How to persuade your students that gender justice might be an issue for them.

The thing that strikes me about the answers is the honesty of the boys. I am a 50-year-old man with a wife and kids, but I’m pretty certain that if you had asked me these questions 30 years ago, I would have chosen ‘C’, not because I particularly expected it (or didn’t), but because I would have believed it was the correct answer.

I have to give them credit for that.

I like the exercise in principle, but how exactly do you manage responses from non-heterosexual students? Just like you use a preliminary question to weed out students that do not identify themselves in a male-female dichotomy, you might also want to use a question to weed out students whose sexual orientation precludes marriage with the opposite sex. As the survey is set up now, it appears that non-heterosexual students will either need to make a potentially embarrassing announcement in front of the class that they don’t know how to answer question 4 or simply fit themselves into categories in a way that will distort your results (i.e. males will have to answer A and females will have to answer B regardless of the absence of an opposite sex partner)

Geo: That they’re genderqueer or trans-questioning?

I think the kicker is question 5. Even though I would have chosen C for myself (on an optimistic day, that is, knowing the reality will probably be B), I know almost certainly that my friends, both male and female, are apt to do B. If I had to narrow it to just 5 relatives my age, I’d say they would all enthusiastically choose B (would frown on C and would be scandalized by A).

Great exercise. How does the follow-up to questions 4 and 5 go? To me, that seems like a much bigger deal than how many times you were expected to babysit (or otherwise socialized into roles) as a teenager.

I have thought about the issue about same-sex couples, and decided to ignore it because a) they should be few enough not to screw up the results (as saheli says) and b) I didn’t know how to exclude them without seeming rude. I do it all on paper now, to avoid potentially embarrassing revelations. I do point out that it is likely that some of the men will, in fact, be in father-led parenting situations.

“If you’re not sure” is there because one time in a different class a transgendered student gave me a very hard time (in a quite funny, teasing way) for what he/she saw as my absurdly essentialist assumptions about sex and gender. I learned a lot.

So, I’m getting the impression that some of you (Dr. Science and jonm) think I should do more with this. I don’t (but am open to suggestions). I do the exercise after having introduced Okin’s main argument, and after having outlined the earnings-power consequences for a female teacher of taking a year out of the workforce to have an look after a kid (the standard salary schedule makes this very transparent). Then I look at various counteraguments to Okin’s argument, including arguments that claim there is nothing wrong at all because it is all based on voluntary choice, and arguments that there is something wrong, but it is about caregiving not sex, and that talking about gender muddies the issue. I then look at proposed policy responses and arguments for, and objections to, them. They ahve quite good discussions about the issues in section, but I never follow up on whether they have changed their beliefs or anything. The point to the excercise was, initially, to justify teaching the issue as a “contemporary” one, but it also serves to get their intuitions working.

When I did it with a show of hands there was one occasion when 3 boys did say they would be in father-led situations. One of these was, unbeknownst to me, but, I gather, known to most of the class, the #1 pick in his cohort for the football team (and someone who got injured early so didn’t play, butkept his scholarship — as he said to me when I got to know him “the best thing that could have happened to me”). I got to know him pretty well subsequently, and he was entirely sincere and, I think, as committed as could be, to the ideal, though not for feminist reasons, rather for self-interested (its what he really wants to do) reasons.

I did an exercise on the same issue in a similarly resistant senior class on professional issues in science; I had the students look up five blogs by women scientists and find out what posts generated the most replies. They noticed immediately that the male scientists they found blogged about science, while the female scientists blogged about child care.

