Journal ParticleGirl's Journal: I am a woman and innately different 2
Because of the overwhelming amount of email I received in response to my "I am a woman and innately different" post, I thought I would write a journal entry to respond to some of it. I especially want to talk to the people who misunderstood me when I said something about "our society's inability to cope with a workforce that is actively involved in reproduction" and suggested that I was unconcerned about the fact that males don't get this consideration either. To the contrary: I specifically said "a workforce that is actively involved in reproduction" instead of "women having kids" because a workforce should be composed of men and women, and because I believe that both fathers and mothers should be actively involved in reproduction/childrearing; I am talking about more than one major change. "Society" would have to 1. realize that not only women should be actively involved in having kids and 2. find a way to cope with a workforce composed of parents. It should not be a workforce of men because women are doing the parenting. That's total bullshit.
I want to have kids someday. So do a lot of men I know. But I don't know any men who are worried that they will not get hired or tenured if they are wearing a wedding ring because their employers will think they are going to have a child soon and slack off. I want to have kids someday, and part of the reason I picked teaching is so I have a more flexible schedule. Not a shorter schedule: I fully expect to be putting in all the overtime a junior faculty member puts in and working my ass off. I also expect to have a partner who is just as flexible as I am and will be the one to pick the kid up from school a few days a week. I know a lot of pairs of professors who have kids, and put in equal work taking care of them, but the woman had a much harder time getting a tenure-track job than her husband because it was assumed that she would take more time off or have more kids. That's not fair.
Finally, as for the maternity leave deal, I am not suggesting that the university pay for me to take nine months of maternity leave for my pregnancy and then keep my job and benefits for me through my child's early years until I decide to come back to work. I am merely suggesting that some women have complications and cannot work right until a the day before the baby is due, and that if breastfeeding is chosen the woman is often discouraged from working because a nursing infant is unwelcome in a work environment. Unfortunately, consideration for this is not treated as a medical issue OR a personal issue, like a death in the family or an injury requiring hospitalization-- and the difference is that is was chosen. However, I think herein lies the innate difference: men and women both [often, sometimes, not enough?] choose when to have children, but this means choosing a period of time in which the woman may in some way be physically restricted. And for many employers, this is not an acceptable option until the employee has been working for decades. And this means it is not an option for some (reference: the ad reading "Egg donors needed. Waited too long for tenure.") That's not fair either. If it was some kind of elective surgery, most employers are more than willing to accept it, or even plan with you-- but when it comes to pregnancy, many employers treat it as disinterest in the job and a sign of poor quality of work to come.
I think that's everything I needed to respond to. I'll add more if something else springs to mind. In contrast to all of the defending and clarification above, I want to thank everybody who wrote messages of support or suggestions or "hang in there"s-- no, I'm not planning on getting married or having babies anytime soon, so it's not like I'm making any tough choices at the moment. But --well, I hope I do someday, and it would be nice to stick with the career, too.
28 February-- Nature (the journal, not Mother Earth) seems to be on the same page as I am: http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v433/n7027/full/nj7027-780a_fs.html
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Most people don't like to stop wi
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