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Even in Denmark, children are career killers for working moms

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Re: Even in Denmark, children are career killers for working moms

#101

Post by 09bjb »

jhomedall wrote: post #60
09bjb wrote: post #9

Generally speaking, equality of choice between the sexes is unequivocally a good thing...but we're going to spend years untangling the muddy notion in many people's minds that equality of outcome is expected when there is perfect equality of opportunity . What actually happens in the Scandinavian countries, where both sexes have the highest levels of equality of opportunity, education, and choice in the world...is th…

A woman does not equal a man, and she shouldn't. Careful with your wording here. I'm assuming you meant 'is not the same as'; however 'does not equal' could easily be interpreted as 'not the equal of', which has an entirely different meaning than you intended.

A man is not the same as a woman, and a man is not the equal of a woman. My only argument is that the linguistic categories of "Woman" and "Man" are useful (in everyday communication, in science and biology, etc.) and I will be slow to give them up. To pretend that no categories exist is to invite chaos, as categories are useful.

...metaphysically speaking, all categories distort, but good luck navigating the world with your eyes that wide open.

Re: Even in Denmark, children are career killers for working moms

#102

Post by mschuster91 »

david38 wrote: post #29
jlg23 wrote: post #8

The point of having to ~"force fathers to take time off" rings true to me, I'd even go as far as forcing both parents to take some minimum time (and maybe of equal length) off: It would relieve all parents of the pressure to justify why they "put family before career".

Wow. You know there are sci-fi books written about a world were some people are not allowed to be better than others? If you have some advantage, you have to do extra so it's nullified. Seriously, who are you to tell me how to run my family life? Your arrogance is astonishing. I suppose if I don't push my kids just the right amount you're going to claim you know enough about how all children will turn out to revoke m…

> Seriously, who are you to tell me how to run my family life? Your arrogance is astonishing.

The point of worker rights is to provide equal footing for everyone. Your boss would certainly like it if there were no mandatory holidays/PTO...

> Now we have to force men to not work because some people might get get their feelings hurt? Fuck them.

No, but in order to provide equal chances for the kids' development in early life. This is valuable for society as early child-parent bonding issues will lead to issues later on in life.

In addition, by forcing employers to provide PTO for fresh parents, they cannot (legally) force those who cannot object to work. Yes, it might be 6 months or whatever time out for a couple managers but an immediate benefit to millions of poor parents.

I assume you're from the US? Well, try to come over to Europe and work here, with such things as workers' rights, minimum PTO per year, proper health insurance systems... sounds socialist as hell but guess what? Our people are happier and more productive.

Re: Even in Denmark, children are career killers for working moms

#103

Post by TheCoelacanth »

09bjb wrote: post #9

Generally speaking, equality of choice between the sexes is unequivocally a good thing...but we're going to spend years untangling the muddy notion in many people's minds that equality of outcome is expected when there is perfect equality of opportunity . What actually happens in the Scandinavian countries, where both sexes have the highest levels of equality of opportunity, education, and choice in the world...is th…

I could accept this argument, but I have not seen compelling evidence that there is equality of opportunity.

Do women with children really have the same opportunity to prioritize their career that men with children do? I doubt it.

Women face much more social ostracism than men do if they choose to spend prioritize time at work over time with their children. Men also face much more social ostracism if they choose take on the traditionally female role of staying home with their children as opposed to engaging in paying work.

Even if women do decide to prioritize work over child-rearing in spite of the social pressure, employers will often assume that their attention will be divided by child-rearing.

Re: Even in Denmark, children are career killers for working moms

#104

Post by simsla »

ars wrote: post #13

Why is there this underlying theme that Careers are more important than Children? They are not. The measure of your life is not how much money you made, it's how many people love you, and actually care that you are alive. Someone with lots of money how dies alone and unmourned, is not better off than someone with less money, who is surrounded by his descendants.

To each his own.

I'm not a very family oriented person. I really enjoy solving problems, learning, etc.

The measure of your life is following your dreams / passion. For some, that's interpersonal relationships. For others, it may be work.

Re: Even in Denmark, children are career killers for working moms

#105

Post by cryptonector »

ars wrote: post #13

Why is there this underlying theme that Careers are more important than Children? They are not. The measure of your life is not how much money you made, it's how many people love you, and actually care that you are alive. Someone with lots of money how dies alone and unmourned, is not better off than someone with less money, who is surrounded by his descendants.

The measure of life is happiness. For many this involves parenting (probably, one imagines, biology drives this, no?).

Some people will choose to be stay-at-home parents. There is nothing wrong with that. That is a career. The household income... is the household income, not the wage earner's, because for a couple with children the family is their life project, and the stay-at-home parent's "service" is "paid for" by the wage earner.

If we really want to compare apples to apples then we have to allocate a fraction (say, half) of the wage earner's income to the stay-at-home parent for the purpose of analysis. Alternatively compare singles' income to singles and childless couples' individuals, and separately analyze married-with-children-and-both-working couples, and then separately analyze married-with-children-and-one-stay-at-home-parent couples.

