Thanks Kevin for another offering of the liberal Perpetual Victimhood story: women are Victims, women have No Choices, society is Unfair to Women.

You know what I noticed? Every so often, like clockwork, some Republicans get elected and fuck up the country. Then some Dems have to come in and fix the place again.

This has been going on since forever. How come I don't see that in my paper?

Kenny baby, what you should be concerned about is society's tragic indifference to morons. You've hit the limits of your kindergarten education - the blackboard ceiling, if you will.

If you could make an index out of it it might be a nice economic indicator.

Seems women are more likely to 'decide' to not work when the labor market is weak.

Bedwetter, you truly are a tedious fool. Yawn.

Thank you, Kevin. We owe thanks to Labor for the 40-hour week. Why is 40 hours ever considered “part time,” and why do so many desk jobs expect salaried workers to routinely perform unpaid overtime? And what are the consequences of this mandatory overtime on their spouses and children and the community? These are profound policy questions.

Not sure what the issue is here. Top end law firms expect women and MEN to give up their lives if they want to stick around. It's a seventy to eighty hour weeks all the time. More than that when it is really busy. As soon as I paid off my student loans and saved some money for a home down-payment, I left and took a pay cut to take a slower paced job. I wanted to spent time with my wife and start a family. This is a choice that women and MEN at "top" law firms have to make.

The big corporate forms now pay first year associates out of law school a base salary of $165K with bonuses of $35K. By the time you are eight years in, you make $280K with up to $65K bonus and then its on to partnership in year 9 or 10 where average profits per partner are well over a million dollars at alot of firms (two-four million at some places). They don't pay this kind of money without expecting you to sacrifice every ounce of your personal life regardless of whether you are male or female (though some firms are better than others).

http://www.infirmation.com/shared/lss/one-payscale.tcl?employer_id=NY0840

Anyway, it sounds like Katherine Brokaw made the same choice that I did electing to take a slower paced job in the law (though she works as a university administrator and I decided to work for the government and help prosecute corporate wrongdoers rather than help defend them like at did at the firm). There is no such thing as a part time job at a law firm and this isn't a gender issue ... it's a law firm culture issue. Most men at these places are miserable too and the attrition rate is horrendous but it's an up or out model so the firms don't care. 100 first year associates will start the race and at the end of ten years, 4 or 5 will make partner and everyone else will leave (and the firm expects/wants them to leave). That's the business model for everyone (MEN and WOMEN). Most sane people go to law firms to get good training for a few years then high tail it out of there ... so they can get their lives back.

http://www.law.emory.edu/cms/site/index.php?id=580

Katherine Brokaw is the Dean of Students for Emory Law School and the Director of Academic Assistance. She graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University in 1982, with an A.B. in Classics. She was the principal speechwriter for Governor Thomas Kean of New Jersey before attending Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, Articles Editor of the Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems, and a teaching assistant to Dean Jack Greenberg. Dean Brokaw received her J.D. from Columbia in 1990 and clerked for United States District Judge Robert P. Patterson, Jr. in the Southern District of New York. She practiced at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York and King & Spalding in Atlanta for several years, in the field of commercial litigation.

Kevin, Though it pains me to admit it, you're right. There's nothing new in this trend. It's one of the benefits of living in a free society that we can come and go into and out of the work force.

Women leave the workforce to become mothers. When men do it it's called a sabbatical, which I can atest from personal experience is a great way to recharge your batteries.

FK is correct - society is unfair to women. Our patriarchal culture reflects that from top to bottom - from average lower wages to lack of adequate funding for child care to disdain for women's reproductive health issues.

As some pundit wrote, if it were men that got pregnant instead of women, abortion would not only be legal but it would be as available as McDonalds.

This may be a problem, but that's a crap example. Ms. Brokaw didn't want to put in the hours required of anyone in her "first choice" profession and did something else. That's a textbook example of a choice. If there's a gender issue involved here, it may be that more women than men have the good sense not to choose to tolerate the foolish demands of that environment.

As a woman working on Wall Street since the mid-1970s, these articles were always a thorn in my side. Here I was trying to push the stereotypes aside and MSM kept writing articles implying women weren't strongly attached to the work force. Particularly annoying were those 1-2 Harvard MBA women about to graduate who they dredged up to quote about how family was just so much more important than long hours at work to them. Grrrrrrrrrrr.

Conservative Deflator has it right. Meanwhile, many of the other folks are letting the points whoosh right over their heads. For example:

just saying: "f there's a gender issue involved here, it may be that more women than men have the good sense not to choose to tolerate the foolish demands of that environment."

Al: "Women leave the workforce to become mothers. When men do it it's called a sabbatical"

Got out "e. Top end law firms expect women and MEN to give up their lives if they want to stick around. . . . There is no such thing as a part time job at a law firm and this isn't a gender issue ... it's a law firm culture issue."

Do you folks really not see how these things are not equivalent, how they are, in fact, gendered issues? Got out, do you imagine the law firm culture you describe just magically appeared, or is some immutable fact of nature? ("Culture" is in fact the entirely correct term here). Do all men at top law firms leave when it's time to start a family (although I am entirely sympathetic to your choice - see also The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit)? Are the male partners uniformly childless? If not, who cared/is caring for their young children?

So.. um.. Katherine Brokaw's first choice was.. working less? Hey, that's my first choice too! Unfortunately, some jobs don't make room for that, either for men or for women. It's not like that's a secret.

If you choose to be a 'high-flying lawyer', then don't expect a lot of sympathy later when you find that your career choice is incompatible with certain lifestyle choices. We can't have it all, and it's the worst tendency of liberalism to encourage people to cry about this.

Many young lawyers leave law school to become associates at law firms that pay them substantial salaries. Until they spend a few years learning something useful, their actual worth to the firm is marginal at best. They are still expected to prove their "worth" to the firm by billing endless hours, more hours than the guy or gal in the next cubicle. Much of their time can't be billed. They are still in training. It usually takes sixty or eighty hours to bill forty. The work they do is often tedious beyond belief. To get ahead their firms often expect them to sacrifice their social and family lives. After a few years most of the young lawyers, their home and personal lives shattered and having learned nothing about the practice of law, leave their firms. Sometimes they go to teach law. Other times they go to smaller firms in smaller more laid back towns. Many go to work in corporate organizations. Some times they are institutionalized. Twisted beyond all recognition, a precious few remain in the large law firms inflicting pain and suffering on generations of newly minted associates.

