I have seen this point of view and understand where it's coming from, but I think it puts the cart before the horse. Maybe it should be the case that society should define success not by the status of your profession and the size of your bank account, but by your other contributions. However, at the current time, it does not. In the United States, money is everything. It decides whether your kids go to a decent school, whether you get medical care, whether you can live in a place without intolerable crime. We live in this society: http://blog.figuringshitout.com/the-parable-of-the-fisherman.

Within this context, "opting out" means depending on a man for security, and telling women that "motherhood is more fulfilling than work" is encouraging them to be dependent. My wife sees it as rationalization--women trying to convince themselves that people do respect parenting because they should respect it.

Anecdote: when my wife had trouble finding a job initially in law school, a career counselor tried to comfort her by pointing out that at least I had a good job. To a person who yearns to be self-sufficient it wasn't comforting--it was devastating.

Unless you're independently wealthy, you can't be self-sufficient. Is depending on your spouse really any different than depending on your boss/corporation for money? I'd argue that if your spouse "pays the bills" you actually have more independence because you're free all day to pursue entrepreneurial options and/or family and hobbies. You can take risks and be independent in a way that an employee cannot.

> Is depending on your spouse really any different than depending on your boss/corporation for money?

Yes, those are extremely different. There are very few ways in which an employment relationship is anything like a spousal relationship.

It's easier to change bosses if the current one happens to be a jerk than change spouses. Independent career helps in both cases.

The irony of these observations is that the obvious strategy for fixing this addresses both problems, of women being dragged down in their careers by the baggage associated with expectations of women parents, and of men being chained to pointlessly demanding jobs: we need to rewire the terms of full-time jobs to be more compatible with family life.

I don't think that's a realistic solution. No matter what terms you write there will always be someone willing to work crazy hard and ignore their life in return for financial reward. That person is always going to get ahead of someone that wants more balance.

It's not clear to me whether companies that clear the path for "overperformers" like that are going to outperform companies that do their best to shield their team from this stag hunt problem.

Maaaaybe. But this line of thinking sometimes strikes me as have your cake and eat it too thinking. It would be really nice if the world worked that way for sure, but the idea that harder work leads to greater returns seems pretty robust to me.

The premise of your comment is that the productivity-maximizing strategy for managing a company is to allow everyone to work at their maximum personal tolerance.

But that's not necessarily true; it's possible to imagine a scenario where you net out ahead by buying improved median productivity at the expense of reduced maximum individual productivity.

Think of it game-theoretically, assume a coordination problem that penalizes defectors (here, people who don't sacrifice their personal lives for improved productivity), and then bear in mind that some workers might be required to defect no matter what the rules of the game are.

The strategy you want obviously depends on your mix of natural cooperators vs. natural defectors.

It's certainly possible that you are correct. But isn't the over performance of the US economy compared to Western Europe (where they have made the kind of tradeoff you propose) evidence to the contrary?

It's evidence that the dial settings Europe uses aren't productivity-maximizing, but not evidence that "optimize for maximum individual productivity" is the productivity-maximizing strategy.

> Why is that bad? Why is it that women are the worst when espousing the idea that life isn't about career ambition?

Because this is not their life that they are talking about.

There has been something of a pendulum swing in feminist thought. The second wave was all about reducing barriers to women from being full participants in society. Along with that came an ideology that essentially said that gender was social constructed, and that if only we didn't impose them on children men and women could be essentially interchangeable.

The efforts were largely successful (albeit not completely) but in the third wave* there has been a severe backlash against the ideology and the social pressures that it raised. That's what your are talking about in your comment. There's was a movement to say -- it's okay to want to be a homemaker, it's okay to wear clothes that make you feel sexy, it's okay to want men to hold the door for you.

I think it's swung too far the other direction. While it was originally "okay" there's a lot of voices out there saying, implicitly or explicitly, that it's "natural" to want to play all those traditional gender roles. That women who run companies, or nations, or work 80 hours a week are unnatural, ruining it for everyone else, or lying to themselves. That if you are a successful single women you nonetheless have a duty to the sisterhood to fight for mothers' issues because of your gender.

In other words, I think it's time for a backlash to the backlash.

*ignoring for the movement the race/class/international/gay aspects of third wave feminism

> erasing this imbalance by grading successful women by the same rubric as successful men. But this is the wrong idea, and it seems to establish this extremely misguided notion that the men had it right all along

Some people want career success. Some people want to take care of a family. There are both genders in each group, but society only supports one gender in each. A feminist point is people of both genders should be supported in whichever endeavor fulfills them.

ps You are not a feminist.

Society is more accepting of men who join street gangs (rather than corporations). However, I think correcting that imbalance by focusing on how society treats women in gangs, rather than how society treats men in gangs, would be a mistake. Don't you?

It is surely an imbalance that needs correcting, but there is legitimate question as to how that imbalance is best corrected.

> A feminist point is people of both genders should be supported in whichever endeavor fulfills them.

this may be how it looks on paper, but in reality the 'right wing' (hah) of feminism hijacks the agenda.

modern feminism is like the republican party of gender relations.

Ha, you know, I started reading this reply and thought "This really reminds me of TLP's writing." Then I saw the link at the bottom. Cheers.

Great link, thank you.