UK: Anne-Marie Slaughter’s plan to close the ‘gender gap’ will take us right back to where we started from

Submitted by Mastodon on Tue, 2014-01-28 06:02

Article here. Excerpt:

'Slaughter believes that the best way to reduce the disparity between men and women is to encourage the greatest number of women to reach the highest positions of influence. She believes that to make this a reality more men must stay at home. “It is far, far easier to be at the top of a major organisation if you have a primary or full-time caregiver at home,” she wrote.

Slaughter wanted to conduct a poll at Davos to find out how many participants had a life partner who is either at home full time or works outside the house but is the primary caregiver. “If the numbers are, say, 80 per cent or higher,” she wrote, “then future Forum gender equality polls should assume that women will only achieve parity with breadwinning men when men achieve parity with care-giving women.”

Slaughter recognises the importance of the primary caregiver. But her argument is not advanced in order to find a way of balancing being a mother with being a worker – the real problem woman face today. The Princeton professor is, instead, trying to find a way of balancing family and career in order to have the best career possible. That is a very worrying, masculine approach. Perhaps when the world is eventually ruled by women, men will then press for equality – and we will be right back where we started from.'

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Ed. note: Anne-Marie Slaughter is not to be confused with Louise Slaughter, the Congressional representative (House) from upstate New York.

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Comments

"Masculine approach". Hmmm. Never imagined "approaches" could be masculine, or feminine, for that matter. Well, why pick nits. The author actually has a good point: As long as there is a "labor role" distinction within a couple, especially as pertains to child-raising tasks, there's going to be this problem. Frankly, I don't see it being solved any time soon. If one decides to have kids with someone else, the best thing to do is come to an understanding of how the various new (and current) duties toward one another's joint life issues are to be handled. If this seems like it won't work out, don't do it. Marriage with kids is stressful enough; just winging it is bad advice, especially these days.

Modern society does not do a good job of raising kids. That is, institutions and traditions in modern industrialized societies are not well-suited to the matter of bringing up a succeeding generation. The very low developed-world birthrates attest to this. One way this is shown is the repro. rate of new arrivals (immigrants) from relatively high-birthrate countries to western, low-birthrate countries. Almost immediately, among the recent arrivals, the birthrate falls drastically. This is because it's hard to have kids in modern societies. Countries with fewer demands and distractions, as well as greater practical reasons for having kids (i.e., they're the only "social security" you can hope to have), will have higher birthrates. When people do not see a practical need for having kids anymore, they quickly stop doing so, or limit themselves to one or two. In addition, having kids is in effect punished due to the deterrent power of divorce (esp. so for men who might have become fathers, but decided it wasn't worth the risk) as well as the perils to career and personal life it can bring. Not even sr. female business leaders have "ushered in a great new day for work-life balance" -- not even close. I don't know of a single sr. female corporate executive at any large company (or even smaller one) who has done anything like implement on-site day-care for employees' kids, more-than-legally-required maternity leave that is also paid, etc.

Modern life is just better-suited to being single. Even if mental health professionals say that it's bad for people's morale/happiness, it's also bad for their morale/happiness if their odds at a successful marriage are worse rather than better and they end up shafted. C'est la vie, I guess.

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Submitted by Matt on Wed, 2014-01-29 05:53