Women aren't the only ones who are victimized by the pressures generated by high powered law firms. Men suffer as well. I know a man who went to work for a law firm. An honors graduate of one of the best law schools in the country, he spent two years reviewing tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of documents requested by an opponent in a big case. He didn't see other people. He didn't interview clients. He didn't go to court. He just sat at a desk and read what were in almost all instances the totally innocent, routine records of his client's business. One day he just quit the practice of law. When he recovered he went to work at a “low” pressure firm and created a life. I know another man who was asked to interview on Easter Sunday. “That was the only day the partner had available.” He elected not to go to work for that firm. He had a wife and two babies. He didn't want his sons to grow up without his participation.

High powered law firms are generally crappy employers. Both men and women chose to leave them all the time.

This makes me razor angry, for it's not just this work issue pertaining to women, it's any issue at all related to work that our whoring corporate knee-bangers who dare to call themselves "journalists" ignore or screw up that creases me so.

They never cover anything--not child care (a huge issue), not the obliteration of the 40 hour work week, wages, injury, union-organizing, nothing.

American workers are expected to give all to the corporate machine, their lives be damned, and god damn it our story is never told.

I swear to god corporate journalism as we know it is dead. They're so fucking bad and clueless with the internet right here they're gone. Finito. You hear me, corporate cousins? You're so bad you're gone. I'm publishing all weekend, assholes, I just serve the time and wait.

You won't tell our story, we will. One day we'll be good enough to take the narrative away from you scumbags, I'm going to my grave trying, jesus what incredible harm you've done to us.

What many commenters are missing, and what these articles nearly always miss, is that this is readily available as a choice (whatever the pressures that bring women, or men, to it) to a small proportion of people whose spouses (or parents) are wealthy. See Kevin's data on the top 1% vs. the rest of us. Who can comfortably afford to have a family with children and only one working spouse and attractively grace the cover of the New York Times Magazine? (Footnote: what if all lawyers worked 40 hours a week and were paid accordingly?)

We can't have it all, and it's the worst tendency of liberalism to encourage people to cry about this.

You know, there's an element of truth in what you say. Liberalism is indeed more closely associated with ideals such as freedom of speech than conservatism.

One problem I notice: when conservatives complain about any encroachment on their economic freedoms--the freedom to satisfiy greed--it doesn't square very well with their complaints about cultural excess.

Interesting essay...I notice women at work are taking shorter maternity leaves, and there is more pressure than ever on managerial staff to work long hours and to be on call on weekends.
Regarding the opting-out theory, the economy practically requires a two-income family, especially if one has purchased a home, etc. Not to mention the increased cost of health care co-pays, utility bills, maintaining two cars, etc. --that list is endless.
I know professional women who have to resort to credit cards to pay monthly household bills.
Look at the price of gasoline alone--and OPEC wants these higher prices to remain--I just heard that on the news--and OPEC elected not to increase oil output. The oil-men who run the administration have not helped working people one iota in their six long years.

My friends who are working mothers are tired, stressed out and still at it--juggling all the roles.
I know a couple of gold-digging gals who quit work to marry wealthier guys, but most women around here are still doing it all, putting in long hours at work and at home. There is stress and guilt--and worry about young teens who have increased freedom as mom comes home late some nights.
Men at work do look askance when mothers leave for appointments that cannot be made on weekends, and I know of women who were likely not hired or promoted because they were pregnant during the interview. It is not legal where I work to ask job candidates about marital status or children.

I am sure the pressure in law firms is unreal, and that is why women opt for lesser roles such as law clerks. Or quit larger firms for a less involved role. I know that to be a fact in my area.

I guess the point of my two paragraphs is that the pressure of the 60 or 80 hour work week is not a "woman's issue," it is a worker's issue. Both men and women can be victims. Children are the ones who suffer.

I just read all the comments, jesus fucking christ, y'all are infuriating.

You think lawyers work hard? Oh it's so bad for the little suits? I could tell you twenty stories in high tech that are just as bad, for fuck's sake it's not just the lawyers who have had their lives ripped to shreds by incredible hours at work!

My old employer doubled my position load to convert to an new website. Maintain the old one still live, work up the new one to go live. They fucked it up for 2.3 years with continual failure all that time and kept me on double workload.

I forgot what 50 hour weeks were like. They fucked up my health terribly--I am sick, horribly sick 5-6 times a year for the last 1.5 years, they have no idea what's wrong with me. I recover much faster, it might go away, it's been pure hell. I quit those fucking abusers 11 months ago.

Bricklayers, carpenters, roofers, so many have lost knees and backs forever. Hey lawyer, when you're done with that god damn whining think about what it's like to lose your life to back pain every day 'cause Labor is all that life offered. You're 35 with 30 years to go of being a cripple, wanna changes places? Thought so.

[spits]

This is our country, it is not set up for corporations (I shit you not, American), and stories with comments like this are going to end, I swear to god.

Thank you Ron Beyers, finally, it's a worker's issue, not a lawyer's issue.

We all suffer, not just the children. It does not have to be with this way.

Paradox, I feel your pain.

I know about lawyers. The little story in Kevin's post was about a high flying lawyer, who had to "choose" between being a good parent and being a "good lawyer." That is why I wrote about lawyers.

You are right. Somehow we seem to have forgotten that the machines and corporations are supposed to serve us. It seems we spend a lot of time serving them.

P.S. -- Speaking of working women forced out of a job, Valerie Plame Wilson will be testifying this morning at an investigatory hearing with Congress and I will have the privilege of watching on Cspan since I have the day off.

I would just like to say that the example in the exerpted paragraph is an example of the COUPLE choosing to have the mother forced out of the labor force rather than the father.

These inequities start right in the home. It is not the evil corpratists that do this, it is husbands that don't value their wive's careers, and wives who will not fight for them.

