Linda Hirshman has been here, there, and everywhere on the internets of late. I’ve been trying to ignore her, despite the gentle pokes of my readers. But I just finished watching the finale of Rome, and I’m in the mood for a good gladiator fight. Release the lions!
On TNR On Line, Hirshman asks what would Marx think about the opt-out revolution?
I do, and I have written that women who quit are making a mistake. But, no matter what you think of moms who opt out, their decisions speak volumes about the workplaces they flee. In interviews and on their mommyblogs, the women able to opt out tell a tale about the twenty-first century workplace that is uncannily reminiscent of the most radical Marxist theory. Maybe we put Marx into the dustbin too fast….
Women tell Hirshman that they face enormous obstacles in the workplace – long hours, discrimination, lack of part time options – combined with increased pressure for intensive childrearing. Thus, they drop out. She says that Marxist would say that was all the unavoidable consequences of capitalism.
What would Marx say? Marx would say that it is totally ridiculous for anyone to wag their finger at women who drop out of the workforce. Men and women who stay in their corner offices are bourgeois capitalists. He would spit on all those employed elites whom she loves so much. Marx writes that system destroys the family. Marx would want everyone to drop out and join forces with the oppressed. If the system gets destroyed by women who opt out, so much the better. Whenever we poke holes in Hirshman’s “studies,” she calls herself a philosopher. Has she read Marx recently?
Today, she’s over at TPM Cafe ranting about the women who want to take longer maternity leave or work part time. Instead of reforming the workplace, they should be reforming men. Men get 50% of the hugs and kisses from junior, but only put a fraction of the time into raising junior. Those family-friendly positions are female ghettos. She chastises some of my favorite daddy-bloggers for going back to work.
I left this post scratching my head. What am I supposed to yell at my husband about? She seems to think that men are irredeemable users. They take the first ticket out the house. They won’t use family leave options. So, if they are such hopeless, selfish schmucks, then there’s no point nagging them. Wouldn’t it be better to lobby the workplace and the politicians to create jobs that are somewhat compatible with family life? It isn’t the perfect option, but at least women will have a chance to keep their hands in a career until they are ready to ramp up. They will have some benefits. It’s something to put on a resume.
Excellent rebuttal from MCMoran.
If you really are an “old lefty,” as you claim to be, then you must realize that we are born into a world that is not of our own making. We can change this world, yes, but not each one of us on her own, and certainly not by recourse to the rhetoric of heroic individual effort. We do not sit down and rationally calculate, while drawing up our own unique, tailor-made individual 5-year plans. We muddle through, as social actors who are already deeply embedded in thickly-descriptive socio-cultural-economic contexts. You can work at changing the content and meaning of those contexts, or you can deny the relevance of culture and society while excoriating the “choices” of women as you set yourself up as national scold.
I have accused elite women of “making a series of self-defeating decisions about education, employment, and family formation.” And I told them to stop. I told them to take school seriously, don’t quit a job until you have another job and never marry a jerk.
And how is that tactic working out for you? Are they listening, all wide-eyed and shame-faced, while signing pledges to amend the evil of their ways?
I didn’t think so.
Apt. 11d 
Marx says to have Engels pay the cable bill and buy the daughter’s prom dress.
LikeLike
Hirshman’s strategy for staying in the public eye seems similar to Ann Coulter’s (and Paul Krugman’s, except he actually knows something) – say things which are pretty much like those being said by many others, but say them with more venom and at the extreme edge, get folks riled up.
It’s working pretty well for her: people are paying her far more attention than they are to, say Susan Estrich or Kathy Young, who might be left-right examples of people who try to be thoughtful and less provocative than inclusive in what they write. But as far as being persuasive, I think Estrich and Young are doing better.
LikeLike
Ye gods — comparing modern workplaces to the nineteenth-century factories of Marx! Does this woman know nothing?!
