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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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 think where you find big gender gaps in career paths you are looking at awful jobs.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
In the US, sure, but there are other countries with other models...
Nothing wrong with that, but mother goes first for obvious biological reasons.
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. :(
https://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/fulltext/S1931-3128(1...
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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...
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"
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?
Law exhibits a bimodal distribution in compensation as well. Paralegals make even less than poorly compensated lawyers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is really a bad thing, because women are generally superior to men at tasks involving fine motor skills.
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.