Thoughts on women, men, and work

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1. The point the author made about marriage confuses me. If men benefit more from marriage than women do, why do women see it to be in their interest to marry earlier, or at least have in the recent past? (I can imagine some ways of reading that claim and that conclusion that are reasonable, it just needs to be explained….and maybe it would be if I read the actual link.)

   • The link just lists the data.

     Her explanations are plausible (for marriage, maybe women mistakenly believe it will bring them financial security and happiness — I know I do, especially the latter). But she asserts them without giving reasons to believe her, or considering other explanations.

2. Rose says “[My] field is not well set up for parenthood. Meetings and colloquia happen after school hours. Workplace bonding and networking happens in bars after work.”

   And I say that men do indeed benefit more from marriage than women, if you consider “can put in all the extra time required, work more overtime and also work on Saturdays, because someone’s taking care of the house and the kids” a *benefit*.

   Higher-level married men do indeed get paid more than higher-level married women, because they can put in all the extra time required, work more overtime and also work on Saturdays, because someone’s taking care of the house and the kids.

   It is not a surprise that someone who works less would get less money. And yes, you didn’t “choose” to work less–having a child probably was not an economic decision. Which is, to some extent, why conversations like this happen at all. If a couple actually said “okay, we’re gonna have kids, but that means one of us is never going to rise above the lower tier of middle management” then that would be one thing. Instead, everyone has kids, the wife stays home to care for them because that’s what wives do, and then we all wonder why women don’t get paid as much (in aggregate) as men.

   What I’d like to see is a society where, if two people have kids and one is a woman, it is not automatically assumed that the woman will be the stay-at-home caretaker.

   • I said parenthood, not motherhood. We take care of kids 50-50. My husband is hit by this, too. Everyone assumes it is my problem.

     • This is how we’ve handled it as well. Two school-aged kids, lots of appointments and field trips and choir concerts and recitals and soccer games and on and on. We try to split things as evenly as possible, but last year my wife took a job which really eliminated her from appointment and field trip duty, so I’ve been carrying the load, which typically means leaving work early or taking a day off at least a few times a month.

       Luckily, my job is flexible, my boss and coworkers are understanding, and I lack ambition! 🙂

       • Yeah, we definitely go in and out with who does what. I had a fellowship one semester and did the bulk of housework. My husband has one in the fall and will do more then. I tend to be the one who does doctors and therapies for my disabled kid, he tends to do dog and house stuff more. But it generally falls out around 50-50.

         I came home late from teaching tonight and had a hot dinner waiting for me. I could get used to that! I could see why men are so reluctant to give it up!

   • And the benefits were what married men get from marriage compared to single men, not married women. Married men are richer, have better health, longevity, and reported happiness than single men. Difference is almost non-existent comparing married women to single women.

     • ahh, the wonders of not-self-selected choices! To get married, a guy gotta find a woman who will marry him. And, particularly nowadays, he gotta not be a total incompetent cheat, or a dick.

       Am I the only person who has known women who will marry for money?

   • Rose, could you go into some more detail about why you found this comment offensive? Because I wasn’t trying to intentionally offend.

     I’m also not trying to say “well you should just deal”. Not in any way at all. I kind of hoped my last sentence would make that clear. My intent was to explore why it was, in my estimation, that married men experienced more work-derived rewards than single men or married women.

     • Mostly because of the assumption that I was actually working less than my husband and that I was complaining that my job didn’t pay me more for less. We have the same job.

       And that assuming that jobs that are set up for late night hours are something that is no big deal. I could do my job better if they thought about accommodating families. It would be next to no skin off their back to make adjustments (this is abviously not true in every industry). Yet it ends up excluding talented people.

       Again, on a 1 to 10 scale of offense, this ws maybe .75.

3. Every time I try to contribute to this discussion, something bad happens.

   • Do you have particularly outré views?

     • I didn’t think so until the fourth or fifth time I tried to participate in this conversation. Then I wasn’t so sure. This topic is where I learned the term “mansplaining”.

       Work/life balance conversations are up there with circumcision and anything to do with raising babies as “topics wherein people have strong opinions”.

       • I have no idea what mansplaining is!

         I didn’t mean to start a whole thing on the work/life balance (and realized too late that I chose a bad title for the post. I was more irritated at people who look at 2 or 3 data points about some vast social phenomenon, and then tell us what the reason is for those. Without thinking they need to make an argument or consider other viewpoints.