LikeLike
You and Mary Catherine get Hirshman absolutely right, Laura. I mean, this is an old, old discussion in the blogosphere, which she is apparently completely ignorant of: is the best way to reform the system, as far as the economics of family and gender are concerned, to buy into it, or to opt out of it and/or create alternatives within it or beside it? Clearly the latter! Marx would hardly approve of a game plan that consists of a particular woman, one whom happens to be concerned about both her financial well-being/fulfilment and her family, abandoning the latter for the sake of maybe someday doing something about the former. Not that Marx was a great family man, but he did acknowledge the family as one of those “thickly-descriptive socio-cultural-economic contexts,” as MC put it, which we need to acknowledge for the sake of a decent life, but which the ethos of get-ahead, untrammelled capitalism also destroys.
So, as a weird Marxist/Burkean hybrid, I say: working women of the world, unite behind flextime and family leave! Challenge the social and economic basis of the alienating system which bourgeois climbers (both male and female) benefit from! You have nothing to lose but Hirshman’s approval.
LikeLike
You nailed it, totally.
<>
And she seriously thinks that this is ground-breaking advice? Or that her advice is in any way going to change the structure of the American family?
Well, at least she included links to (us) rising, moving, and mojo’ing ‘moms’.
LikeLike
Agh, I lost my quote that I was commenting on:
“And I told them to stop. I told them to take school seriously, don’t quit a job until you have another job and never marry a jerk. My bad.”
And it’s not *just* the family, Linda. Stupid.
LikeLike
My thing with Hirshman is that I kinda agree with her on some points. I *do* think women opting out make it significantly more difficult for those of us who stay in the workplace. But Hirshman is so repellent in the way she states her opinions that it makes it just *impossible* to agree with her.
LikeLike
I also agree with Hirshman on some things. For example, I think there’s a trickle down affect of women who chose to leave jobs for which they are highly trained (it doesn’t really matter why; only that women do it more than men). But, Hirshman doesn’t seem interested in public dialog (just like Coulter). She’s playing some game for her own publicity, and it’s counter-productive, even when one does agree with points she makes.
bj
LikeLike
I agree with basically nothing that Hirshman writes. However, I find the woman so annoying that I would probably differ with her assessment of the color of an apple.
I’m working full time again, so she would approve. But I’m working 80 hours weeks and am probably looking at another all nighter tonight. This is absolutely bananas. My job is nice, but the two career family is a killer. Steve has to work late again tonight. Is it worth it? Gender equity in the workplace is nice and all, but I am just keeping my head above water. At this moment, I don’t give a crap about gender equity in the workplace. I only care about survival.
Russell – my husband loved “You have nothing to lose but Hirshman’s approval.”
LikeLike
To be honest, lesbian separatism is a far more honest response to the kind of arguments that Hirshman is making in the way that she is making them. Cut loose. Don’t depend on others. The slavish thing is in fact that she utterly depends on a male-centered (and historically recent) understanding of what constitutes legitimate personhood.
LikeLike
Exactly. Not that the historical approach would carry much weight with Hirshman, because she’s all about pitilessly tearing asunder the motley feudal ties in order to rescue women from the idiocy of suburban life.
She bristles with impatience over the existence of women who refuse to see themselves as unencumbered selves. And she doesn’t seem to realize that her arguments are almost comically similar to those put forth by right-wing “family values” types. The right-wingers argue that women cannot possibly occupy the corridors of law, politics, commerce, academia and etc., without sacrificing maternal investment and familial commitments. Hirshman apparently agrees with them. But where the conservatives want women to choose family over work, Hirshman wants women to make the exact opposite choice. Two sides of the same coin. And a stubborn refusal to even acknowledge that large, messy area in between.
LikeLike
Randomly inserted funny and off-topic comment.
LikeLike
But, Mary Catherine, you’re missing part of Hirshman’s arguement, which is that the middle in between will never be accommodated if women who have the choice consistently dump work for their families, rather than fighting, the workplace, the system, the family structure, . . . . Maybe they’ll drive a labor shortage. But, if they don’t, there will be no economic incentive to change the system to accommodate a new style of working, in the middle.
bj
PS: Maybe we can stop calling that Hirshman’s argument, ’cause I agree that it’s almost impossible to support Hirshman herself, even if you agree with bits and pieces of her argument.
