well. Over-scheduled, overworked and over-pampered kids that can't make a single choice on their own, can't accept failure and don't even know what they like!.
I think you completely missed the point. What's good enough for the kids may not be good enough for the parents. It's the parents that are yearning to spend more time with their kids and to say yes more to the "play with me." Even more so than the begging child.
It's about identifying the costs and benefits and it is different for everyone because the benefits are not measurable. If your immigrant family invested in a security system and hired an employee to manage the store so they could spend fewer hours there, that cost is measurable. Their added well being or happiness from spending that time with their children instead of at their business is not easily quantifiable and is more of a feeling. The point of the article is that for many people the trade is worth it and they're better off spending more time with family than at work.
Besides, the excessive hours running your business is the e-myth anyhow. They're better off learning how to leverage the work of others.
All that being said, some people want to have kids but they really don't enjoy spending a lot of time with kids (even their own). Those people are definitely better served by focusing on their work and outsourcing childcare.
> What's good enough for the kids may not be good enough for the parents.
That's certainly true, but orthogonal to what I'm talking about. It's one thing to downshift your career because you want to spend more time with your kids. It's another thing to do so because you tell (incorrectly) that working long hours is "not compatible with family life." My objection is to people who justify downshifting because of imagined benefits to the kids, not real benefits to themselves.
Is anyone surprised that this thread is dominated by men, whose only response is to complain that its unfair that this article addresses women only? Not only is the complaint crass, but it avoids discussing the article's thesis at all.
If we can't recognize that women face different and more pressure around the issue of work/children balance than men do, then sexism isn't dead yet.
It's not so much unfair as...perplexing. The article seems to imply that women will be happier placing more emphasis on family, but at the moment the mean-time-working-women-spend-with-their-families is greater than mean-time-working-men-spend-with-their-families; stay-at-home moms outnumber stay-at-home dads by approximately a bajillion to one.
In other words, if there is a bunch of free happiness to be gained by emphasizing family more, addressing that advice to women _in particular_ seems...inefficient.
"Is anyone surprised that this thread is dominated by men, whose only response is to complain that its unfair that this article addresses women only? "
Is that a complaint about it being unfair that it's women only? I don't see it. This is not the only response of the men in this thread, stop generalising. If you have a problem with specific posts then why not answer them?
Man, 117 comments and counting, and yet not one mention of the woman who serves as the jumping off point to the article's story.
I'd like to note firstly that I really enjoyed the piece, but the judgement of another humans choices left a bad taste in my mouth. If Mark Zuckerberg had written a book around the challenges of men's life in his generation, would a similar article have been written?
I think that its somewhat sad that the response to one woman sharing her story regarding what makes her life fulfilling being dismissed as the wrong choice by another woman. I'm relatively sure that it would be a very different conversation we would be having, perhaps not better or worse, but different in a way that highlights some of the craziness in our culture regarding the roles of women (and men).
As other people have pointed out, this article seems to argue that women should have work-life balance as if it were a problem specific to women. But that assumption itself is a huge part of the problem women face in achieve de fact equality. It is often taken as a given that a woman should be the primary care-taker of children. It is often taken as a given that woman is _naturally_ more invested in family life. It is often taken as a given that women need more life in the whole work-life balance equation. These sort of assumptions reify the norm that men work and women stay at home. Sandburg and her cohort advocate for an extreme repudiation of this norm even to the extent of abandoning work-life balance as a whole. One might argue that Sandburg is too much of a capitalist robot, but to revert in the other direction is just as bad, if not totally regressive.
I am so tired of this overgeneralization and oversimplification of a subject that is bound to be extremely personal and different from person to person.
Blanket statements like "why women should ~~" or "why men should ~~" are never ever going to be true and these media outlets and writers need to stop using these cover-all phrases that are bound to be met with disapproval from ~80% of the relevant population.
Relax :). Everything is a generalization or simplification, unless you're looking at research papers all day. And those will make for dry conversation eventually, in addition to halting pretty much all efficient communication. "BUT WAIT, what was the sample size?" "I can't make a decision because the relevant and precise research has not been completed yet."