         Also, that her reason doesn’t particularly mesh well with my experience.

         • Mansplaining is a condescending sort of explanation from a general-purpose idiot who knows less about the question than the person who asked it. It often appears in the context of stupid men who talk down to intelligent women, hence the man- preface.

         • Is it just me, or is that sort of an offensive thing to say? Is that acceptable?

           I mean, don’t get me wrong. I have been annoyingly condescended to by men. And while certainly more frequently than being condescended to by women, I certainly have been condescended to by women. And there are men who are not condescending at all.

         • Heh. Mansplaining isn’t a particularly offensive term. If I read Patrick correctly, he’s pointing out how little insight men actually have into the values systems of women. You’ve pointed out how troubling the conclusions have become: every attempt at an explanation fails. If women are puzzled by all this, for the explanations seem to be as varied as the career women involved, how the hell are men supposed to provide anything but mansplanations?

         • “Is it just me, or is that sort of an offensive thing to say? Is that acceptable? ”

           I personally find the term offensive, but perhaps I’m oversensitive.

         • > Is it just me, or is that sort of an offensive thing
           > to say? Is that acceptable?

           Six of one, half-dozen of the other.

           Personally, I think it’s kind of an offensive thing to say. Sometimes, that’s okay; if someone’s being offensive, being offensive back to them can get their attention. But that’s a person-on-person conversation, not a public one.

           Rhetorically, for public conversations I think it’s completely counter-productive: if a twit is speaking out of his ass, blithely unaware of his male privilege and how his advice is not applicable precisely *because* of his male privilege, good dialog construction would involve explicating that. Throwing down a gender-linked term intended to be pejorative stops the conversation and doesn’t make your side look particularly awesome, either.

           The times I’ve had it thrown at me, it was when someone asked me for my opinion and then didn’t like that opinion. That was really annoying.

         • The term with which I am familiar (which I find much less potentially offensive) is “Male Answer Syndrome”.

           Mostly because when I first heard the term “mansplaining”, I said to myself “what the hell is that?” but the first time I heard “Male Answer Syndrome”, I said to myself “Oh. Yes. *THAT*.”

         • Yes, it’s fine to point out that men don’t really understand what women go through, etc., etc., and to say that a man in a given situation is being condescending. But mansplaining is a) dismissive, b) ad hominem, and c) characterizes a certain bad way of answering as being characteristic of an entire gender. Which we ought to be mindful of. I do think that male to female sexism is worse than female to male (because of the history of relations between the sexes), but both really ought to be avoided.

           And I suspect I’m taking a joke-y phrase to seriously. But I think there’s a way of shutting people out of a conversation (you can’t know, so you can’t say) that is counterproductive.

         • “Mansplaining is a condescending sort of explanation from a general-purpose idiot who knows less about the question than the person who asked it. It often appears in the context of stupid men who talk down to intelligent women, hence the man- preface.”
           Not sure this is appropriate. Mansplaining is to gender topics what whitesplaining is to racial topics. Of course, that isn’t helpful if you don’t know what whitesplaining is.

           I’d tend to regard either as the presumption of someone from a dominant group that they can speak better about an issue that uniquely affects a marginalized group better than members of that marginalized group can. It is heavily predicated upon privilege.

           For example, a white guy might be able to accurately explain why a given joke was not intended to be racially insensitive. But the moment he begins telling the offended group why they shouldn’t be offended, he is whitesplaining. “No no, sir. I know better about you than you. Allow me to explain…” That sort of thing.

         • > For example, a white guy might be able to accurately explain
           > why a given joke was not intended to be racially insensitive.
           > But the moment he begins telling the offended group why
           > they shouldn’t be offended, he is whitesplaining.

           That’s a great distinction, Kazzy.

           I think what I see that drives me a bit nuts is the middle.

           “I’m trying to tell you why that joke wasn’t intended to be offensive”
           “You’re telling me what I should find offensive!?”
           “No, I’m telling you why it wasn’t *intended* to be offensive”

         • That makes it a bit clearer. But there’s still something bothersome about it. Is it really NEVER okay for a man to say to a woman that X does not warrant offense when she finds X offensive?

           I say this having had many, many experiences where men said I shouldn’t be offended by something, and I felt deeply that they were wrong. (For example, I found DensityDuck’s comment above to be slightly offensive. I’m guessing he would say I shouldn’t have been offended. NB: I have absolutely zero desire to get into a back and forth about whether it actually did warrant offense. I certainly wasn’t very offended.)