LikeLike
And, Laura, yes, it’s tough to “balance” work and family, and when you don’t need the economic benefit of work, it’s hard to keep it going just for the sake of the work.
When we’re talking about the “opt-out” women, who are the economically elite, I wonder how much of the equation can be compared to those who inherit wealth. Which of us would keep working if we $10,000,000 appeared in our bank accounts tomorrow? And, how many would continue working when things got tough at work (or at home)?
So then, how many of us work when it really doesn’t make a significant economic difference to our families? I think the key question in that is why, so often, is that decision made in favor of woman staying at home and the man working, even in previously economically equal relationships (a narrow segment, mind you)?
bj
LikeLike
I disagree with Hirshman, and find her attitude grating. At the same time, I think most of the sting of her argument comes from identifying something that many people would rather not acknowledge (never mind the conclusions Hirshman draws from this for a moment) – namely, that the currents of upper-middle-class life may draw women into educational paths and careers they don’t necessarily want. Many “elite” professions are rewarding in terms of money and prestige, but are not personally fulfilling. If money is not the issue, why should a mother (or anyone, for that matter) stay in a prestige job, barely keeping her head above water, if she feels more fulfilled at home, on balance?
But then that begs the question of why a woman who is not going to spend her life in law, business, academia, etc. be supported in pursuing the training for such careers, a disturbing question (at least to me). There was an interesting, Hirshman-esque debate on this in the Netherlands a while ago. I’m not sure of the answer, but I think it involves abandoning the linear model of career development. For myself, I’ll say that if I did not find academia both personally fulfilling and flexible (and I’m very aware that not all academic fields and positions are flexible), I wouldn’t do it.
LikeLike
Why do we support people who might not fully use their training?
I think it’s two things: a little thing called freedom and a little thing called knowledge. We train people without any guarantees of how they will put their training to use because that’s what freedom means. To constrain our training to narrow and guaranteed uses is to put illiberal constraints in advance on individual uses of education.
More, it’s not good pedagogy. You have to teach even highly specific topics or competencies as if there is something that can come from them that wasn’t there in the first place. That’s what good knowledge production is all about.
Hirshmann is trying to make dogmatic statements about education that strike as contradictory to the ethos of a liberal society and to the ethos of good pedagogy. There have *never* been good guarantees of specific individual outcomes from training since education in the West moved beyond rote learning and rigid class hierarchies. It’s got nothing to do with gender in that sense.
LikeLike
But Timothy — you teach at a liberal arts school, and are expressing the teaching philosophy at that level and in that environment. As an extreme, I can’t imagine you disagree that training a neurosurgeon who isn’t going to do neurosurgery is a poor use of resources? I’m pretty confident that high percents of people who are trained in neurosurgery practice, for a significant portion of their career.
I think the gray zone is in lots of other fields and professions, where one is being trained with a purpose in mind, rather than taught to learn. Wher does medical school fall? engineering? law school?. And, add that in many professions, the value of the hire doesn’t pay off until many years down the road (Law firms say that their first year associates, making 180K a year, are largely losses). You train these people because you’re going to get economic value from them later on. If they’re not going to produce that economic value later on, it’s not worth expending your resources to train them.
So, maybe we’re talking about the difference between training and pedagogy.
I too think that non-linear career models are going to have to play a significant role in this — but, as with flextime, I see little practical work on how to integrate these models into our system.
bj
LikeLike
So then, how many of us work when it really doesn’t make a significant economic difference to our families?
I think a fair number of writers (and I include bloggers – even Hirshman’s despised “mommybloggers”) and artists would do so. Of course, Hirshman completely de-values these fields as well as any type of caregiving.
LikeLike
I spent five years as a graduate student in Math, but never became a professional mathematician. I don’t think I wasted that five years. I don’t think Lipman Bers, who taught me, wasted his time on me. I don’t think Columbia wasted its resources. When the department held a graduate student reunion last year, it seemed to me I was as welcome as those who had become mathematicians.
Nor am I exceptional. I hear of many who went to law school, got their JD and then decided law was not for them. I hear of many who went for PhDs, got them and then decided academia was not for them.