Simple reforms to help make the job market work better:

- single payer universal health care.
- everyone gets paid overtime except the top 5% of management and any other owners with executive control authority or $250,000 equity.
- everyone gets to turn down overtime in excess of 10 hours every two weeks.
- actual enforcement of the age and sex discrimination statutes.
- stronger laws that support employees and their families.
- Better retraining for older workers who have been dropping out of the labor market.
- Personal liability for executives who violate employment protection statutes.

Meanwhile:

Over 40 million U.S. Jobs — 1 in 3 — Pay Low Wages
For Immediate Release: March 15, 2007
Center for Economic and Policy Research

Washington, DC: A new report from The Mobility Agenda finds that over 40 million jobs in the United States — about 1 in 3 — pay low wages ($11.11 per hour or less) and often do not offer employment benefits like health insurance, retirement savings accounts, paid sick days, or family leave. Moreover, these jobs tend to have inflexible or unpredictable scheduling requirements and provide little opportunity for career advancement.

The Mobility Agenda is a special initiative of Inclusion, a virtual think tank affiliated with the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

"All too often these low-wage jobs are replacing jobs that have supported a broad middle class," said Margy Waller, director of The Mobility Agenda and one of the paper's co-authors. "The economy and our democratic society are strongest when no one is falling too far behind the rest. Unfortunately, we find that, in 2006, 44 million workers were employed in low-wage jobs paying much less than the rest of us get paid."

The report, Understanding Low-Wage Work in the United States, uses a social inclusion approach that provides a definition of low-wage work that allows for comparison among jobs in the United States. The authors define a low-wage job as one paying substantially less than the job held by a typical male worker. The trend since 2001 has been a sharp decline in wages for these jobs.'

[snip]

Reflexive contrarians--can't you just accept an article written on working women and realize there are likely similar articles on hard-working, personally troubled men and fathers--no sense getting defensive. The article you complain about just happened to be highlighted today.
And we know that both working men and women have been neglected by this administration--just look at how union greivances and arbitrations have been denied.
Google information on the National Labor Relations Board under this administration and it will make your skin crawl.

I agree with you that working men are tortured as well. Men hold up half the sky. We women know that. Believe me, you are appreciated here.

Wait, so White Collar is the new slave class? How ironic. I wish I'd known that before I got my JD/MBA.
Honestly, this country needs better labor laws. It's all about aligning cost with responsibility with capability. Firms don't actually pay any marginal dollars for the hours worked beyond 40/wk. That cost is paid by the employee in quality of life. However, the firms net some marginal productivity/output on that stolen time.
(Aside: Virtually every study indicates that prolonged work beyond 45 hrs/wk yields almost no additional productivity, in the longer run. But who cares if you get it for free?)
The specious "it's a choice" argument is plain stupid. Same argument has been made for improving working conditions in every single industry since time immemorial. Conditions down in the mine suck? Well, go get another job if you don't like it. Children keep getting caught in the manufacturing machinery? If they don't like it, they should do something else to earn. Waiters inhale dangerous amounts of secondhand smoke? Suck it up or find another job.
Improve conditions for all labor, and the market will find a real equilibrium.

paradox nails it. The tone of a couple of these comments seems to indicate that most workers--not just lawyers--have the option of choosing reasonable working hours if they just aren't so greedy as to demand a job from a "top firm." As if.

The average corporate employee works soul-destroying and family-endangering hours without the huge salary bonus or great benefits. This is indeed a worker's issue, and if our Democratic elected officials were interested in something other than maintaining the status quo while making occasional noises about the plight of today's American worker, they could hold Congress and the White House in near-perpetuity by showing some fucking leadership on this and health care.

Men hold up half the sky. cwa

But they get paid better...and frequently substantially so for doing so.

"What this is, is a huge redistribution of wealth away from workers who compete with immigrants to those who employ them." George J. Borjas, a professor of economics and social policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

"For many unskilled American workers, immigration amounts to imported outsourcing." Harold Meyerson Washinton Post 17May06

rabbit: Who can comfortably afford to have a family with children and only one working spouse and attractively grace the cover of the New York Times Magazine? has it exactly right. Good article in last week's Nation called "The Care Crisis" which lays it out very well.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070312/rosen

As the economy sinks, every working person gets screwed but yes, Kenneth, women do get screwed worse in many cases. That's not victim or identity politics, that's just the fucking facts.

First, I suspect you are right that there is no more of a trend here than there was 50 years ago. The media loves nothing so much as to declare a trend, only to declare it reversed next year, and re-reversed the year after that. It gives them a patina of "big picture guys."

However, I don't get the "forced out" part. Is the implication that more is demanded of women than men, to force them out preferentially? If so, the article you linked does not say that. It merely says that women turn down the same 80-hour-a-week job that men accept.

So? In my mind, that makes them smarter. I was top of my class Ivy League etc., and I (a male) opted out of the 80-hour a week professional track too. I make less money now, but am happier. There are plenty of 40-hour a week attorney jobs out there. They just don't pay a half million a year or carry big ego-boosting credentials.

It strikes me and these women are lamenting is that there are no 40-hour a week high power attorney jobs that pay the same money and offer the same challenges as 80-hour a week jobs. Get over it. I certainly did.

MsNThrope

I guess I am the guy who is reflexively contrarian, but maybe I am. Right now the only people seeing an increase in their incomes are the folks in the upper 1%. Wage earners, be they men or women, have not seen relative wages increase in a long, long time. For the top workers at least a decade for the rest 3 decades. Wages are flat for men and women.

Articles that focus on the struggles of women imply that men are having an easier time of it. There is no reason to let people drive wedges between the problems of men and women in the work place. None. That is exactly what the article cited by Kevin does. It creates a wedge that helps the people in the upper 1% defuse the real issue. American wage earners of both sexes and all races and all economic conditions are working harder and enjoying it less. That is the problem we need to focus upon. Every thing else is small groups fighting over a shrinking pie.

"Do businesses have to reinvent themselves so parents only have to work 40 hour weeks, even if 74 hour weeks are the norm?

Yes, they do. Just as they had to "reinvent" themselves to stop hiring 12 year olds, to stop locking workers into fire-prone buildings (see Triangle Fire, 1911), to stop forcing workers to live in company towns and shop at company stores that only accept company scrip.