It's in the opinion section. It applies to a subset of people. I think many people understand that. Maybe even ~80% of all people. With 3 std deviations of confidence.
I don't really care for Sheryl Sandberg or Marisa Mayer, but I like Anne-Marie Slaughter. Heard her speak a few times, when I was at Princeton.
I really think this discussion is about "What [White] [American] Women Want". It's a shame that women's lib is constrained to only this fraction of the population. They want it all, even as some women still don't have anything.
How about what Black and Asian men want? Or what Arab and Hispanic women want?
On paper, we are willing to accept equality between men and women, white people and people of color. In the professional realm, it becomes very risky - financially and socially - to enforce these ideals.
It is still deeply engrained in us to trust only those people who are similar to us.
Meh, and the next job posting is going to look for the 120% committed software engineer who has no higher priorities than creating the next big thing in mobile|ads|facebook apps.
Much of the advice in here is really good and actually applies to men too. It seems obvious to point out that a multidimensional life is richer, but it took me a long time to find out. Family life and personal development are no less important than a career, but the latter takes up, almost by default, most of our critical cycles. Creating the proper balance requires that we step back and evaluate how to spend our lives rather than merely following the well worn patterns. I doubt that anybody wishes, upon dying, that they had spent more time at the office.
I think, in general, we should be supporting people to "do whatever they want" as long as they aren't hurting other people. When we start prescribing set paths to anyone, you get these problems. Thus, all the garbage around some people thinking homosexuals don't deserve the basic human right to choose their partners and live in officially recognized relationships with them. Many other examples, too numerous to count, basically all boil down to "Just quit trying to tell other people what to do, you damned busy-bodies."
Because life is too short and full of other, imperfect humans, so you just have to get along as best you can and enjoy what you've got while you have it?
(OK, I'll go read the article now)
--edit-- don't think I was too far off there. Missed the "don't aspire to spend your whole life working" thing.
Question - are women not yet fed up of being told what to do by various talking heads yet? I thought feminism was in essence the belief (which I subscribe to wholeheartedly) that women have the same power of and right to self-determinism as men? How does this mesh with endless essays about how women ought to be living?
--edit-- (it's entirely possible that most women pay no attention I guess, I pay no attention to people telling me how I ought to live)
An article called "why coders should embrace C++" would get lots of flak around here, and deservedly so. But it's a much smaller field with many fewer options than the entirety of life. Do we really believe there is a definition of the "good life" that applies to half the population?
It costs me $2800/month to send my kids to daycare. For a similar amount of money, we could probably hire a nanny. What we pay is not out of line for the area that we live in. This is a decision that many middle class parents will face. We are decidedly upper-middle class, but I know middle-middle class parents with a "servant" just for this reason.
There are very few women who wouldn't like a nanny or part-time help if it were affordable. We used to live with our extended families and children need a lot of attention. Evolution of our fantastic childhood development went hand-in-hand with our social structure having lots of people around to watch children who are always doing dangerous things.
I thought this was the most brutal critique out of all of the attacks, high brow and low, that I've seen of Sheryl Sandberg and her book.
"And third, I have to wonder if Sandberg does not realize that she is going to die someday. There is so little life and pleasure in her book outside of work. Even sex is framed as something that men will get more of if they pitch in and help their working wives."
As a guy, that is about the worst thing someone could say to me because it means even if I have accomplished an immense amount I have done so without any meaning. In a sense, I have been fooled and deceived in to doing all that I have done for a mere unreachable carrot on a string.
The majority of responses to this are the same criticism I've had with the source material (Sandberg's book). A few twists and turns aside, the idea that there is a separate set of rules (and values) for each gender can go away now.
The idea that things are now symmetrical is a bit of a contentious one. There are different periods of fertility alone hit pretty hard still with our society of parent paid childcare
I am pretty sure that most men do not negotiate salary either. It is hard to believe that a significant percentage of pay gap between sexes is determined by negotiation skills. And the whole "don't take the first offer" thing is just silly, though it may work in case the first offer is really bad. Going by the title of the article, if the offer is 'good enough' for you, you should take it.