If someone trains as a neurosurgeon, but then decides she’d rather not practice neurosurgery, I’d hate to be her next patient after she’s forced to remain.
Timothy has it right. We go to school, even graduate school, even post-doctoral training, for knowledge. And we’re free, must be free, to use or not use that knowledge in what we do for money.
LikeLike
One popular option that we haven’t much discussed is running your own business and deciding your own hours. Women are well-represented among small business people. While jobs on the low end of that continuum are famous for earning you a pink cadillac, even Linda Hirshman would approve of the high end. I am thinking of the small-town accountant who does my parents’ payroll and taxes. She operates a one-horse accounting firm out of an office attached to her home and does the books for a number of local companies. She is highly respected.
LikeLike
The idea that I would tell someone who appeared to be a promising neurosurgeon on all the particulars before they enter that if they didn’t become a neurosurgeon, I would not only view their education as wasted, but I would never have admitted them in the first place, strikes me as an obscene violation of the covenants of education.
Hirschman and others would have it that my admitting that person takes up a precious space that could have been occupied by someone equally superb. You know what? The more urgent the job becomes, and the more specialized the training, the smaller the line behind the candidates who present themselves as possible trainees becomes. The capacity of liberal arts education is huge; there is no reason to conserve space as if it were an irreplaceable resource. The capacity of highly specialized, demanding technical training is small, but the pool of people sufficiently qualified to begin it smaller still. So if we ask all the appropriately qualified women who show up at that door, “Are you planning to be a mommy? Will you sign an agreement to use daycare extensively or make your husband stay home?” I don’t know who we’re saving a place for. The man who kind of sort of diffidently is doing med school and maybe kind of might be able to sort of do neurosurgery? I vote for the woman who has all the qualifications to train well even if she won’t sign the Sacred Mommy Oath. Even if she decides, in the vagaries of life, later on, that long hours cutting open people’s skulls and actually doing neurosurgery aren’t for her.
Because, you know, that’s what freedom is all about: people deciding later on that what they did before wasn’t really what they thought it would be. One variation on that is that yes, once they’ve got a child, women (and men) decide that the life of the family outweighs being one of the people who operates on people’s brains for endless hours. Should I hate on Oliver Sacks because the guy takes away from clinical work to write books? Or Thomas Lynch because, you know, he’s not burying enough people lately? We are more than what we train, and giving to our children might, in some lives, come to mean as much as giving to strangers.
Hirshman wants a hedge against life. She can’t have it.
LikeLike
Timothy,
That is interesting. There are a whole lot of people who’ve done very well combining medicine and a writing career, like Chekhov and Theodore Dalrymple. Then there’s Grisham. He may not produce great literature, but I’m pretty sure that he has produced more enjoyment as a writer than he ever did as a lawyer.
It’s not clear whether this is true for women mathematicians, but male mathematicians seem to do their most brilliant work early on, as if there is a limited amount of original work to be harvested from any particular mind. If the same held for female mathematicians, one could in very good conscience put in a good ten years in math and then wipe little noses and bottoms for the following ten years, with the field suffering barely at all.
Lastly, I think a lot of people are forgetting that anyone who does a professional degrees (law, medicine, business) emerges buried in debt, and the only way to dig out from that debt is to seriously pursue the profession, unless one is fabulously wealthy already.
LikeLike
“Because, you know, that’s what freedom is all about: people deciding later on that what they did before wasn’t really what they thought it would be. One variation on that is that yes, once they’ve got a child, women (and men) decide that the life of the family outweighs being one of the people who operates on people’s brains for endless hours.”
The problem that I always see when the discussion takes this turn is this: when the ‘deciding’ time comes, it’s just all too often the woman who ‘decides’ that family life outweighs brain surgery (lawyering, professing, etc.). If your position is that there is something problematic in Hirschman’s asking women to re-think this decision before they (often irrevocably) make it, or giving them reasons in advance to think about how to make a different choice possible, then maybe you end up holding the position that women just *are* better suited, happier, whatever, as moms instead of neurosurgeons. (“She tried it… it just wasn’t for her! Or her.. or her… or her… hmmm.) You can say “respect the process” all you like, but you still seem to be saying that, since in the end far more women than men who initially embarked on a career end up leaving it, we ought to accept that the womanly position is to sustain the “life of the family”.