There is no reason to work human beings into the ground; companies could hire more people, retain loyal workers, and still make profits. Do you think it's a good thing that doctors and nurses work 12 hour shifts, sometimes 2 in a row? Do you want a dr. on his 23rd hour doing procedures on you? Do you want a trucker who hasn't slept in 2 days driving his big rig on the highway with you?

Human beings need 8 hours of sleep and a reasonable amount of family time and personal time in order to be healthy. Occasional crises aside, that's what workers deserve. But corporations constantly push against the legal boundaries and use a tight job market/lack of healthcare outside of jobs/puritanical and misguided views about the "virtue" of working ourselves to death to coerce employees into working longer hours. We have to push back.

Having children is a social good; society needs new people, and it needs them to be healthy and not sociopathic. This means that women and men deserve a chance to make that contribution, just as they would if they joined the National Guard. That means healthcare, sane workplace policies and parental leave. It's not rocket science.

From the bits I know about the fifties, I would say that the number of high performance white collar people working in excess of 50 hours/week appears to have increased a great deal. Back then people got away from the office (though their personal lives were still sometimes intertwined with their business life). Of course they had secretaries so they could get their work done faster, they weren't rewarded by their peers for being at the office all the time or tethered to their Blackberry, and there appeared to be less of an obsession with conspicuous consumption.

BTW, everyone should actually go and read the CJR article Kevin links to - it's quite good, and discusses many of the points people are making.
------
American Hawk - the problem is that most fathers - with exceptions, like "Got out" here - a) don't end up getting forced to choose between 80hrs and personally/societally acceptable models of fathering or b) wouldn't have the - as mentioned above - great luxury to make such a choice.

From the article: "Underlying all this is a genuinely new trend that the moms-go-home stories never mention: the all-or-nothing workplace. At every income level, Americans work longer hours today than fifty years ago. Mandatory overtime for blue- and pink-collar workers, and eighty-hour expectations for full-time professional workers, deprive everyone of a reasonable family life. Blue-collar and low-wage families increasingly work “tag-team” schedules so that someone’s always home with the kids. In surveys done by the Boston College Sloan Work and Families Research Network and by the New York-based Families and Work Institute, among others, women and men increasingly say that they’d like to have more time with their families, and would give up money and advancement to do it—if doing so didn’t mean sacrificing their careers entirely. Men, however, must face fierce cultural headwinds to choose such a path, while women are pushed in that direction at every turn.

. . . Here’s what feminism hasn’t yet changed: the American idea of mothering is left over from the 1950s, that odd moment in history when America’s unrivaled economic power enabled a single breadwinner to support an entire family. Fifty years later we still have the idea that a mother, and not a father, should be available to her child at every moment. But if being a mom is a 24-hour-a-day job, and being a worker requires a similar commitment, then the two roles are mutually exclusive. A lawyer might be able to juggle the demands of many complex cases in various stages of research and negotiation, or a grocery manager might be able to juggle dozens of delivery deadlines and worker schedules—but should she have even a fleeting thought about a pediatrics appointment, she’s treated as if her on-the-job reliability will evaporate. No one can escape that cultural idea, reinforced as it is by old sitcoms, movies, jokes—and by the moms-go-home storyline." [This follows several paragraphs discussing bias towards (esp. white) working mothers - for example, asked to rate an identical consultant, "[w]hen the consultant was a “mother,” she was rated as less competent, less committed, less suitable for hiring, promotion, or training, and was offered a lower starting salary than the other three"]

What also comes up is that people are asking for temporary consideration - ""just a little flexibility for a short period in my life"" as one award-winning internist and Harvard Med School prof exclaims.

But yes, since certain businesses have reinvented themselves to require 80 hour weeks (etc.) of many employees - based on the idea that said employees would be childless, have a wife/nanny or somehow just get by - it's not really that unreasonable that they reinvent themselves again, to recognize the importance of mothers and fathers. 'Why do businesses hate parents?'

There are two issues touched upon in the article that I think are less intertwined than comments indicate.

Some have read the article as a labor issue(Americans work too hard for too little money/benefits/etc.). I don't sense there's a whole lot of disagreement on that general sentiment.

Others have read it as a gender issue. The article didn't focus on a man "opting out" of the workforce, but a woman who had recently had a child. But the article never (and I have yet to read an article that touches on this subject) discusses the ultimate choice: to have a child in the first place. The framing of the article presumes that A) having a child is just part of life and that B) women should have much better choices after A. Remove A from the equation and you completely remove the gender component from this issue.

The law firm example is a terrible one. I did the big firm thing for 3 years, hated it, left, moved to a mountain town in Colorado and joined a 5 person firm. I took a 40K/year paycut but I work 9 hour days, ride my bike during the day and hardly ever come in on the weekend. For the most part its a 50 hour week. And I'm a guy, and I like seeing my kids too, its a big reason I left.

But my wife and I are still in loads better shape making what I make and working in the conditions I work in as a lawyer than most of our friends here with kids. Most of them find it impossible to pay for healthcare, let alone any niceties, on one salary, but daycare costs make it impossible for both parties to work at the same time. So many of them work alternating schedules, one working at UPS in the early morning and the other working a late workday at the sign shop, with a baby swap when they cross paths. They never see each other, and its not like the job prospects are great once you get in this cycle.

These are the people suffering in the modern work environment, not those of us that have the luxury of making choices with our professional degrees.

What if the body politic addressed women’s interests, particularly those of childcare? Other countries do it by passing laws protecting maternity and paternity leave and by providing various means of childcare. But there isn't even a serious discussion. The reason American women’s interests are not addressed is the same reason millions of Americans lack health care. Conservatives and many of their neoliberal enablers reject risk sharing as moral hazard (in their estimation it will cost the rich disproportionately more in taxes and profits and undermine conservative culture). They reject the notion of fairness and an American Commonwealth in the name of a false individualism that is nothing more than a cover story for classed plutocracy. Whatever their intentions it has certainly been the result.

We have to ask ourselves how it is that politicians in a democracy end up embracing policies- over many decades- that seem to royally benefit the richest households while the concerns of the vast majority are explained away or never addressed.

