Letters to the Editor

• Not so much that women are compelled to take poor jobs...

  [Read the article: Oprah gets some rich company]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  ...as that only women are willing to, due to very poor support for mothers in this country.

  No woman is forced to be an elementary school teacher. It pays horribly and it doesn't offer as much job satisfaction as it used to, but teachers do it because they love to teach. The question is, why don't men also love to teach? And the answer is that they do. But married men feel pressure to have good-paying jobs because women are under pressure to provide child care.

  Imagine a married couple, man and woman, making equal salary. The woman gets pregnant. She has only 12 weeks of legally mandated maternity leave, and that's without pay. If she wants to breastfeed, she's going to need to buy an expensive pump and find a time and a place to pump at work, which many, many businesses are fairly hostile to. She may well feel tired and ill during pregnancy and her work might suffer, which may cause the business to lay her off (in an at-will state, they can find any non-pregnancy-related excuse to fire her.) So if the two are making equal salary, but her ability to work through a pregnancy and the infancy of their child is not supported by her employer, she's likely to be the one who will cut back hours or quit if they can afford for her to, and he will likely respond by trying to fill in the financial gap by working longer and harder and trying to get more raises.

  It is a biological fact that pregnancy takes a toll on women's bodies that men never suffer. It is a cultural fact that businesses in the US would prefer us all to be robots, and have little enough sympathy for the health problems of men, let alone the parenting choices of women. It is an artifact of our right-leaning political climate that there has never been enough political will to enforce genuine support for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and/or parents of either sex's need to be there for their kids or support for child care in this country. So it's a total crapshoot as to whether a pregnant woman is going to be able to, or even want to, keep her job (if she can afford to quit and she doesn't love her job and she's tired and ill and she wants to be with her baby, yes, she may very well choose to quit. Most jobs are pretty soulless and unlovable, whereas babies are very cute, and somewhat more tolerant of mom's illnesses than business is. At least they nap a lot.) Under such circumstances, men feel that they must take high-paying jobs because there's no guarantee their wife will be able to work (and men have a lot more tolerance for women not wanting to work because of a baby than vice versa, in part for cultural reasons and in part because men don't get pregnant.) So men don't take the low-paying jobs because they feel these will make them less attractive to women as marriage partners, or because they feel it's their duty to provide for a wife if she needs it, or because, due to the pressure society puts on men to be providers, they feel emasculated if they don't make enough.

  Note that everybody suffers for this. Men who might love to teach children can't. Women are forced to choose between bad choices (and, in doing jobs they love that do support pregnancy, end up with a lot less money.) Boys and girls are denied the balance of having male role models standing next to female ones, in school (conservative commentators keep decrying the "feminization" of schools, and how female-only-teacher schools hurt boys, without it ever occurring to them that men are choosing not to go into the profession because it doesn't pay, and maybe if we paid higher taxes to give teachers better salaries or supported men's choices more by supporting women's choices more, we'd get more men to teach young kids.)

  This may be part of what's going on with the billionaires as well. Most female billionnaires who are self-made are either childless (Oprah) or insanely lucky (JK Rowling... I mean, I like Harry Potter quite a bit, but it's just amazing that Rowling is a billionnaire and Madeleine L'Engle or Diana Wynne Jones or any number of much better writers of children's fantasy aren't.) The grueling hours it takes to support building up a really successful business as an entrepreneur destroys your family life, and the kind of men who would be most supportive of a woman giving up her family life and taking up the slack themselves are probably the kind of men that intelligent, ambitious women usually don't marry. What I've read about small businesses says that most women's small businesses make *less* than the women would have made in the corporate world, and they chose to be entrepreneurs to be their own bosses and to balance work and family life, not to get rich. (Entrepreneurs who want to get rich are not their own bosses. Their businesses are the bosses of them.)

  Permalink Tuesday, March 14, 2006 10:23 AM