LikeLike
s,
Until men start lactating and doing their fair share of bedrest, early parenthood is going to remain a female preserve.
P.S. I think attachment parenting is a male conspiracy.
LikeLike
First chance to get to the blog today… Great comments. I had a chance to read them at lunch, but no time to respond until now. House is over.
bj, you’ve made the point before that women who opt out are wasting precious resources; they have a moral and fiscal responsibility to continue with their career after receiving expensive educations and training. It’s an interesting point. Tim and others make excellent rebuttals. Let me try, too.
The problem with that argument is that you can’t willingly sign a contract on your future. It’s really a form of slavery. Even those who sign up for the military have some outs. And they have to actually sign a contract and only agree to sign away just a year or two at a time. No one can be bound by educational decisions they make when they are kids.
When you sign up for the military, you know exactly what you are getting into. When you get trained for any other profession, they are rather vague about the outcomes. Too much small print.
How many entering grad students are sat in a conference room and told, ” Welcome students. You are now going to here for seven to eight years. You will receive modest to zero stipends. During that time you will be exploited by your graduate advisor who use you for cheap labor. Hell, they might even have you ghost write a few articles for them. Maybe you’ll adjunct for some snotty undergraduates, and you’ll get paid less per hour than if you worked at Burger King. You will sweat blood for two years writing your dissertation. Then you’ll be forced to interview in North Dakota and Utah, forever severing family relationships on the East Coast. If you are lucky enough to get an entry level position, you won’t be paid enough to pay for your student loans. Then when you’re completely beat, you’ll have to go for tenure writing stupid articles than no one will ever read. After five years of that, you’ll be denied tenure because you foolish enough to write a blog. Add some kids into that mix and then things really get interesting.” How many entering grad students would still be in the room? None.
Other professions may be slightly more upfront about future prospects than academia, but most of the time, you really need to experience the job to see if you like it. You need to experience having kids to really see whether you are cut out to be a full time parent or not. Also, people change over time.
s, Hirshman isn’t advising women to rethink opting out. Hirshman isn’t advising women at all. She’s demanding and scolding. She’s saying that she doesn’t want to hear any excuses. She doesn’t believe that some women really like being full time parents. It’s her intolerance that drives me batty.
I’m up for any discussion about why women opt out more than men or whether staying at home is risky or whether there can be ways to make things easier for women who are pushed out of the workforce. I don’t like anyone telling me what to do.
LikeLike
Another consideration is that a number of fields (like academia, sports, and classical music) require huge amounts of dedication, but produce even larger quantities of waste in human terms (for instance the ABD Barnes and Noble cafe manager). I know that I would not be at all pleased if one of my kids showed an inclination towards classical music, knowing that what lies ahead is tens of thousands of dollars (before college!) in music-related expenses and probably crushing disappointment further down the road.
LikeLike
To do her justice, Hirshman seems to have softened up quite a bit over the past year or so.
LikeLike
running out the door…
Tim, I don’t think that Hirshman would be content with the All Girl Island. She would kick off all the non-elite women who aren’t doing something interesting enough to even bring into her analysis and then all the cookie baking mommies would also be evicted. It would be a very small island of Elite, Working Women. Maybe the kids and their nannies would shipped off offshore somewhere. Seems like a lonely place to me.
LikeLike
It’s not going to make me popular, but I agree with BJ on the wasted resources thing. I think it might be because I view this more as a class thing than a gender thing.
This is not necessarily about an upper-middle-class MAN taking the med school slot of the upper-middle-class woman who may or may not use her neurosurgery training, or her Wharton MBA, or whatever. Not only does the opt-out woman reinforce stereotypes of *every* woman opting out, but that education was also denied someone who is not necessarily upper-middle-class. It just reinforces that you only get choices if you’re rich.
