Posted on 28. Nov, 2005 by rebel in General

There is some deep-thinking analysis is this American Prospect article due out next month that has knocked me — temporarily — off of my obsessive convention focus. (Though, of course, I began posting to the wiki over the weekend.)

The Prospect piece seeks to tackle familiar ground: what can be done to attack the underlying set of circumstances that “forces” women to opt out of the workforce. If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I get worked up every six months or so when the New York Times runs one of their piece about women cheerfully chucking professional life. Apparently, Linda Hirshman, who wrote the Prospect article, feels the same way.

Hirshman does a great job of describing the problem. Her solutions, however, are a bit odd, though. She proposes a number of strategies to make it easier for women to continue to work, mostly operating on the theory that women who outearn their mates will be best able to slough off the role of primary caregiver on their husband. I’m going to leave aside the obvious objection — raising kids ain’t a bad gig, especially if you can afford it — and throw out my usual work-life plea instead.

The ideal situation for most families should be shared parenting, where a child has ample doses of both parents. The best way to make that happen is through workplace flexibility: alternative schedules, ample part-time work (with benefits), telecommuting options, etc. There is no reason why the workplace in 2005 needs to run like it did in 1981, when the phone company was a monopoly, fax machines were considered something close to black magic and the internet was powered by 213 computers. If you could build businesses around the concepts advocated by Joan Williams at UC-Hastings — proportional pay, benefits and advancement for part-timers — a lot of Hirshman’s concerns would disappear. You’d have happy workers and happy parents, and there’s evidence you’d have good parents and good workers, too.

Is this all starry-eyed? You betcha. But I’d rather see a concerted effort to get there than to get to Hirshman’s utopia, where the martial market is some kind of bottom-line driven race to buy out of childcare.