I could give a fuck less about some privileged white women wringing their hands about their law careers. I do, however, care fiercely about those for whom opting out is not an option.

Coyote,

The real problem is that even professionals seem to feel that they cannot control their lives. Blue collar workers have had to deal with arbitrary and absurd work rules for years, that was why most of the laws to protect workers were written with those people in mind. Now, we have the helpless white collar and professional workers. Of course, their helplessness is generally self-inflicted. They let their greed overshadow their sense.

A law school grad who can start at a Wall Street firm for $200,000 with bonus could also find a well-respected, but smaller firm that would be willing to to pay $80-100,000 and let them work 40-50 hours a week in their first year on much more interesting assignments. Not only that, but they're more likely to end up with more control of their life throughout their career.

We have too many graduates of top universities who are graduating without any apparent goals but money and little understanding of what makes a society work well. If, for the next three years, nine hundred of the thousand most recruited law grads in the country turned down every firm that wouldn't let them have a personal life (guaranteed no more than 2600 hours work in the year, no phone calls at home, no at home research required) the system would change. As long as lawyers, doctors and MBAs are motivated by money alone, they will get money alone.

"Is the implication that more is demanded of women than men, to force them out preferentially"

Yes. If they want a family, society (and often their own selves, for whatever intertwined reasons of nature and/or nurture) demands that they do much of the child-rearing, with fairly rare exceptions - although as mentioned, both men and women increasingly would like to spend more time with family.

That is the problem we need to focus upon. Every thing else is small groups fighting over a shrinking pie.
Posted by: Ron Byers

Absolutely correct. But the general erosion of pay and the complete absence of benefits is much more acute for the remaining 80% than for those much more comfortably situated. For many years all the wage gains have clustered at or near the top of the wage scale. That these gains have moderated somewhat recently is not really what I consider a crisis.

There have been substantial tax rate cuts to these income brackets already. And all I hear is whining from people making $300k about the AMT 'diluting' their Bush capital gains cuts.

Boo-Hoo!

The very real crisis is happening at level of ordinary clerical workers and service workers. Not people concerned about whether they might have to forgo a second trip to Europe (poor exchange rate) and instead 'settle' for Barbados or Jamaica...

I feel their pain.

"Census Bureau data show median family income -- half of families have income greater than the median, half have less -- fell 3.6 percent from 2000 through 2004. Incomes for the poorest families fell even further. The only group to gain was the family at the 95th percentile -- that is, richer than 95 percent of all families." WSJ

Dan S. Yes. If they want a family, society (and often their own selves, for whatever intertwined reasons of nature and/or nurture) demands that they do much of the child-rearing, with fairly rare exceptions...

Yeah, that's the glitch that keeps this from being solely a worker's issue rather than a gendered one, isn't it? The expectation--societal, personal or combined--that women will bear the lion's share of parental duties isn't going to go away anytime soon. Knowing this, and recognizing that workers at all income levels and of both genders are facing unrealistic and unhealthy work hours, I prefer to focus on the situation of workers in general. That's where I think we have the ability to get the attention of men as well as women, and make some real changes.

Re Globe's post at 10:48, my first instinct is to be similarly unmoved by the plight of the top earners, women or men. But I'm taking the longer view, because I know that professional people feeling the pinch is the only way to get some action here. A lot of Republican middle managers suddenly became more likely to listen to Democrats when their jobs went overseas or their health-care benefits were slashed or eliminated. Most people have to take a direct hit before they start getting it.

What you are describing here is a person choosing to take two $100,000 jobs instead of one. It works out for the big law firms to do this, but why young lawyers are so eager to take this deal is beyond me. It has been my experience that a lot of people choosing law as a career are motivated by a pathological need for status, and will trade anything, including their souls and lives, to get it.

I know them feeling the pinch too is the path to action. But they can take care of themselves.

Globe--I am home. We have freezing rain and I cancelled my trip today

I know them feeling the pinch too is the path to action. But they can take care of themselves.
Posted by: Blue Girl, Red State (aka Global Citizen)

Just like it took withdrawal of most student deferments (That's when Cheney had to get married and have a kid.) to suddenly galvanize the broad middle class opposition to the Vietnam War...

Funny how that works. Whose ox?

But what is the Senate worked up over? The AMT and that fucking loser 'Comprehensive Immigration (so-called) Reform'. I know you don't want to hear it but flooding the labor markets with immigrants is a freakin' disaster.

'Legal immigrants to the United States are at their highest level ever at over 35,000,000. Net illegal immigration also soared from about 130,000 per year in the 1970s, to 300,000+ per year in the 1980s to over 500,000 per year in the 1990s to over 700,000 per year in the 2000s. Total illegal immigration may be as high as 1,500,000 per year [in 2006] with a net of at least 700,000 more illegal immigrants arriving each year to join the 12,000,000 to 20,000,000 that are already here.' (Pew Hispanic Data Estimates)

For purposes of comparison only 2 US states - CA & TX - have populations in excess of 20M. This is more than #3 New York (19.3M) This is equal to 4 Alabamas. Nearly 2 Michigans. 40 Districts of Columbia...And that's just five Latin American countries...Guatemala alone has exported 10% of its population to this country.

(State populations US Census Bureau 2005 - est.)

'Officials later released some of the single mothers, but the raid shocked Guatemala, where an estimated 10% of the population has migrated to the U.S. to work, mostly illegally. Last year, the migrants sent home $3.6 billion to their families, an amount equal to around 10% of Guatemala's gross domestic product.'
Immigration Reform: Bush's Big Promises
Geri Smith
http://businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2007/gb20070315_602665.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_
businessweek+exclusives

But they get paid better...and frequently substantially so for doing so.

Yeah, because Bill Gates is a white male billionaire, the white homeless guy sleeping in the gutter lives a priviledged life compared to every woman.

Men hold up half the sky. Posted by cwa

Posted by MsnThrope: "But they get paid better...and frequently substantially so for doing so."