Another reality check: much of adult life is slavery, albeit wage slavery. You go to school, you incur huge loans … guess what, you’re a slave. The ABD night manager at Barnes & Noble? Slave. Or how about a young person with no educational opportunity who is now selling mobile phones? Ditto. This is all about making sure young people understand what they’re getting into before they choose a career, or incur loans. It is most decidedly NOT about giving a free pass on all educational decisions.
I don’t have a problem with people changing their minds later on. In fact I believe our current structure is too rigid in this area; it’s why I’m encouraging all my nieces and nephews to put off post-secondary school decisions until they’re more sure. Because once you’ve incurred the loans, you’re committed. And if the thing that causes you to change your mind is your family, that’s great too. Both men AND women need to be more free to focus on their families if that’s what they choose to do. But this idea that a wealthy someone who’s just dabbling in a field is allowed to train for it, while non-wealthy others are excluded? Not getting much support from me.
LikeLike
So, Laura, I agree that people can’t be bound retrospectively for obligations they didn’t know they were signing on for. For example, no one said when I accepted the scholarships/grants that largely funded my undergraduate education that I would be required to work in a certain occupation. So, I’m not. Any moral obligation I feel is not enforcible, and I would never apply it rigidly to others because I don’t walk in their shoes. I don’t know how much they received from society, don’t know how hard it is for them to work, don’t know what other obligations they have. Each of our lives is very very different. To be explicit, I can’t imagine telling Laura, herself, that she has a of moral obligation to continue teaching because she went to graduate school (even if I feel so myself, on occasion, though my mind changes about this, too.).
Timothy: I’m all for freedom, too, but where you loose me is when you suggest that people’s future plans not be used in determining who is going to be chosen to get training as a neurosurgeon. Let me assure you that there are plenty of people in line to train to be neurosurgeons, and that when people chose among them, one of the most important criteria is their dedication to the field. This criterion gets wrapped into the person’s potential to be an excellent neurosurgeon. Honestly, I picked neurosurgery because I think it’s unique. It’s kind of fun that Timothy thinks that it’s OK to have neurosurgery dilletantes (who I’m terming so because they want to get the training because they think it’s fun, rather than because how they plan to use it), because that’s the one field where I”d have thought that everyone would agree that there’s no point in training someone who doesn’t plan to practice.
People bring up another point, though, which is people who change their mind. Of course that happens — people’s lives change. And, no one really wants a neurosurgeon who hates their job mucking around in their brain or spinal cord. But, in these unique fields, part of the goal on the admissions commitee is to figure out whether this person is “likely” to change their mind: Are they dedicated to the practice of the profession? Although I don’t think one can apply the moral obligation retrospectively, I think we can try to apply it prospectively, and we do. We ask people where they see themselves in ten years, and, honestly, I can’t see how staying home with my children would pass muster for any admisisons commitee I’ve served on (but, I don’t serve on admissions for a liberal arts education, or say).
But the difference with the ideal of education Timothy invokes is the difference I see is that we don’t train neurosurgeons for the benefit of the individual — we train them (and pay for their training) for the benefit of the society (hey, that’s almost Marxian). I would actually make these obligations more front-ended (as does the army). It would force us to make explicit what we think we are doing in offering the training, and would force individuals to think about why they want the training. But, I suspect that’s largely impossible because of its legal ramifications.
bj
LikeLike
Hirshman bugs the ever-lovin’ snot out of me. She’s hectoring, condescending, and mean-spirited.
That said, I think that “don’t marry a jerk” is excellent advice – probably the only thing I agree with Hirshman on. I don’t know that many women set out to marry men they know are jerks, though. I do think that many women, without realizing what they are doing/letting themselves in for, marry men who aren’t as committed to them or willing to work on the marriage as they are, so they lose what Laura called “hand.” I remember a study by some sociologists – Scott Stanley is the only name I recall, but I can try to find the link – which found that women who coaxed and pushed reluctant men into marriage/commitment wound up with husbands who weren’t as committed to the relationship as they were.
Perhaps I could put it in a softer way than Hirshman: “Marry a man who is as committed to making your marriage and family work as you are.” And, of course, I would add that just because a woman stays home with the kids doesn’t mean she’s married to a jerk.
