Must-Read: Judith Shulevitz: How to Fix Feminism: “IN an important new book, ‘Finding Time’…
…Heather Boushey argues that the failure of government and businesses to replace the services provided by ‘America’s silent partner’–the stay-at-home wife–is dampening productivity and checking long-term economic growth. A company that withholds family leave may drive away a hard-to-replace executive. Overstressed parents lack the time and patience to help children develop the skills they need to succeed. ‘Today’s children are tomorrow’s work force,’ Ms. Boushey writes. ‘What happens inside families is just as important to making the economy hum along as what happens inside firms.’
Knowing that motherhood can derail a career, women are waiting longer and longer to have children…. I recently got into an argument with a professor friend about the plausibility of restructuring higher education and the professions so that women–and men–wouldn’t have to hustle for positions like partner or associate professor just as they reach peak fertility. Many universities, I said, now stop the tenure clock for a year when assistant professors have children. My friend laughed. A year is nothing when it comes to a baby, she said. She’d never have won tenure if she’d had her son first. I didn’t know what to say. At least she had a child, unlike friends who waited until too late….
What if child-rearing weren’t an interruption to a career but a respected precursor to it, like universal service or the draft?… American families, particularly low-income families, can’t do without a double income, given wage stagnation and the cost of children in a country that won’t help parents raise them. But having to work should not be confused with wanting to work…. Marissa Mayer, now chief executive of Yahoo, reported that when she was in Google’s employ, she slept under her desk, one disgusted feminist, Sarah Leonard, wrote, ‘If feminism means the right to sleep under my desk, then screw it.’… Feminism… should not mean… a politics of the possible. We’re fighting for 12 weeks of leave when we need to rethink the basic chronology of our lives…
This is, I would note, what Larry Summers said eleven years ago we should think very hard about, as an economy, as a society, and as a culture:
Larry Summers (2005): Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce: “[In] major corporations… [at] large law firms… [in] prominent teaching hospitals, and… [in] other prominent professional service organizations, as well as… in higher education…
…the story is fundamentally the same. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, we started to see very substantial increases in the number of women who were in graduate school in this field. Now the people who went to graduate school when that started are forty, forty-five, fifty years old. If you look at the top cohort in our activity, it is not only nothing like fifty-fifty, it is nothing like what we thought it was when we started having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being female, twenty or twenty-five years ago. And the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to…. That is a reality…. What does one make of that?…
Speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively… the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work… a large number of hours in the office… a flexibility of schedules… a continuity of effort…. That is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That’s not a judgment about how it should be…. That expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe….
What fraction of young women in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don’t want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week? What fraction of young men make a decision that they’re unwilling to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week?… That has got to be a large part of what is observed.
Now that begs entirely the normative questions…. Is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity?…
To buttress conviction and theory with anecdote, a young woman who worked very closely with me at the Treasury and who has subsequently gone on to work at Google highly successfully, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Business School. She reports that of her first year section, there were twenty-two women, of whom three are working full time at this point. That may, the dean of the Business School reports to me, that that is not an implausible observation given their experience with their alumnae…