From CWA--I always feel badly when I see guys feeling put upon by articles focusing on the plight of women--so I responded with empathy to the fellows posting here. Of course men also work long, hard hours and also have childcare issues and wage issues, and problems with fairness in the workplace.
And I had posted up above supporting the plight of women.
Men do hold up half the sky. I know my hubby works diligently and tirelessly in the financial industry and has it as hard as I do.
I am sympathetic to both working men and women. As was said above, this is a working person's issue.

This article in the NY Times Sunday mag three years ago just profoundly disturbed me. (The pay-wall is defeated in the link).

"Remove A from the equation and you completely remove the gender component from this issue."

Well, yes, but that's the point - and B isn't necessarily right; many folks feel that parents should have some flexibility, not just mothers.

I agree with shortstop re: getting action. Blue Girl - as long as one keeps reality in mind, and front and center, those privileged white-woman hand-wringers are potential allies, up to a point - with money, time, and organizational skills.

Let me offer a little perspective on why my sympathy evaporated. In other words, I'm going to confess my bias...

The last healthcare job I had before abdicating for academia, I managed the phlebotomy crew in an inner city hospital. My department was made up primarily of inner-city black women, most were single mothers. They struggled daily, and I cheated the "points" more than once when someone was two minutes late because of a childcare issue and the tardy was the final "point" and I was supposed to terminate them, no appeal process possible - but it was the female doctors who bitched and moaned the loudest.

I decided when the hospital politics came calling, that the doctors could fend for themselves, the phlebs needed my help.

Global: How about that Bob Herbert column on black unemployment?

He writes: 'They haven’t. However much this epidemic of joblessness may hurt, very little is being done about it. According to the Labor Department, only 97,000 new jobs were created in February. That’s not even enough to accommodate new entrants to the work force.

And then there’s the question of who’s getting the new jobs. According to statistics compiled by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, the only groups that have experienced a growth in jobs since the last recession are older workers and immigrants.

People can howl all they want about how well the economy is doing. The simple truth is that millions of ordinary American workers are in an employment bind. Steady jobs with good benefits are going the way of Ozzie and Harriet. Young workers, especially, are hurting, which diminishes the prospects for the American family. And blacks, particularly black males, are in a deep danger zone.

Instead of addressing this issue constructively, government officials have responded by eviscerating programs that were designed to move young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into the labor market.'

Forget the published unemployment rate. It's a joke. Forget that even if 4.5% were anything but a complete fiction it still means 12,000,000 human beings.

And yet real wages continue to plummet.

'Fast economic growth, after all, is a means to an end--namely, higher living standards for most people. By any decent moral calculation, an economy that does not produce higher living standards for most people is not a good one. '

Over the last quarter century, the portion of the national income accruing to the richest 1 percent of Americans has doubled. The share going to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent has tripled, and the share going to the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent has quadrupled.

"If the rich control a growing share of the national income, they will turn their financial power into political power to protect their holdings. Untrammeled economic inequality will inevitably lock itself into place as the rich buy political influence and propagate policies that safeguard their wealth."

"Third, the whole pattern of rising inequality does not suggest a split between the educated and the uneducated. The rise in inequality isn't between the top one-fifth and everybody else; it's between the top one-hundredth and everybody else.'
by Jonathan Chait

Well, yes, but that's the point - and B isn't necessarily right; many folks feel that parents should have some flexibility, not just mothers.

And yet...there are a few lawyers who work for me who have kids. I often accomodate them leaving early or at odd hours for family obligations, and one of them just told me that she's thinking of leaving altogether to spend more time with her young child. The end result of all this accomodation is that I, as a single man, take on more of their work. OK, fine, you'd say, he's single, he doesn't have kids -- and yet if I have to stay at work for hours longer how am I ever going to have kids myself? How am I going to have the free time to meet women, spend time with them, develop a relationship, etc.? After all, parents already have their family, and it's a little unfair to demand that I give them added leeway at the cost of ever having a family of my own. It's not just parents who need flexibility -- we all do, parents and single, for various reasons.

Here is a little trick that HR departments use to pay blacks less - the same resume evaluated by HR with two different applicants of different races will both merit an interview. After the interview when the race and gender are known, the salary is evaluated and points are awarded based on experience. The points are plugged in to the formula and the base pay is offered. I have seen too many equally qualified applicants be offered starting pay differences of up to $2.00 per hour.

As long as lawyers, doctors and MBAs are motivated by money alone, they will get money alone.

Money, unfortunately, is a wee bit important in our society. For one thing it can be used to buy food, housing, vacations, retirement security, etc., all good things that people like to have. If I can find some other way to get all these things without using money, then great, but until then I rather like having a lot of it.

I think I have been reading this same story and the same responses for forty years. You want it? You can have it. My dynamic, smart-as-a-whip daughter is amazingly immune to the cultural influences—the must-have ego boosting credentials, the McMansion and the Mercedes—that most everyone else knuckles under to. She looked at the world through completely fresh eyes, decided the most rewarding job she could have would be raising kids full time, and she is having a great life.

She recognizes that nearly everyone who writes for a living thinks that women are less if they aren’t out there in the culture duking it out with the men and she thinks that’s their tough.

Personally, I think anyone, M or F, who chooses that overworked, overstressed, overcompetitive, loveless corporate life is an idiot. The only joy comes when, after thousands of hours of slaving, you get the new account or win the case. Yay, let’s all go get drunk!

While the lawyers are hunkered down in their glass towers with windows that don’t open, my daughter is out in Balboa Park riding the little train with her two boys and their friends, reveling in the wind blowing off the ocean. I ask you, among all the strivers, the getters and the grabbers, who really understands life?

Two minutes, versus paying unemployment and training costs for a new employee? The cost-benefit analysis of a no-tolerance policy doesn't make any sense.

American Hawk--you fly in here with an immediate criticism and offer nothing of value to the current discussion. You are an opportunistic creep, and I critique you on it.

Hawk would rather I compromise patient care than bend a stupid rule to accommodate a dedicated and skilled employee.

No thanks.

And if anyone is defrauded it is the employees who cut breaks short or skipped them altogether and weren't paid. That particular employer regularly faced injunctions demanding they pay backpay to workers who were denied breaks because of understaffing.

Know what the fuck you are talking about before you jump on someone who knows the god-damned subject from actually doing the fucking job, Henery.