Re: Even in Denmark, children are career killers for working moms

#106

Post by 09bjb »

jaaron wrote: post #47
09bjb wrote: post #9

Generally speaking, equality of choice between the sexes is unequivocally a good thing...but we're going to spend years untangling the muddy notion in many people's minds that equality of outcome is expected when there is perfect equality of opportunity . What actually happens in the Scandinavian countries, where both sexes have the highest levels of equality of opportunity, education, and choice in the world...is th…

I'm not convinced that there still is that full sense of "freedom to choose" that you suggest. In your argument that genders naturally tend towards certain careers, how certain are you that you've eliminated systemic bias that may still cause inequalities in occupation and opportunity? For example, I suspect a similar argument could have been made a few decades ago about why women tend to be nurses not doctors, or wh…

> I'm not convinced that there still is that full sense of "freedom to choose" that you suggest.

I don't, and I wouldn't! The Scandinavian countries are much further along on this, but probably still don't constitute a perfectly level playing field where being a man or a woman doesn't confer advantages in certain disciplines. I'm just not holding my breath for perfect equality of outcome once the playing fields are fully level; in fact, the science points to it being pretty likely that the only way you'll get men and women to do exactly the same things in exactly the same way in exactly the same proportions is by tyrannical force, which I don't think helps either sex.

> Would you still feel as comfortable to suggest that, "... where all races have the highest levels of equality of opportunity, education, and choice in the world...is that that racial effects are actually maximized.

Sure! This one is trickier as I can't point to any society that's very far along the path of actually leveling the playing fields between races. Certainly in the U.S. the stakes are stacked abhorrently high against blacks in particular (the drug war in particular is disgustingly deliberate legislative racism, in my opinion). Many Mexicans in the U.S. are not free to choose. However, we've already run a lot of well-designed experiments that show that race is not at all correlated with intelligence, drive, job choice independent of other factors (family, education, and level of poverty, for example). Gender, on the other hand, has been shown to correlate not at all with things like intelligence, and correlate fairly tightly with things that affect your work and your choice of occupation, such as: disagreeableness (one of the strongest predictors of ending up in a leadership position), empathy, interest in people vs. interest in ideas, etc.

All categories should be open for discussion, and additional good science will gradually wither the fields/distinctions that have no predictive ability or bearing on reality (phrenology, eugenics, antiquated theories of physics, etc.).

This last statement is subjective opinion, but my assessment of the science (plus my real-world experience and fallible human schemas) tell me that we won't find perfect equality between genders once we have perfect equity between genders. That equity is absolutely worth striving for but not at the expense of good science, healthy debate, and dialogue itself, things that are at times threatened in these emotionally-charged discussions.

Re: Even in Denmark, children are career killers for working moms

#107

Post by pcwalton »

patall wrote: post #90
pcwalton wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, to prove this point, the gender ratio is much better in STEM fields other than computing and engineering. Biology, for example, has more women graduating nowadays than men, despite the fact that a lot of biology work is actually CS (and more intellectually challenging than most software engineering jobs at tech companies, which to a large extent involve creating CRUD apps).

From working in that field, I can tell you this is not true. There are lots of women in biology but in computational biology its more like one in three (and often much less). In the algorithmic and tool developmental parts even more so. It may be more equal than in pure CS but still the imbalance is huge.

Regardless, the point of mentioning how much CS is in biology is to dispel the silly idea that biology is somehow less intellectually demanding than CS as practiced in industry.

Re: Even in Denmark, children are career killers for working moms

#108

Post by bduerst »

hvidgaard wrote: post #14
se30b wrote: post #7

If you choose to have children then your career is raising children. You have to choose to prioritize one or the other, the idea that you can take large amounts of time off and still be at the same level as people who kept working is insane. There isn't any injustice going on here. Juggling an intense career path with raising children is a bad idea. Sending children to day care for large amounts of their youth has be…

The entire point, and what the graph clear shows, is that fathers and mothers wage-growth significantly diverges. Both become a parent, but apparently only the mothers pay suffer.

This is correlated with a Harvard study of Booth MBA graduates:

>The presence of children is associated with less accumulated job experience, more career interruptions, shorter work hours, and substantial earnings declines for female but not for male MBAs.

http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/dynamics_of_th...

Re: Even in Denmark, children are career killers for working moms

#109

Post by thescribe »

jtr1 wrote: post #53

Equal, mandatory parental leave would go a long way toward leveling the playing field. Western cultures are still much more understanding of men being absent from their children's early lives than mothers. These sorts of cultural expectations and allowances are often taken for granted by the people who argue that "inequality of outcome != inequality of opportunity." If women are to take a career hit for raising their…

Why mandatory? Why not let people do as they want?

Re: Even in Denmark, children are career killers for working moms

#110

Post by Spooky23 »

billti wrote: post #71
hvidgaard wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point, and what the graph clear shows, is that fathers and mothers wage-growth significantly diverges. Both become a parent, but apparently only the mothers pay suffer.

The most amazing thing to me was that the male income didn't budge after childbirth. Even ignoring taking time off work, my free time in the evenings and mornings, when I would often do some of my best focused work, has almost entirely vanished since having kids.

You adapt. Those things are really luxuries.
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