LikeLike
You know Laura, I agree with you: Hirshman seems to relish wagging her finger at all the weak, unfortunate women who ended up in inferior roles due to their own dumb or careless choices. That stance inevitably generates resistance and resentment as responses, not anything useful.
So, maybe put H. aside for a minute. I guess that I’m just trying to get my own ideas clear about some things: (1) I went to grad school wanting to be a professor (which I now am). However, in the past year or two there have been plenty of moments when I have been in what have felt like impossible positions, and I have felt strong desire to put aside the profession stuff and just parent my baby and run my home. Better to do fewer things better. (2) I really am bothered by the fact that most working men don’t seem to feel the ‘impossible position’ pressure, and most men don’t seem to seriously consider putting aside the profession. So: is it so clear that, if I did so, it would just be a matter of a person making the best choice? Why is it almost always the best choice for the woman, not so for the man? At this point, that thought is what I use to push through those moments; there has not been anything about professing itself that makes me want to leave it behind- and, barring some genuine emergency-crisis on the home front, I’m not going to consider that option.
By the way, I know about lactating and (not getting enough) bedrest – I just put away my b. pump after a not-fun year of endless rushing to pump between classes. Is it super great to be a pumping working mother? No, not so much.
LikeLike
“But this idea that a wealthy someone who’s just dabbling in a field is allowed to train for it, while non-wealthy others are excluded?”
I don’t actually see this idea being advocated anywhere. What I see Tim arguing is that there is no agent of society that can legitimately tell someone who has taken education in one field that the person must have a professional life in that field. What to do with education, or training is a decision that the person with the education makes. Full stop.
This is not to say there are no constraints, that there are no consequences of one choice or another. (Tim is also keenly aware of the tradeoffs in graduate education; he’s got a terrific essay on his blog called “Should You Go to Graduate School?”) It is just to say that no agent in society can legitimately compel a person to pursue in a particular field.
As outsiders, we may have opinions about what a person should do. But that is all they are, and all they should be.
LikeLike
I personally don’t think anyone’s advocating punishment for those who train in a field but don’t use their education. (Certainly not me.) However that’s not what I’m hearing — I’m hearing that even criticizing the decision, implying that not using your training is a waste, is an unfair and inaccurate statement. In that sense there’s pushback even on the opinions.
Here’s where I fear I’m straying too far into Linda Hirshman-land. This is going to sound very bitchy and judgmental, but here it is.
Laura is in a special situation. She has a kid with some issues. You can take the most driven person on this earth, and if their kids or spouse get sick enough (for example), they need to reprioritize, which is what Laura did. I would disagree with a parent who was not willing to make some changes to accommodate their special-needs kid. But I also find myself disagreeing with the statement that it’s OK for anyone to opt out, period. (I think more of us would see the wisdom of this if it weren’t for Hirshman’s divisive blather.)
When I encounter young people who are drifting into fields with high bars of entry — very competitive, high training expense, exclusive, etc — and they seem less committed, I do judge them on that. In some fields there is no room for dilettantism. Am I advocating new laws, new rules, blah blah blah? No. Would I ever hire someone like that? No.
To S’s very insightful comment above, I believe I read somewhere that men consistently stick it out at work despite lots of difficulties, and women consistently stick it out with parenting despite lots of difficulties. (Whereas it’s simply more acceptable for women to bail on work — and let’s face it, for men to bail on parenting.) It shows that if it becomes socially unacceptable to drop part of your responsibilities, people stop opting out. Definitely food for thought.
LikeLike
s,
1) Even a full-time SAHM occasionally feels spread just as thin, for instance while pregnant while parenting a toddler, while caring simultaneously for an infant and a toddler, or (later on) when the whole family gets a bug. Roughly speaking, 1 small child equals a job, and 2 small children at home all day equal 1 child and 1 job. Two small kids plus one job equals…I don’t know. Those people don’t hang around to talk much.
On the bright side, three-year-olds can be very good at amusing themselves, and four-year-olds are very capable indeed. Were it not for our namby pamby child protective laws, you could almost leave a 4-year-old alone for the weekend, if you stocked up on enough little juice boxes and Dora yogurts.