I made all decisions based on what really matters in healthcare - the care the patients received.

Who do you want in your room sticking needles in your body at 3:30 am, so your doctor will have results for rounds at 0700? A 20 year old fresh out of the short-course and no experience, or the skilled long-term employee who happened to have childcare issues after her mother died?

In America people can be successful if they work hard. That is obvious to most Americans (and 95% of immigrants who come to America to flee countries where caste or family determines your fate).

Why can't you Libs acknowledge some of the wonderful things about America???

American Hawk is pond scum. Merely labeling it a troll besmirches trolls.

Don't respond to its phony provocations.

And yeah, HR decisions directly affected me, and my drew and patient care. So I felt perfectly justified interjecting myself into them.

There is an insidious side to that policy.

It is a slow but deliberate undermining of the workforce. Corporate healthcare swoops in, and buys up hospitals. They enact unreasonable policies and employees end up terminated on some specious points issue and replaced with newbies that cost less, and also offer a lower standard of care. The high-paid experienced workers are winnowed out and the quality of care suffers.

I'd like to add my $0.02 here.

I'm getting a vasectomy today, my wife's third pregnancy ended prematurely with a uterine rupture in the middle of the night, at home, in her 35th week of pregnancy. This is potentially fatal for mother or baby or both. Fortunately, mom and baby are both fine. Her second pregnancy ended early with a botched termination for medical reasons (trisomy 18, which if the fetus survives to be born, has a lifespan measured in days, due to multiple organ failures).

These difficult pregnancies made her decide to adjust her workday -- not even cutting back her hours -- to more easily accomodate daycare and have more time in the evenings. It should have been fine, almost all her work is over the phone with people all over the country and very little of it requires a physical presence in an office.

But her co-workers, most of them childless or near retirement age with children long since gone on to college (and were men whose wives were at home fulltime) were not just sympathetic but would criticize her performance and point out it was her decision to have kids that was making life difficult. But in reality, her projects were as successful as ever by any objective measurement (sales, schedulekeeping, peer-reviews).

She made an offer: You have two weeks to accomodate my alternate hours or I'm going freelance. No response. (My mother taught me that "no response" IS a response) She leaves.

Of course, the childless dynamo they gave her projects to after she left drove the $15 million worth of projects into a ditch, but that's just cosmic justice...

Anyway, I know my wife is an extremely capable worker, she's excellent at her job, but in the minds of the people in her office, BABY became written on her forehead in bright bold red, obscuring anything else that they thought about her. And their prejudice was that no mom could ever do as good a job as one who was childless.

You are insane.

Look at Global Citizen's last few posts about her experience managing a phlebotomy lab, and it's easy to figure out why she failed in that job. The work didn't get done, doctors complained, and Global Citizen whined before quitting. No wonder she's "back in acedemia." Those that can't, teach.

You know actually I'd rather no one was sticking a needle into my arm at 3:30 a.m. to suit the convenience of a doc...part of the depersonalization of the patient.

American Squawk, hush, grown-ups are talking.

Go play with your GI Joe in your room like a nice little boy.

If the doctors don't make rounds at 0700, they don't start seeing patients in offices until noon.

The problems in healthcare are systemic. No one would have ever designed the system we have on purpose.

The problems in healthcare are systemic. No one would have ever designed the system we have on purpose.
Posted by: Blue Girl, Red State

No lie.

Do you realize how much gas etc. we'd save if women (or, one of any couple who are both working, if that sounds better) didn't work near so much? The effort it should really take to supply a decent standard of living, if workers got a good share, should be providable with 40 hours a week total per couple. It used to turn out well enough, and we are supposedly even more efficient now. What happened?

Is that you sock-puppet boy? The sentence structure looks like Kenneth/Pedant/Frazier.

I'd rather not have people who are defrauding their employer. If they'll steal from their employers, they'll steal from me, and it's quite possible my wallet or personal possessions are in or near my room. It's especially bad if the person supposed to be keeping them honest is part of the fraud.

Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

American Hawk at 12:07 PM,

That is perhaps the single most absurd comment you have ever made in your long history of making absurd comments on this board.

One of the responsibilities of any boss is to weight the relative costs of overlooking a technical violation of employment rules with the rewards that overlooking the violation will engender to the employer. Hard rules are sometimes winked at by wise and effective bosses every where. Human judgment tells us when to wink.

My 27 year old son works in our family business. He is forever complaining that he sees otherwise productive employees taking advantage of the business in small ways. People show up late. They do non-business work at their desks. He thinks his uncles are blind fools for not seeing the activities of those employees. My brothers are many things but they are not blind fools. They know most everything that goes on in the business. They know who is doing what and why. They sometimes come down hard, and other times look the other way. They know that if Jane is a little late some mornings it is probably because she has been having trouble with her child care. They also know that Jane does her work and more. They know that they will send the wrong message to the rest of the employees if they fire her for violating work rules.

Hawk, people are not machines. A business is not a giant machine. It is a very human enterprise. Every boss worth his salt knows that. That is why my son is years away from becoming a boss.

from James of DC, who posted: Personally, I think anyone, M or F, who chooses that overworked, overstressed, overcompetitive, loveless corporate life is an idiot. The only joy comes when, after thousands of hours of slaving, you get the new account or win the case. Yay, let’s all go get drunk!

From Stefan, who posted: Money, unfortunately, is a wee bit important in our society. For one thing it can be used to buy food, housing, vacations, retirement security, etc., all good things that people like to have. If I can find some other way to get all these things without using money, then great, but until then I rather like having a lot of it.

From me, CWA--you both make great points. I repeatedly advanced my education so I could get a fantastic job. All along I stuck to my bleeding heart liberal roots and entered the social services/psychology/psychiatric rehabilitation field, and ended up with a coveted job.

And i agree with Stefan that it takes money to have some good things--and retirement security is extremely important to me as well. I did purchase a fantastic home, and want to drive a safe, well-equipped vehicle, so I bought that too. Without guilt.
I have my liberal leanings, many charities, and work in my profession to make it better for the less unfortunate. I am highly sympathetic to unionized people, always have been.
I married a guy not unlike Stefan.

What happened?
Posted by: Neil B.

