Since Chris and Kieran have been posting on this I thought I’d weigh in, and perhaps be a little more politically incorrect. (See also the interesting article by Katherine Quarmby in last month’s Prospect, temporarily available to non-subscribers) The left tends to emphasize two things about child-rearing:
1) The desirability of having men and women more-or-less equally involved in the hands-on aspects of rearing from very early on;
2) The desirability of women facing roughly equal prospects in the labor market as men.
This will be of very little interest to non-philosophers, but we probably get enough philosophers through here to make it worth posting. I did a break-down of the 438 jobs advertised in Jobs for Philosophers this fall in order to get some picture of what demand was like for job candidates with different specialisations. The results aren’t too surprising, but there might be some interesting stuff here, especially for PhD students going on the job market in upcoming years.