           They are annoying, but it does seem that they should be judged on a case by case basis. And will men learn more if a) what or how they said something is pointed out to be offensive, or if b) they are told that they can’t judge for themselves whether offense is warranted or not?

         • Nature equipped us with two ears and one mouth. That’s about the proportion in which each should be used. If we’re locked in some baffling conundrum such as “How should men think about the issues faced by women?”, sometimes the best response is “Please expand.”

           I’m putting my girlfriend through school. Second time I’ve done this. I’d like to think I understand the problems faced by working women but that’s such a fatuous assertion I won’t even dignify it with even a partial defence. That’s part of the problem for men: how do we even begin to respond?

           Some while back, I snarkily observed the day shall come when feminism has come full circle and women will demand the right to be mothers. Nobody responded, of course. Being a parent is a job, often more job than one person can handle, surely the most significant of all occupations. Human beings have a long childhood. We no longer enjoy the luxury of extended families and clan groups to shelter our children while mothers go off to work. Maybe we just might need to foster such relationships again in the interests of our children. It’s passed into cliche, that when someone is trying to gin up support for some position, that they’ll say “But it’s for the children.” We all sorta laff and scoff at such special pleadings but there’s a sad note of truth in there when it comes to the fate of women in this society, one for which there are no easy answers, one for which men don’t have any answers, either.

         • “Is it really NEVER okay for a man to say to a woman that X does not warrant offense when she finds X offensive?”

           What I always figured was the appropriate way to go was something like “I can see that you are offended, and I’d like to understand why. I’d also like you to understand that I didn’t mean to offend you, because I wasn’t aware of the potential for offense in that statement. And so in the future I’ll try to avoid it…at least when I’m not specifically intending to offend.”

         • DD,
           yeah, see, that’s called not being a dick. “I didn’t mean to cause offense, I’m sorry you’re offended, and what the hell did I just say” is called opening your ears and listening for a change.

           It’s a good strategy for a lot of situations where ignorance impedes understanding.

           (If the other person immediately says “you Did mean it!” then they’re the one being a dick).

         • Seems a polite thing to say, DD.

           I’m just wondering if it’s ever okay for a man to conclude that a woman was unwarranted in taking offense. While it is usually the case that a man who says a woman shouldnt be offended probably is unwarranted in saying that, I don’t think it’s anything in principle a man couldn’t comment on.

         • Rose-

           Mansplaining, whitesplaining, and other -splainings should not be ready as indicating that people from the named dominant group can’t or shan’t weigh in on issues involving those in marginalized groups. Only that they should be mindful of how their privilege might be informing not only the position they have, but the authority with which they propose it.

           There is a vast difference between:
           “Listen, little lady. I know you’ve got the right to vote and all nowadays, but trust me when I tell you what’s good for ya.”
           -AND-
           “Having lived in female dominated households my entire life, I am confident in saying that my specific course of action might not be universally offensive to women, as it has never run afoul of the women I’ve been surrounded by before. I’m curious to hear why you might have found it offensive. Please know that my intent was not to offend and if I have, I apologize.”

           It is wrong and silly to think that individuals from within a group (be it majority/dominant or minority/marginalized) have a monopoly on accurate perspectives of that group.
           However, it is just as wrong and silly to an individual to not realize when they have waded into an area of which they have little expertise and wronger and sillier still to insist that their experience (or more accurately) authority elsewhere translates over.

         • That is MY thoughts and experience with those terms. I’m sure they are used in other contexts and with other meanings…

         • My first experience with “mansplaining” was in the Game of Thrones threads on the main page.

           For what *THAT* is worth.

         • My first experience with “mansplaining” was in the Game of Thrones threads on the main page.

           {{Shudder.}} I remember those threads.

         • Can someone link to it?

         • This will probably be caught by the filter but here are the three threads that I remember.

           This one, this one, and this one.

           Tremble.

         • Ack! Forgive me if I started reading those threads, and then couldn’t bear it…

         • Mansplaining is a totally-not-sexist term that feminists use to dismiss things a man says on the basis of the fact that he’s a man.