I’d feel a bit cheated by the #2 question. I babysat a lot (not including family) for money, but only, I think, when I was a “pre-teen”. Where I lived it paid horribly ($1/hr mostly, $1.5/hr from the “more wealthy” family), so I was happy to ditch that for delivering papers as soon as I could (12 or 13, I think). That, too, was awful in many ways (not even so much in getting up early in all weather, though that was bad, too, but from people trying to cheat me out of the cost of the papers) but paid more than baby-sitting so I switched as soon as I could. But if baby-sitting had paid anything plausible at all I would have much rather done it than delivering newspapers. And after that, baby-sitting was something that people who didn’t have to work for spending money did- people who mostly got what they needed from their parents. In their teens, if you didn’t have wealthy parents you had a regular (part-time) job of some sort rather than baby-sitting, since only people who got most of their money from their parents could afford to baby-sit for extra money.

This is a wonderful exercise!

As for what else you could do with it — seems like the most important thing is to share it with others who teach this stuff.

LF-

Not that it matters to you, but the bra-burning thing is a canard. And do you really think that the history of gender relations over the last 40 years points to the fact that changed expectations make no difference? You’d be hard pressed to see an area where there has been more change, and in a progressive direction.

It never ceases to amaze me how when it comes to this issue, people don’t think their views have to be grounded in any knowledge of the subject.

Harry, I just put this comment up over at Laura’s, and I thought I’d put it up here as well, though I note that Matt in #13 has in some ways already touched upon it (perhaps not surprising, as he and I grew up is similar social environments). Anyway…

Regarding question #2 on your quiz: does only being paid in cash count? That is, is the only babysitting that counts for purposes of gender differentiation a babysitting job? I ask because in communities, congregations, neighborhoods, etc., where you have a significant number of families that have some degree of relations to each other (cousins, in-laws, etc.), it’s very common–in my experience, anyway–for babysitting to be shared between families, with older children, male or female, taking responsibility for the younger ones. If there is any compensation for this (and there often is), it’s rarely an established wage, as opposed to a quid pro quo.

The thing is, of course, the majority of said arrangements involve socially and/or religiously conservative parents, and so strict gender roles which privilege the male children tend to be passed on to them as they go on to form their own families. And yet, they would say they did tons of babysitting while growing up.

Matt’s comment brings some interesting age and class angles into the issue: the fact that babysitting, in communities where the levels of trust are high enough (amongst one’s congregation?) or perceived levels of danger are low enough (in rural and/or socially homogeneous areas?), is often a pre-teen or younger teen-agers’ endeavor, the sort of thing you do from ages 11 to 15, at which point it’s assumed you’ll go to work at KFC; also, the fact that many babysitters are doing it just for spending money, not actually looking to save or accomplish anything significant through doing that “work.” Either way, though, I think the implication behind my primary question holds–are you (and, perhaps, therefore Okin) only counting for your inquiry into socialization the kind of teen-age babysitting that takes place in well-heeled, high maintenance suburbs, where sitters easily earn $7-$10 an hour for getting the children to do their homework while the parents are at an office party?

Lt – “It never ceases to amaze me how when it comes to this issue, people don’t think their views have to be grounded in any knowledge of the subject.”

And it never ceases to amaze me how, irrespective of the topic at hand, people with opposing views always seem to be lacking in sufficient knowledge.

As for gender issues, maybe this will explain things for you:
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/news?ch=334515&cl=2727191&lang=en

Umm, yeah, LF, I’m quite aware that kids can have very strong innate personalities and that this includes gendered expression. It does not follow that male and female binaries are the most meaningful way to talk about the huge variations that exist between people, including those of the same gender. Nor does it follow that, to the extent that such differences are innate, our response should be to reinforce them. Encouraging boys to be nurturing and girls to be daring in this light is no more a denial of biology than encouraging shy kids to try to make friends or encouraging an antsy kid to learn to relax.

But again, there’s a rich literature of feminists talking about different ways of approaching this. Most feminists would sensibly say we should be cautious about these kinds of studies given their history and the tendency of media to overstate their findings and conflate description and proscription. There’s a rich literature on how to acknowledge difference, both biological and experiential, and still pursue the social goal of equality.