Stagflation and Ronald Reagan...

Thiis has been a thread well worth reading--but I'd just like to reinforce Kevin's original point. The thrust of all these articles is that these women turn away out of a simple denial of the world of work, or, at best, a dislike of the 'rat race.'
I don't think it's exclusively sexist, because it falls into the continuum of the article about the guy who becones a blacksmith, or a maker of classic muskets, after quitting a high-powered job.
But with women, it's trteated as something about 'women', and that's sexist in the extreme.
But it's also clueless in the extreme, covering up what's really happening with an odious (with a touch of lavender) puff-piece. The reality has been eloquently portrayed here. Thank you.
Corporate pressure, in all these articles, has been normalized so it's treated like the law of gravity, when it's policies made by actual humans for actual (sometimes stupid and nasty) purposes. Somebody builds the track for the rat race, after all.

And there's the old liberal/conservative split, also pointed out: Owners and managers are allowed to push work conditions as hard as they can--why, that's the force of the Free Market! The Invisible hand! But workers are not allowed to push back: that's communism! Call out the troops!
That counter-pressure is just as much a part of capitalism as its counterpart. And of course the guys doing the pushing don't like it when the guys and gals being pushed push back.
But tough.

Well Ron, if the Frist's decide to pursue me for those 4-6 minutes a month they might have been "defrauded" of, then I'm calling your firm.

And Frequency - I didn't fail, I entered a doctoral program.

If I were a boss, I would want my employees to work the hours required to do the job, whatever that job is. Ms. Brokaw is a lawyer, so she can hang a shingle outside her child's nursery if she wants to. If she did and if business was good and it became necessary to hire someone, I would bet she would expect her employee(s) to work the hours required to do the job.

Working women who want to have children are at a disadvantage, they want to nurture their children and have jobs. I cannot blame them for that, but life is full of opportunity costs. Men who want to stay home and nurture their children are given much less sympathy and accommodation than women are by society and in the work place.

One thing that bothers me about this issue is the type of work being written about. Many of the jobs written about are high paying professional jobs that require a lot of dedication and hard work in order to be successful and justify the compensation. If one wants a part time job with flexible hours so one can spend the maximum amount of time with one's child, there are plenty of jobs available. They are not jobs that provide incomes that put one in the top nintey percentile, however.

What would I do. I would probably find out what was going on. Shooting first and asking questions later works on television, and in Texas, no place else, not even the battlefield.

Given Globe's reasons, I would probably agree and give her a promotion.

I was the shift supervisor, and the only boss many of them ever saw if they never worked day-shift.

I have seen bosses like Henery thinks everyone should be. Their departments suck, they have an unacceptable rate of error and low productivity. When peoples lives are the final product, the people matter more than the policy.

"This history suggests that if today’s globalization crashes it will also be because of economic factors, but those factors will differ from the past because the system is different. The New Deal era created a system that remedied earlier financial fragility by restricting private ownership of bullion, and creating deposit insurance and lenders of last resort. It also created a new social democratic mass consumption economy in which income was more broadly shared owing to unionization, minimum wages, and social security provisions. However, a social democratic mass consumption economy is expensive for individual capitalists, giving them an incentive to evade its costs. That has been driving force behind globalization since 1980, and that is the contradiction in today’s system.

Business has a private incentive to escape the system to countries with lower costs. Yet, it still needs mass consumption. The system needs a solid middle class, but is also driven to hollow out that middle class. This contradiction has been papered over by consumer borrowing provided by deregulated financial markets and a 25-year asset price boom. The problem is that such borrowing risks proving unsustainable if incomes are hollowed out, and if it stops the economic merry-go-round may also stop. If that stoppage produces an economic crash, globalization may crash, too. This is because it lacks political support, having been a primary cause of middle class hollowing out."

Thomas Palley - Can Globalization Fail? - Lessons from History
http://www.thomaspalley.com/?p=45#more-45

Thanks Ron. That truly means a lot. The doctors at Kansas City Internal Medicine offered to expand their lab and hire me to manage it when I left that hospital, they were so pissed. I would love to have an endocrine lab at my fingertips, but it just didn't mesh with grad school.

If your opinion mattered to me...

I would check myself into an inpatient facility.

You have no experience, just an ideology and a dogmatic, authoritarian response to everything.

Whatever you think, you think. It matters not one whit to me, nor to anyone with three simultaneously firing neurons.

Posted by American Hawk: "... The woman in question became unqualified for her job, but there was a whole world of opportunity out there for her. Small firms still easily pay six figures, so she could have afforded day care and such and still worked."

From CWA, me--I think everyone's situation is different and it is hard to generalize. An unhappy work environment could make all the difference in feeling forced out versus opting out.

Please stop picking on BlueGirlRedState/aka/Global Citizen. She is highly regarded in these circles and in other circles. She doesn't deserve your grief for her candor. Surely you can tell from posting here what a great person she is. Thank you.

How are your tax returns, Henery? Report every penny, even the fifty bucks from the super-bowl pool?

Thank you cwa - but I'm not special, just louder than some.

You are pretty darn special and loud

Unamerican Ciizen: "Why can't you Libs acknowledge some of the wonderful things about America???"

The flowers are nice. Now fuck off and die.

And Hawk, your adversarial, schoolyard taunting is everything that's wrong with this country today.
You have personally lowered the national IQ by 10 points, perhaps 2 of them just today.

E. J. Graff is as qualified to write about traditional family issues as David Duke is to write about the American black experience.

You know, no one talks about the men who have "opted out" of the work force--it's called retiring early because you made enough money to do so.

Thank you very much, yes I did retire early. No, you can't have any of my money.

This is what America is all about, liberals. Too bad you insist on ruining the country and forcing everyone to work menial jobs to keep the Earth from overheating in a bogus flimflam of your own design. A hint to you all: smart people like myself aren't buying it.

Brojo - how do you feel about new fathers?

Why are new fathers not expected to sacrifice for children, but new mothers are?

I love Norm on Nyquil even more than I love Norm on Doan's Pills.

Norman, now I know you are a comedian!!!

What is really entertaining is Norm on Nyquil and Green Tea - call it a Manchester Speedball and keep an e