The Feminist Paradox

Twenty or twenty-five years ago, we started to see very substantial increases in the number of women who were in graduate school in this field. Now the people who went to graduate school when that started are forty, forty-five, fifty years old. If you look at the top cohort in our activity, it is not only nothing like fifty-fifty, it is nothing like what we thought it was when we started having a third of the women, a third of the law school class being female, twenty or twenty-five years ago. And the relatively few women who are in the highest ranking places are disproportionately either unmarried or without children, with the emphasis differing depending on just who you talk to. And that is a reality that is present and that one has exactly the same conversation in almost any high-powered profession. What does one make of that? I think it is hard-and again, I am speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively-to say that there are many professions and many activities, and the most prestigious activities in our society expect of people who are going to rise to leadership positions in their forties near total commitments to their work. They expect a large number of hours in the office, they expect a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency, they expect a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and they expect-and this is harder to measure-but they expect that the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job, even when the job is not taking place. And it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women. That's not a judgment about how it should be, not a judgment about what they should expect. But it seems to me that it is very hard to look at the data and escape the conclusion that that expectation is meeting with the choices that people make and is contributing substantially to the outcomes that we observe. One can put it differently. Of a class, and the work that Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz are doing will, I'm sure, over time, contribute greatly to our understanding of these issues and for all I know may prove my conjectures completely wrong. Another way to put the point is to say, what fraction of young women in their mid-twenties make a decision that they don't want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week. What fraction of young men make a decision that they're unwilling to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week, and to observe what the difference is. And that has got to be a large part of what is observed. Now that begs entirely the normative questions-which I'll get to a little later-of, is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all questions that I want to come back to. But it seems to me that it is impossible to look at this pattern and look at its pervasiveness and not conclude that something of the sort that I am describing has to be of significant importance. To buttress conviction and theory with anecdote, a young woman who worked very closely with me at the Treasury and who has subsequently gone on to work at Google highly successfully, is a 1994 graduate of Harvard Business School. She reports that of her first year section, there were twenty-two women, of whom three are working full time at this point. That may, the dean of the Business School reports to me, that that is not an implausible observation given their experience with their alumnae. So I think in terms of positive understanding, the first very important reality is just what I would call the, who wants to do high-powered intense work?

Typically glib Joe, but what the hell does it mean? Do try to argue something of substance for a change.

And you are able, I suppose, to to argue against the extensive and continuous nature of slave (intentional or otherwise) breeding?

Considering that there are any number of Americans alive today who can trace their lineage to actual slaves, it is difficult to see how the scale of "regression to mean" applies.

At the risk of redundancy...glib Joe but your point is? Do you mean to suggest that this was not the way that slaves were propagated? Just what do you mean to suggest? Give us the Haute Couture analysis...please.

Duh? Let me attempt to 'splain for you: American slaver owners may not have had eugenic intentions, but that doesn't mean that similar results were produced through different intentions.

Predictably, you have pounced upon the argument you are inclined to pursue. "Not all slaves were culled by hard field work." Brilliant observation Joe. Now please explain how and when I asserted otherwise.

Many slaves did work in the Big House, but if you knew something of the history of the time you would know that the vast majority of "house niggers" were the illegitimate children of slave owners or their intended conquests. This being the case, I refer you to my prior statement regarding the two primary means for propagating slaves.

That male slaves physically capable of enduring the hardships of slavery were most likely to propagate is simple logic. I suppose you are of the opinion that slavery wasn't all that bad and the meek, mild and nebbish Africans had as much of a shot as passing along their genes as the "Black Buck."

Please direct us all to a post wherein I have advanced the notion that African Americans, understandably, dominate every major sport today. Try as you might, you will find the contrary. Sorry Joe, but you really need to read the postings before you fire off with your "Iconic Liberal" replies.

I see no need to restate my point. Try harder to fathom it Joe.I don't know precisely when you became an "iconic Liberal," only that in A2K you are one. Your position on this subject serves as proof enough.

Talk is cheap.

Where did I say he didn't say that?

But yet you offered zero evidence to contradict my claims; therefore in the world of A2K my claims are just as good as yours.

It isn't a matter of statistics anyway. Once the process of importing new slaves from other places stopped, the only way the slave owner had to replenish the 'stock' was via new births among slave in the U.S. and/or buy slave from another slave owner. So requirements for breeding are very well documented and the cruelty involved in that is also very well documented.

The question remains as to whether the slave owners utilized 'selective breeding' to produce bigger, stronger, more beautiful slaves. It is well documented that a big man with obvious strength and stamina brought a much better price than a little scrawny guy; a well formed, healthy young female a better price than a more frail one. That this would not be considered when forcing slaves to 'breed' seems beyond probability.

Once black people were free to choose their own destiny, and until the welfare state largely destroyed it, the black family was one of the strongest, most enduring institutions on the American scene. And of course family traits were passed from generation to generation.

As had been said, until somebody comes up with a study to compare U.S. black athletes with those who emerged from tribal societies in other countries, there will be no conclusive evidence for the theories but only reasoned speculation.

One of the many gender-biased hurdles in academics

Or, in your case, unreasoned, baseless conjecture.

Soz, okay I see your point and I should have qualified my comment because as I typed it, I misspoke. What I meant to say is that I do not believe Summers was definitively saying that differences beween men and women account for the disparity between men and women in advanced math and hard sciences at Harvard, but that possibility could not be ruled out without further study.

On the stats FD posted, I am not surprised at the overall scores or math scores on SAT, but I am confounded at the verbal scores as I would have guessed the women would have outscored the men significantly on that one.

One of the conjectures on the disparity is that in high school, careful precision is rewarded while in the SAT's it's important to work within time constrictions. Sometimes using guesses on multiple choice quetions.

And, actually, I have to comment on your surprise at the verbal scores. I'm not trying to pick on you, Fox, but that very statement is an example of the societal preconceptions I was talking about earlier. Why would you think that women would have blown away the men on the verbal test?

But my surprise at the verbal scores goes back to my earlier post in which I said I believed women tend to be left brained or verbally oriented and men tend to be right brained or graphically/spatially/visually oriented and I wondered if that had anything to do with giiving men an edge in math, physics, etc. Conversely I believed women in general do have superior ability in verbal skills.

Fourth, what do we actually know about the incidence of financial incentives and other support for child care in terms of what happens to people's career patterns. I've been struck at Harvard that there's something unfortunate and ironic about the fact that if you're a faculty member and you have a kid who's 18 who goes to college, we in effect, through an interest-free loan, give you about $9,000. If you have a six-year-old, we give you nothing. And I don't think we're very different from most other universities in this regard, but there is something odd about that strategic choice, if the goal is to recruit people to come to the university.