You said that these are dead questions, settled in a timeless and inevitable way forty years ago. Can you really deny that gender roles have changed greatly over that time? Now, maybe you think that’s a bad thing. Maybe you think that a much lower female participation in the workforce and in public life, greater inequality in marriage, and so forth, are good things. But it certainly does suggest, does it not, that changing socialization has lead to changed expectations as to how both men and women see their lives?

Gender justice in this sense is a pretty foreign concept to me. Of my five peers with children, one is a stay-at-home dad, one is a dad who works from home and so does more than half the childcare, one is a widower and two are so soon into their parenthood as to be unpredictable, although they’ll likely go with B.

I don’t think the babysitting thing gets anywhere near the issue of socialization, as there seems to be a pretty consistent trend towards prepubescent girls across all societies being drawn toward nurturing children and prepubescent boys across all societies being drawn toward hunting and warfare surrogates. Maybe it’s just a massive coincidence or conspiracy that all societies socialize the sexes identically in this way, but I doubt it.

Still, I totally got paid for babysitting more than ten times as a kid and later when we moved to a neighborhood with fewer young kids and more empty nesters, I got paid for a lot of lawn mowing. What does that say about gender justice?

Still, for something that was thought up on the spot, this is a very good demonstration. I personally would be pretty happy to be a stay-at-home dad, so the 0%s are pretty baffling.

I’m a 57yo unmarried guy. I’ve done nearly all of my baby-sitting since I retired, and my diaper-changing experinece remains essentially zilch, since the 17mo nephew in question nephew is pre-emptively forcing the issue of toilet-training, or as he terms it, “ploop”. Inapt as I am, I preferred taking him for half a day to observing a product focus group. (Some of us engineers continue to be allergic to marketing.)

I’m also my elderly mother’s primary caregiver/caretaker, a task to which she and I are spectacularly ill-suited. My hair-trigger impatience with stupidity is a poor match to her deteriorating memory, not least because she can’t comprehend it herself, and the anxiety and confusion she experiences at the gap between her expectations and her capabilities infects me as well. So we yell at each other more than we should.

My brother, father of the above-mentioned brat, was to a considerable degree the primary caregiver to his brood, the dad who cooked dinner, the dad they moved in with after the split, the guy who had to kick them out when he got a new wife and kid.

Many, perhaps most of us can escape responsibility indefintely. Those of us who weren’t so lucky can neither wish you good luck nor assure you that it’s not so bad.

Currently at home with my 10 month old, have been for 3 months, and will be for 7 more. Amazingly I find myself genetically qualified for the task.

Harry, the comments from various right-wingers here should be part of the next iteration. You can point out to the students that attitudes which they might (naively) thought to be obsolete are alive and well).

By the way, I thought I’d add to my previous comments a bit of anecdotal data from my experience and that of my circle of acquaintances, speaking as a parent of two very small children.

First of all, by far the most salient aspect of the parenting experience is having one’s previous expectations of it blown to smithereens practically on a daily basis. The fact that college kids have unrealistic ideas about it is about the least surprising thing I’ve encountered in the last two-and-a-half years.

Second, among the couples we know from friendships and various parents’ groups, very few mothers of babies actually find themselves itching to go back to work. Those who can afford it stay home, and those who can’t are usually unhappy about it. Most people, after all, don’t have careers–they have jobs, and if they can afford to forgo the income and do something more fulfilling like childcare, they do.

Third, among those couples I know where the wife does have a career that she prefers to full-time child care, a part-time shared child care solution would be quite unsatisfactory. Rather, those women quite happily put their children in full-time daycare and return to full-time work. I don’t think I know a single woman for whom the child care-vs.-work dilemma is such a close call that they’d ideally like to split their lives evenly between the two.

Lt- “I’m quite aware that kids can have very strong innate personalities and that this includes gendered expression. It does not follow that male and female binaries are the most meaningful way to talk about the huge variations that exist between people, including those of the same gender.”