       • Kazzy, that makes sense. I do think it should be allowable that, even after her further explanation, a man could be in a position to judge offense unwarranted — assuming he listens with an open mind, really tries to put himself in her shoes, etc. And again, “mansplaining” has a feel that all men do it, or it’s men’s way of doing things.

         • I don’t ever believe that a given conversation should be off-limits to anyone. But a mindfulness as to whose terrain you’re on is important. Some men, white folk, and others, tend to always assume they are on their own terrain and act accordingly. While they more often than not are, they are certainly not always.

           I attend a conference that was initially explicitly intended only for people of color. It has since been broadened to include white allies, but the focus of the conference remains PoCs. I have to remind myself of this at times… Am I talking too much? Listening too little? Am I acting the same way I’d act in an environment that was white-centric? If so, is this acceptable? Questions like these are how I do my best to avoid whitesplaining, though I’m sure I err at times. I see other white folks with decidedly less self-awareness. Some colleagues walked out of a workshop on the obstacles people of color face moving into upper adminstration wondering why everyone was just griping and no one talked about qualifications or lackthereof. Well intentioned people, certainly accurate in individual instances (some people of color don’t get promoted because they don’t deserve it, not just because of their race)… But they demonstrated perfectly the issues with whitesplaining, which was a fundamental ignorance to the broader context of the conversation.

       • “Does one serve Carolina or Texas style barbeque at a Star-Trek themed bris?”

4. Reality does not line up with averages.
   Ambition is not known as “got a college degree.”

5. Maybe the economy is skewed in men’s favor, because economy is measured by things that men do.
   In other words, look at “traditional” agrarian societies where subsistence farming. It has been argued, and I believe, that women were empowered by providing labor and skills which were indispensible, and couldn’t be obtained any other way.

   The Industrial Revolution made commodities of tasks which women used to provide; in our economy, you ability to cook dinner is less valuable than your ability to buy dinner. Further, children went from being valuable helping hands to being financially draining emotional trophies.

   Except not all of women’s roles were consumed by industry. Child rearing still isn’t something that can easily be outsourced and puchased. So even with two gainfully employed yuppies, someone has to get pregnant and spend time raising the children. And thus devote energy and resources to something other than career advancement.

   And all the talk of “come the revolution, men will stay home” was just that, talk. Men and women still embrace gender roles for whatever reason you want to imagine.

   So women are trying to carry a baby in one arm while competing with men in the economic world, under terms defined by our great grandfathers.

6. I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder regarding the whole mansplaining thing. I believe it absolutely describes something real and important, but I typically seen it used in a way that is more heat than light. I think there’s something about the word that lends itself to being used as a baseball bat rather than an attempt to point out that someone has actually stepped out of bounds. I have not seen a reluctance on people who use the term to also explain why men think the way they do. Which is unfortunate, because I do think it is describing a real thing. I think a more serious-sounding name for the term, like Man Answer Reflex, may be used more judiciously. Mansplaining just asks to be used flippantly.

   • Mansplaining just asks to be used flippantly.

     Perhaps it’s become that. But imagine the first time a woman used that word to refer to something no one could quite get their mind around? Imagine the excitement at having this whole cultural paradigm exposed? Pretty cool, huh? (Of course, I think mansplainin followed from whitesplainin, fwtw).

     For my part, I think going overboard is OK and even appropriate to some extent. Let the privileged bastards skulk around in frustration for a while, just as a karmic balancing act. I mean, the fact that someone thinks it’s overly- and bluntly-used may be just another example of the type of unselfconscious privilege the terms is trying to highlight, no?

     • I like that the phenomenon is picked out. But the word itself I find off-putting.

       • But the word itself I find off-putting.

         Yes! Precisely!

     • For my part, I think going overboard is OK and even appropriate to some extent. Let the privileged bastards skulk around in frustration for a while, just as a karmic balancing act. I mean, the fact that someone thinks it’s overly- and bluntly-used may be just another example of the type of unselfconscious privilege the terms is trying to highlight, no?

       I consider it broadly counterproductive. The skulking around that occurs mostly leads to more antagonism. Those most inclined to skulk were probably the ones that were otherwise most reachable. The ones who really have kharma coming are those who will get self-righteously pissed off, which is a briar patch.

       • Dammit, Will! When are we gonna agree on something again?

         • The next time Republicans do something breathtakingly, off-the-charts stupid.

           I suspect it’s right around the corner.

7. I wrote a blog-post length comment and ate it.

   I’ll see if I can recreate it later.

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