As lots of posters have already said, the solution to work-life balance is not more benefits to working mothers. It is more benefits for everyone. Paid parental leaves for both women and men and more time off.
> It is hard to believe that a significant percentage of pay gap between sexes is determined by negotiation skills
Don't shortchange the effects of compounding on those negotiations. Most raises of BOTH sexes are percentage based. But those percentages apply ALSO to the past gravy earned by negotiation. So 4k extra at 24 turns into 4,000 *(1.04)^26 (a hair over 11k) at age 50 from just negotiating that ONE time. And that's PER YEAR. And that doesn't take into effect FURTHER negotiations.
Now that's not to say it's the WHOLE story, but teach your children of both sexes to negotiate
People (regardless of sex) are different, no one can tell you how to live your own life, only you can.
For some people "good enough" will mean a rewarding and successful life, for others "good enough" will never be good "enough", even if it means being potentially unsatisfied in the end.
Success and happiness in life shouldn't be measured by absolute standards (which I feel is one of the points of the author).
I like this article a lot. I have always thought it very shortsighted to strive for the life that men have. The tradeoff that many men make (more time working, less time with family) are advantageous from a biological point of view, but, frankly, they are terrible from a moral point of view.
As a result of our biology, many men have this insatiable appetite for advancing our careers. The reason for this appetite is to build wealth, fame, and power, which then enables us to attract more mates and, hopefully (from our genes' point of view), have more children. Now, this is not to say that men sit there thinking about how working over the weekend will get them more future mates. No, instead, we just have this blind urge to work and that blind urge gets us into a situation that enables the other stuff.
While this may make a lot of sense from the point of view of our genes, in my opinion, it doesn't make sense morally. To me, a person should work enough to be comfortable and spend the rest of the time building relationships with the people they care about. I just can't see a justification for choosing money, fame, and power over nourishing and building your relationships. And, knowing that attracting mates is the whole point of working in excess of what's necessary to meet basic needs, I just can't understand why anybody would want to adopt that strategy.
So, coming from that point of view, while I completely agree that women who choose (or need) to work should enjoy the same opportunities for career advancement that men do, I think equal emphasis should be given to increasing the respect that we, as a society, have for the roles that women have traditionally played. That way, women can be women (whatever that means to them; as a man, I cannot speak to this) and be respected as equals.
As an example of what I mean by respecting the roles that women have traditionally played: at the company where I work, we recently had two women give birth. They had _NO_ maternity leave. Any time they took off was either sick time, vacation time, or unpaid. To me, this is unacceptable.
So, to go back to my earlier point, it is important that these two women have the same career opportunities as men, but I think it's equally important that we respect their roles as mothers by creating an environment where they can spend an adequate amount of time with their newborns, without having to worry about whether or not the bills will get payed.
Note: I am a straight, white, and male. I have not been thinking about these issues for a long time, so please elevate me if I'm getting things wrong.
Why do people submit print versions to a website where people will be reading it on a screen? I shouldn't have to download a Readability extension to get your submission to have a reasonable line width.
And if the submitter hadn't, there would be someone else asking for a print view because they don't like the pagination, or the ads, or the lack of reasonable line width.
The idea with print view is that everything is on one page and as minimal as possible to allow you to focus on the content. Everyone has their own view about it, as your comment shows.
That wasn't exactly my point. My point was that a significant number of people would prefer to have the non-paginated, advertisement-free version of the article. Others would rather have the layout that the site was intended to use.
Whether or not people actually like screen-width reading, some prefer to see this format and will ask for it much in the same way others will ask to not see it.
Because sometimes the full versions are nigh unreadable, split into multiple pages (which don't interact properly with the back button), with popups and share buttons and a bunch of CPU-sucking flash ads in the middle of the text.
Submitter here. The original article was on four or five pages, loaded with ads and links, and may have also had the same readability problem that you experienced. Sorry it's hard to read on your device, but there's not much I can do.
Terribly sad, maybe the next generation of feminists will be able to break out of the box they've made for themselves, and devote themselves to more general philosophic introspection.