Of course not, that’s why I posted the 60 Minutes clip. I believe it provides insight into which kinds of males are more suitable for the care giving role. Which one would you sooner entrust with caring for your toddler (assuming that they’d be a few years older)? The one with the painted fingernails? Or the one who looks like he might try to shoot your baby with his pellet gun? The answer should be obvious, and it should illustrate that many (if not most) males are not really suited for the task. So it makes no sense to ‘coerce’ anyone into going against their nature. But that’s just my opinion.

Lt – “Encouraging boys to be nurturing and girls to be daring in this light is no more a denial of biology than encouraging shy kids to try to make friends or encouraging an antsy kid to learn to relax.”

I believe that’s an equivocation.

Lt – “But again, there’s a rich literature of feminists talking about different ways of approaching this.”

I don’t necessarily regard “feminists” as a valid source regarding such issues, because almost invariably their goals are to confiscate the productivity, resources and achievement of others to ‘liberate’ themselves. Very few seem to deviate from this norm, especially when the topic concerns the structure of families.

Lt – “You said that these are dead questions, settled in a timeless and inevitable way forty years ago. Can you really deny that gender roles have changed greatly over that time?”

I think that many things we’ve seen over the past 40-years have occurred, previously, at some point even further back in history. The British Isles during the Celtic-Roman period comes to mind. Possibly Sweden during the Viking era. Much of what’s happening today is a repeat, perhaps allowing for a dose of technological determinism, and it seems to straddle a baseline; things always return back to normal at some point…and perhaps cross over the axis and continue in the other direction. It’s not unlike a sine wave.

Lt – “Now, maybe you think that’s a bad thing. Maybe you think that a much lower female participation in the workforce and in public life, greater inequality in marriage, and so forth, are good things. But it certainly does suggest, does it not, that changing socialization has lead to changed expectations as to how both men and women see their lives?”

I’ll refer to the study quoted by the seafarer, Slocum. That’s how things should go: what people actually want! Not what some “feminist” ideologue wants them to want.

As for your earlier comment about returning to the workforce after a long time out, I wondered whether the men who are now enthused about their wives returning to work were pushing to be the ones who would spend a good deal of time out of the workforce while childrearing, and whether they think their wives now can get jobs which will have the same status and the same intrinsic rewards that their own work provides for them.

My sense is these (well off, left-liberal) husbands are expected to support whatever choice their wives make about combining work/child-rearing, and that is what they do–but the decision was mainly the woman’s. And, of course, there are also many women around who made the choice to continue their careers — both options are clearly available.

I also think you’re right that status is a major factor in the women’s choices about returning to the labor market (or not). These are generally the wives of physicians, lawyers, professors, executives, business owners, etc who have enjoyed high status by virtue of their husband’s position and income. Having been out of the labor market for a decade or more, they may not be employable in their original fields — even at an entry level. But they can hardly start back on the bottom rung or go take a low pay, low status job. So what do they do? Just about what you’d expect — they do things that often pay little or nothing but are suitable for their social standing (and are also pleasant and interesting). So they volunteer or work for local non-profits. They teach ‘Master Gardener’ classes. Or maybe they run a gallery for a few years even if it never makes a dime. That kind of thing. Not at all an unpleasant life.

But the husbands sometimes come to feel rather trapped. They get to their mid 40’s and they no longer enjoy their jobs. But their wives no longer have even the earning potential to provide for the family at anything close to the accustomed level (let alone pay the looming university tuition bills), so it wouldn’t matter very much if they returned to work or not. So they grumble over a beer and stay in the traces.

And that’s when the economy is going well. One guy I know is a manager for a company that sells automation technology to the auto industry. He’s got great two kids in high school, and a great wife — I really like her. But she hasn’t worked (‘outside the home’ as they say) for at least the dozen years we’ve known them. Now he could lose his job any time. He’s pushing 50 and has about 25 years in an industry that’s dying. What’s going to happen to him — to them — if his office closes? I really have no idea, and I don’t think they do either.

