Women in Charge
This topic has been on my mind for a while, and the fact that I'm going to be a father soon makes it a bit more relevant. In a roundabout way. It's really a cluster of topics, and hopefully there will be a common thread when I'm done with them. So bear with me.
First, I realized a few years ago that my social circle includes a high ratio of female bread winners. Starting with my own wife, and including my sister, my mother, three of my wife's co-workers, and some of my good friends from school. All these relationships feature a wife earning most or all of the household income, and a husband who stays at home either to take care of the kids, or work on a masters degree, or some other pursuit. Most of these men had marketable skills and some had previously held successful careers, but all had put them aside for something else while the wife worked on. For those with kids (and in another 6 months, that will be pretty much all of them) they were stay-at-home-dads across the board.
This made me wonder if I knew a bunch of remarkable women, or if I knew a bunch of unremarkable men, or if I was observing a trend that was much more universal.
There was a time when most "work" was physical in nature. Since men have more physical strength on average, it made sense for them to do most of it. Since women were the only ones with breasts, it made sense for them to take care of the babies. Neither of these generalizations are relevant anymore. It's not that men have less strength than they used to, it's that the good jobs no longer require it. Instead, the good jobs in today's economy typically require good verbal skills and good multitasking skills -- something which women tend to do better with than men. Meanwhile formula and portable breast pumps mean that men are now able to "nurse" just about as much as women can. (Don't get started on the difference between these substitutes are the "real thing" -- different argument: not relevant here.) Thus, apart from gestating and giving birth to the child, there is little a man can't do as a father that a woman can do as a mother. And there is arguably more that a woman can do in the modern workplace than a man can.
This doesn't mean that women should work and men should stay at home with the kids, but it does give credibility to the otherwise unsubstantiated unspoken claim of generations of chauvinists that women should be kept in their place because otherwise they will emasculate their masters. Perhaps the error is not in the assumption itself but in the notion that such a takeover would be a bad thing.
The top of most economic entities has historically been chosen by cronyism. It's not that men are so much worse than women at communications skills, critical thinking, and long term planning that they need a rich uncle to get ahead -- it's just that they're better at defending their tribe against a perceived threat. The problem is not that we act instinctually per se, but that when our instincts lack a relevant outlet, we make one up. It's that too often the perceived threat is powerful women, when really it should be competing companies. Cronyism, perhaps, is not so much a good-ol-boys mentality gone wrong, as much as it is the result of the fact that businessmen are visually indistinguishable from their true enemies (competing businessmen) but not so from women in their own workplace. No wonder women in managerial positions tend to wear suits!
Boys and girls are different. And apparently one of the big differences has to do with how they learn when they're young. And historically, in this country at least, elementary education has been the provence of female teachers. Consequently, the methodologies used in modern elementary schools tend to favor the learning styles of girls. (This alone ought to poke holes through whatever shards still remain of the "boys are smarter than girls" myth.) A young person's home life and family will play a lot into how they do in school, but all other things being equal one should expect a 17 year old girl to be better educated than a 17 year old boy. They went to the same school and took the same classes, but the girl will have gotten more out of it. The business world requires very similar skills to those learned in the classroom, so even though this has not traditionally been a woman's realm, it follows that it ought to be. If we were playing to our strengths as a society, women would be at the forefront of both education and business from top to bottom. Instead women lead in teaching and learning up through the end of high school, and then men start taking the forefront in college and business, seemingly arbitrarily.
(As an aside, there are obviously valuable exceptions to this. I'm far from thinking that all women should go to college, or that all men shouldn't. But I do think that many men go to college who would better serve themselves and their community if they instead learned a trade skill and forgot about writing essays.)
So what should men do? Arguably, they should do what an increasing number of machines are doing instead. A large number of careers are immune from the ill effects of paternity leave, or would be if society accepted paternity leave as a positive norm. You don't lose your place in line for the top by taking 12 months off if you are a steel worker or a logger. Yet a woman who spends the same amount of time at home postpartum may well lose her one shot at becoming CEO. A woman must physically take some time off whereas a man won't need to at all -- but this alone is not sufficient reason for a woman of high aptitude to stay at home indefinitely while a man who should be out tilling the fields struggles with the corporate ladder.
Some may be wondering at this point just where I get off, a male suggesting what women are good at, and what they should devote their time to, and suggesting that men can be just as good at parenting as a woman, and ignoring the importance of motherhood. So if you are thinking that, let me clarify one thing: I am not suggesting that women in business suits is the ideal solution -- I am suggesting that the First World no longer plays to the natural strengths of men and women. I consider my ideas to be the lesser of evils, not true solutions. It would probably be a better solution for everyone involved if the tables were turned not on the gender norms, but on the values assigned to different types of work. If farmers made more money than lawyers, and carpenters made more than MBA's, things might be better in a large number of ways. But that's another topic altogether.