2) Maybe you just hang out with the wrong people. My husband is a professor and he often has a chance to yak about kids and baby stuff with his colleagues who have young families. (It is a Catholic university and these are mainly seriously Catholic colleagues, which probably make a difference.)
LikeLike
If an applicant to study neurosurgery says, “Look, I’m not sure if I want to do this, maybe I just want to do it for a while and then mess around and paint pictures of brain scans at home in watercolors while I raise some kids”, don’t hesitate to not admit them.
But if a woman applies, don’t say, “I want your promise that if you do this, you’re not going to have kids, or if you have kids, you’re going to send them to day care 8-6 four days a week, or you’re going to make your husband do it. If you won’t promise, I won’t admit you.”
And if a woman applies, says, “I want to be a neurosurgeon”, goes through your program, excels in it, has the makings of an excellent neurosurgeon, and then three years later has a kid and tells you, “I want to stay home, I’m sorry, but I changed my mind”. And then if that same neurosurgeon six years later comes back and does something that isn’t full time neurosurgery but something else related–teaches in med school, does neurological research of some kind, does consulting, etcetera, then what I want any educator to say is, “That’s a good outcome.” I want to be just as happy with that as “This person worked twelve hours a day operating on people’s brains for 45 years, retired for five years, and keeled over from a heart attack, and oh by the way, was told in the last four years of their life by their two sons that they never got to know their parent well because surgery took so much of their time”.
I don’t want fear of the first outcome to become a condition of admission to training, where you’d rather take a weak, mediocre candidate that you’re satisfied will operate with machine-like efficiency if marginal competency because dammit, that’s what society needs. If you want to make machines, work on an assembly line. If you want to educate people, accept that life happens to people in surprising ways.
LikeLike
How many dilletante, mommy wannabee neurosurgeons are out there?
If my fondest desire was to be a mom and a pampered wife, I don’t think that I would bother getting straight As through high school, being captain of the track team, acing the SATs, then getting into Harvard, more straight As, more good clubs, MCATs, then med school, and all that nonsense. I would just buy a short skirt and temp at an investment bank after high school. How many mommy wannabees are in grad school? If I was wanted to be a trophy wife would I be looking for Mr. Moneybags in the history department?
I think that most of the opting out isn’t a planned thing. People are surprised by how much they like parenting or how much they hate their job or how difficult it is combine both. Sometimes life intercedes in other ways.
LikeLike
“How many dilletante, mommy wannabee neurosurgeons are out there?”
Very few, because neurosurgeons are pretty much told at the outset of their training that the work is incompatible with being directly involved in the day-to-day care of your children (as opposed to the supervision of the care). So, most women chose to opt-out of that profession before the training rather than after.
The problem lies in those fields which seem deceptively compatible with day-to-day family responsibilities (academia being a prime candidate).
I do think lots of people are surprised at what parenting means to them. And unlike finding out what the endpoint of the training will be like (which one could do, with the appropriate research), it’s impossible to find out what parenting will mean to you until you experience it. That’s definitely a random variable out there in the opt-out revolution.
But, maybe we can have that discussion, about why men opt-out far less frequently than women, even when they started out in the same place.
bj
LikeLike
I think it’s debatable that “they started out in the same place.” There are far fewer women than men who obsessively focus on a single area, whether Star Trek or physics. The female mind rarely puts all its eggs in one basket like that.
LikeLike
I disagree that women must choose full-time-plus work or no work at all. I worked part-time for eight years after my daughter was born. I kept up with my career, maintained my sanity and had both quantity and quality time with my child. I knew many women who put family first when their children were young but found ways to keep using their skills. There is a middle track.
OK, you’re not likely to become CEO if you don’t work 80 hours a week for 50 weeks a year. But few women (or men) have the drive or the ability to become CEO. Most of us have ambitions that can be reconciled with child-raising.
My daughter says that combining work and family is a big topic of conversation at law school for female students. She’s decided that she will not try to make partner in a large law firm. It’s not worth it to her. Other options aren’t as lucrative but are more compatible with a balanced life.
LikeLike