The way I see it, an egalitarian marriage is a financially resilient marriage. One of the smarter things I’ve done is to take my full share of child-rearing and, in response to my wife’s suggestion that she go part time or switch to a lower paid, less-stressful non-professional job was to say no (or rather, to say — if you’re thinking we should scale back our lifestyle, let’s talk, but if you just want me to pick up the slack, then, sorry no way).

So I’ll advise my daughter to stick with her career and my son not to let his wife abandon hers. Will they listen? Probably not…

One slightly moany observation … I think we did things in a gender equal kind of way. I say “I think” because I wouldn’t want to assume a family consensus on what actually happened. But it wasn’t always easy, and one of the not-easy things was the fact that the world was set up (I’m talking UK, c. 1985-95 here) in ways that assumed that mothers were in charge. Sometimes this came out in the attitudes and assumptions of professionals, but also just as a side-effect of the predominant choices of other people. I’m sure that come other men would have really had a great time as the only man in a party of 30 on the mother-and-toddler group trip to the Weston-super-Mare, but I felt a bit out of place, to say the least, and I’m sure that many of the women there would have preferred a mothers-only outing.

Lt – “your conclusion is basically that you dimiss out of hand (or aren’t even willing to read) a significant body of work produced by the people who have most carefully studied these issues because you just somehow know that they’re all up to no good.”

Well, yes. For the reasons I already mentioned. But I will say that her proposal of dividing the breadwinner’s paycheck more equitably (according to a comment about her book) is slightly more satisfactory to me than the usual “I’ll have government confiscate your money to pay for my kid’s daycare, so that I can ‘liberate’ myself” view that’s espoused by most run-of-the-mill “feminists.”

Lt – “And do you really, really don’t think boys who play with pellet guns can’t grow up to be good fathers?”

Sure they do. Just not as primary caregivers to young kids.

Lt – “one of the things that sticks out from the original post is that young women want equal partners.”

And a Lexus, a monthly vacation in France, a new pair of shoes, a stylish hairdo…

I’ve taught Women and Work on and off over the years. Students were not strongly self-selected for feminist sympathies because the class met a bunch of requirements and most were business majors because the course was a “soft” way of meeting an upper division econ requirement.

One theme I got consistently from the guys was that women were asking for unfair privileges. As guys, they would have to work consistently from the time they plopped into their office cubicles after graduation to retirement at 65. And if they got married they would be responsible for bringing in the primary income–without any chance to take time off, even to re-tool and change jobs. Women they said had more flexibility in terms of work and wouldn’t be saddled with breadwinner responsibilities.

So it was just unfair for women to expect to get the same career opportunities they got. Women weren’t paying the same dues they were paying.

The child care issue didn’t figure prominently and, when it did, students viewed the roles men and women played in caring for kids as a consequence of different work expectations rather than a cause. The work requirements for women were more flexible so as a consequence they could take off a few years or, if they worked, take knock off early to pick up the kids or in any case not be pressed to stay late, etc.

I think there’s something to this last point. I’m sure causation goes every which way but seems to me that it’s conditions in the labor force that promote inequitable domestic arrangements rather than vice versa. Women aren’t under the same pressures and don’t have the same opportunities in the labor force.

Also the survey asks about “expectations” rather than “preferences.” These guys expected to be locked into work for 40 years and expected that if married they would be under even more pressure and have less flexibility–not that they preferred this arrangement–and they were resentful. I also, and admittedly this is conjecture, don’t believe that women cut back on work because they prefer to do more “caring” but that they end up stuck with the primary parenting job because their careers get stalled and because guys, who aren’t allowed to cut back on work to “parent” don’t do their share.

