More on Summers
The comment thread in my previous post has taken a more thoughtful turn (not that there's anything wrong with knee-jerk bitching about stupid shit, imho), and I was thinking about posting on the question of whether it's reasonable to imply that a hypothetical innate difference in the average abstract reasoning skills of men and women would be large enough to account for the lack of tenured women in the hard sciences, but thankfully Preposterous Universe--a physicist! and a boy!--has done it for me. (Edited to add a link to Matt Yglesias's post, which I hadn't read before I wrote this.)
So I can turn to the other thing I wanted to say instead. My understanding is that Summers trotted out three possible explanations: past and present discrimination, innate difference, and the "choice" hypothesis, that is, that women don't do hard jobs because those jobs are just too demanding and women have families and children to consider.
Now, the specific figure Summers apparently mentioned is 80 hours/week. I'm gonna go on record here and say that yes, in most cases, women with young children are not gonna want to work 80 hours/week. Then again, I assume that men with young children also do not want to work 80 hours/week. In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say no one wants to work 80 hours/week. I would even argue that working 80 hours/week, week in and week out, is unhealthy and impossible.
There are 168 hours in a week. Let us say you work 80 of them. That leaves you with 88 hours of non-work time. If you sleep 8 hours/night, as you should--especially if you are doing 80 hours of productive thinking every week, which really would require you to get your rest--that is 56 hours/week of sleep, leaving you with 32 hours. Let's subtract 2 hours/day for meal preparation and eating, and an additional 2 hours for grocery shopping and putting groceries away. Now you have 16 hours. Per week. That is 2.29 hours/day to do everything other than work, eat, and sleep: talk on the phone, clean your house, shower, brush your teeth, relax, date, pay bills, do laundry, take a shit. If you go to a movie, that's it for the day: you have no time left to go to the bathroom or shower that day.
Now, maybe if you are a single person and you are paid a lot of money, you can hire someone to clean your house and do your laundry, and you can cut back on your eating time by microwaving frozen dinners every night and eating while you relax in front of the tv. That might leave you enough time to shower every day and occasionally go out to buy new clothes. But to presume that this is a reasonable life to ask people to lead is completely insane.
Oh, there may be periods of extreme productivity or inspiration when people can work like that. But regular work on that scale? No. And let's be honest: because it is, in fact, physically impossible to work like that, people don't. I was talking to Mr. B. about this the other day, and he pointed out that the main difference between men and women-with-kids* is that what women-with-kids do when they aren't working is, more work. If I'm not being lazy, I pretty much walk through the door and start interacting with pseudonymous kid, maybe I start dinner, maybe I set the table or tidy up a bit. Sometimes it's hard just to find time to change out of my work clothes, b/c pk is all over me. As Mr. B. put it, "what women do when they're not working is important, so people talk about it. What men do isn't important, so no one mentions it. 'Oh hey, I'm leaving work early so I can go home and masturbate. I'm going to go play golf. I'm going to go to Best Buy and look at plasma tvs. I'm going to make some little doohickey out of paperclips for the next half hour and then maybe wander off and get a candy bar.'" In other words, the difference isn't kids: it's leisure time. And that, yes, people who do intellectual work need. Maybe with with young children have less, and maybe that is a disadvantage for us. But then, everyone needs leisure time.
We women-with-kids, we who are so busy "choosing" not to live this way, we are the goddamn canaries in the fucking coal mine, people. Women make up more than half the population. Most women do, sooner or later, have children. And so do most men. Any system that is set up so that more than half the population is presumptively disqualified from being part of it is not a reasonable system.
*When I say "men" or "women-with-kids" I am talking about stereotypes and cultural expectations. In my own family, of course, Mr. B. is the "woman-with-kid" who has "chosen" to stay home, and I am the "man" who works and gets a fair amount of leisure time. Not as much leisure as "men" are supposed to have, because pseudonymous kid is under the impression that I am his mama, and also because despite my bitchiness, I have internalized a lot of expectations about shit--witness my calling myself "lazy" if I do not do something productive as soon as I get home, but instead sit on my butt and read the paper or something.
So I can turn to the other thing I wanted to say instead. My understanding is that Summers trotted out three possible explanations: past and present discrimination, innate difference, and the "choice" hypothesis, that is, that women don't do hard jobs because those jobs are just too demanding and women have families and children to consider.
Now, the specific figure Summers apparently mentioned is 80 hours/week. I'm gonna go on record here and say that yes, in most cases, women with young children are not gonna want to work 80 hours/week. Then again, I assume that men with young children also do not want to work 80 hours/week. In fact, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say no one wants to work 80 hours/week. I would even argue that working 80 hours/week, week in and week out, is unhealthy and impossible.
There are 168 hours in a week. Let us say you work 80 of them. That leaves you with 88 hours of non-work time. If you sleep 8 hours/night, as you should--especially if you are doing 80 hours of productive thinking every week, which really would require you to get your rest--that is 56 hours/week of sleep, leaving you with 32 hours. Let's subtract 2 hours/day for meal preparation and eating, and an additional 2 hours for grocery shopping and putting groceries away. Now you have 16 hours. Per week. That is 2.29 hours/day to do everything other than work, eat, and sleep: talk on the phone, clean your house, shower, brush your teeth, relax, date, pay bills, do laundry, take a shit. If you go to a movie, that's it for the day: you have no time left to go to the bathroom or shower that day.
Now, maybe if you are a single person and you are paid a lot of money, you can hire someone to clean your house and do your laundry, and you can cut back on your eating time by microwaving frozen dinners every night and eating while you relax in front of the tv. That might leave you enough time to shower every day and occasionally go out to buy new clothes. But to presume that this is a reasonable life to ask people to lead is completely insane.
Oh, there may be periods of extreme productivity or inspiration when people can work like that. But regular work on that scale? No. And let's be honest: because it is, in fact, physically impossible to work like that, people don't. I was talking to Mr. B. about this the other day, and he pointed out that the main difference between men and women-with-kids* is that what women-with-kids do when they aren't working is, more work. If I'm not being lazy, I pretty much walk through the door and start interacting with pseudonymous kid, maybe I start dinner, maybe I set the table or tidy up a bit. Sometimes it's hard just to find time to change out of my work clothes, b/c pk is all over me. As Mr. B. put it, "what women do when they're not working is important, so people talk about it. What men do isn't important, so no one mentions it. 'Oh hey, I'm leaving work early so I can go home and masturbate. I'm going to go play golf. I'm going to go to Best Buy and look at plasma tvs. I'm going to make some little doohickey out of paperclips for the next half hour and then maybe wander off and get a candy bar.'" In other words, the difference isn't kids: it's leisure time. And that, yes, people who do intellectual work need. Maybe with with young children have less, and maybe that is a disadvantage for us. But then, everyone needs leisure time.
We women-with-kids, we who are so busy "choosing" not to live this way, we are the goddamn canaries in the fucking coal mine, people. Women make up more than half the population. Most women do, sooner or later, have children. And so do most men. Any system that is set up so that more than half the population is presumptively disqualified from being part of it is not a reasonable system.
*When I say "men" or "women-with-kids" I am talking about stereotypes and cultural expectations. In my own family, of course, Mr. B. is the "woman-with-kid" who has "chosen" to stay home, and I am the "man" who works and gets a fair amount of leisure time. Not as much leisure as "men" are supposed to have, because pseudonymous kid is under the impression that I am his mama, and also because despite my bitchiness, I have internalized a lot of expectations about shit--witness my calling myself "lazy" if I do not do something productive as soon as I get home, but instead sit on my butt and read the paper or something.