First, I realized a few years ago that my social circle includes a high ratio of female bread winners. Starting with my own wife, and including my sister, my mother, three of my wife's co-workers, and some of my good friends from school. All these relationships feature a wife earning most or all of the household income, and a husband who stays at home either to take care of the kids, or work on a masters degree, or some other pursuit. Most of these men had marketable skills and some had previously held successful careers, but all had put them aside for something else while the wife worked on. For those with kids (and in another 6 months, that will be pretty much all of them) they were stay-at-home-dads across the board.
This made me wonder if I knew a bunch of remarkable women, or if I knew a bunch of unremarkable men, or if I was observing a trend that was much more universal.
There was a time when most "work" was physical in nature. Since men have more physical strength on average, it made sense for them to do most of it. Since women were the only ones with breasts, it made sense for them to take care of the babies. Neither of these generalizations are relevant anymore. It's not that men have less strength than they used to, it's that the good jobs no longer require it. Instead, the good jobs in today's economy typically require good verbal skills and good multitasking skills -- something which women tend to do better with than men. Meanwhile formula and portable breast pumps mean that men are now able to "nurse" just about as much as women can. (Don't get started on the difference between these substitutes are the "real thing" -- different argument: not relevant here.) Thus, apart from gestating and giving birth to the child, there is little a man can't do as a father that a woman can do as a mother. And there is arguably more that a woman can do in the modern workplace than a man can.
This doesn't mean that women should work and men should stay at home with the kids, but it does give credibility to the otherwise unsubstantiated unspoken claim of generations of chauvinists that women should be kept in their place because otherwise they will emasculate their masters. Perhaps the error is not in the assumption itself but in the notion that such a takeover would be a bad thing.
The top of most economic entities has historically been chosen by cronyism. It's not that men are so much worse than women at communications skills, critical thinking, and long term planning that they need a rich uncle to get ahead -- it's just that they're better at defending their tribe against a perceived threat. The problem is not that we act instinctually per se, but that when our instincts lack a relevant outlet, we make one up. It's that too often the perceived threat is powerful women, when really it should be competing companies. Cronyism, perhaps, is not so much a good-ol-boys mentality gone wrong, as much as it is the result of the fact that businessmen are visually indistinguishable from their true enemies (competing businessmen) but not so from women in their own workplace. No wonder women in managerial positions tend to wear suits!
Boys and girls are different. And apparently one of the big differences has to do with how they learn when they're young. And historically, in this country at least, elementary education has been the provence of female teachers. Consequently, the methodologies used in modern elementary schools tend to favor the learning styles of girls. (This alone ought to poke holes through whatever shards still remain of the "boys are smarter than girls" myth.) A young person's home life and family will play a lot into how they do in school, but all other things being equal one should expect a 17 year old girl to be better educated than a 17 year old boy. They went to the same school and took the same classes, but the girl will have gotten more out of it. The business world requires very similar skills to those learned in the classroom, so even though this has not traditionally been a woman's realm, it follows that it ought to be. If we were playing to our strengths as a society, women would be at the forefront of both education and business from top to bottom. Instead women lead in teaching and learning up through the end of high school, and then men start taking the forefront in college and business, seemingly arbitrarily.
(As an aside, there are obviously valuable exceptions to this. I'm far from thinking that all women should go to college, or that all men shouldn't. But I do think that many men go to college who would better serve themselves and their community if they instead learned a trade skill and forgot about writing essays.)
So what should men do? Arguably, they should do what an increasing number of machines are doing instead. A large number of careers are immune from the ill effects of paternity leave, or would be if society accepted paternity leave as a positive norm. You don't lose your place in line for the top by taking 12 months off if you are a steel worker or a logger. Yet a woman who spends the same amount of time at home postpartum may well lose her one shot at becoming CEO. A woman must physically take some time off whereas a man won't need to at all -- but this alone is not sufficient reason for a woman of high aptitude to stay at home indefinitely while a man who should be out tilling the fields struggles with the corporate ladder.
Some may be wondering at this point just where I get off, a male suggesting what women are good at, and what they should devote their time to, and suggesting that men can be just as good at parenting as a woman, and ignoring the importance of motherhood. So if you are thinking that, let me clarify one thing: I am not suggesting that women in business suits is the ideal solution -- I am suggesting that the First World no longer plays to the natural strengths of men and women. I consider my ideas to be the lesser of evils, not true solutions. It would probably be a better solution for everyone involved if the tables were turned not on the gender norms, but on the values assigned to different types of work. If farmers made more money than lawyers, and carpenters made more than MBA's, things might be better in a large number of ways. But that's another topic altogether.