Posted on 05. Feb, 2004 by Brian Reid in General
I missed one heck of an interest op-ed piece last month. I think it appeared first in the LA Times. This is the version that I stumbled across.
In short, a couple of deep-thinking law types suggest that the reason that women aren’t zipping to the top of the work world (see yesterday’s post for additional discussion of the problem) is that men simply aren’t making the sacrifices at home to let their wives climb the corporate ladder without too much baggage.
Fair enough, I thought — it’s a point I had long accepted. But the piece had a couple of nice statistical bits that I hadn’t seen before. For starters, the article cited a survey of 160,000 science and engineering doctoral recipients and found that 82 percent of those working women had a husband who was also working. To contrast, only 43 percent of the men with the same degrees had wives working fulltime. (See the data in this chart.)
And the opinion piece cited one heck of a stat from Princeton University. A survey found not a single married woman on Princeton’s faculty has a spouse that’s out of the labor force. Not one. Men, in contrast, have a better than one in four chance of having an at-home mom in the house and better than a 50 percent chance that their wife works no more than part time. (See the full report here. The money stats are in Table 20, in Appendix B4.)
These are not inconsequential figures. In academia, where the price of admission in terms of life-years is higher than any other profession with the possible — possible — exception of medicine, women are indeed at a huge disadvantage in being the ones who generally bear the brunt of family commitments.
Here’s the kicker to the editorial: “Employers have a critical role to play in making it easier for more parents to balance work and home, to be sure. But so do the husbands or partners with whom women live. Being a working parent can be tiring, demanding and sometimes exasperating. Still, with shared responsibilities at home and understanding at the office, it’s also enormously gratifying. For men and women both.“
G.
05. Feb, 2004
Anecdotally — a couple years back I attended a national junior faculty award program with my wife (the junior academic I know best).
Of that population of twenty younger academics working in science and technology, seven were women. Of those seven, my wife appeared to be the only one who had chosen to have a child.
Of the the thirteen men it was those who came without nuclear families and kids in tow who were the remarkable ones-perhaps two or three had made (or perhaps even been faced with) a comparable choice?
Talking with other spouses, the men’s partners often were also working full-time (sometimes in academia, one woman was an ER surgeon) but I did find a couple of stay-home counterparts. (Among the wives, natch.)
This wasn’t a huge revelation but the fact that this was happening to the “Title IX” generation of academic women was disheartening.