LF, why do you insist on writing Feminists as “feminists”? That doesn’t make any sense, are you saying that Feminists are not really “feminists”? Or haha they’re not a real ideology, what a jackass. Its clear you are just prejudiced and rather than actually considering any of the evidence being presented you are trotting out the same old tired lines. If men want babies so much, go take care of them yourselves – haven’t you just said on numerous occasions that men aren’t hardwired to nurture? Yet you’re acting like Mother Goose telling women what is best for them? You really think its the be and end all for men to work 9-5 and women to take of the children? To piss your life away procreating? Is there nothing else? You just want what every man has wanted for the past 5,000 years, a mediocre boring life. It seems to me that for all the preaching men do about effing childcare and The Almighty Family,that its them who are genetically designed for it, please stfu until you have a personality.

As for the research Harry, very clever, I’ll try it out on my friends and get back to you!

Really interesting exercise, harry. So glad that you were able to write more about it here. A couple of quick thoughts.

First, I’m amazed that your students came to class with actual notions about a future family life. When I was in college, I had no formed notions about such things. Kids and a husband were far off concepts to me. Like arthritis or social security. My immediate plans were to get some sort of job, hang out with my friends, and get away from my mom. I knew I wanted a career, but had no idea how that was exactly going to work out or even what line of work I wanted to go into. In fact, it wasn’t until the kid actually arrived and was in my arms that I spent serious thought on divisions of labor and gender roles. Maybe you needed a Don’t Know option on that survey.

Second, you know that I’m a hundred percent on board with the egalitarian marriage and family life system. After the kid arrived and I was forced to think those things through, that was we aimed for. I’m just not so sure that it is a viable option for most Americans. To have a real egalitarian family, both parents need to have flexible jobs. That’s hard to find. It’s also hard to find jobs these days, so whatever job you have, you stick with it. There’s no room for job movement. Most people are forced into the model of one full time job (12 hour per day, including commute time) and the other works the less demanding, less well paid, flexible, part-time option or else doesn’t work at all. That work situation does not lead to egalitarian family life.

Sure, men can do more and need some guilting on that score. Boys need to be socialized in a different way. But the current economic system doesn’t lend itself to a 50-50 split. Is it fair to push a particular family life that is incompatible with economic realities?

Hi Laura,

I don’t know — I’m not that surprised that a lot of them have expectations that they’ve thought about, perhaps because I get to know fair numbers of them pretty well and know that they think about it. I will add a don’t know option, though. Its interesting what you say about yourself. I thought about it a fair bit at that age, and expected not to get married or have children at all, but hoped to, and had very strong preferences about having an egalitarian situation, and to be honest my choice of profession was guided more by that than anything else. (I consciously chose not to start on the political track, partly because I, with remarkable insight, believed that the left to which I belonged was going to be marginalised for at least a generation or two, but mainly because I thought it was incompatible with being the kind of parent I wanted to be if I had the luck of finding someone who’d want to have children with me).

And yes, absolutely, circumstances intervene and make things very difficult (for all sorts of reasons, including those mentioned by Chris and, in #44, LF). There are two quite different questions: what sort of social reforms would make it easier to achieve egalitarian situations for those who want them and, absent such reforms, what can families that want some sort of egalitarianism do. I don’t think there’s nothing to be said about the second question, but I don’t have much to say, and even if I did I would be very tentative about it, partly because I recognise the combination of luck and privilege that shapes my own situation.

To have a real egalitarian family, both parents need to have flexible jobs. That’s hard to find. It’s also hard to find jobs these days, so whatever job you have, you stick with it. There’s no room for job movement. Most people are forced into the model of one full time job (12 hour per day, including commute time) and the other works the less demanding, less well paid, flexible, part-time option or else doesn’t work at all. That work situation does not lead to egalitarian family life.

An option that’s really hardly discussed is the possibility of, I suppose you could call it symmetrically inegalitarian parenting. Looking at the breakdown of responses to the exercise, very few girls and no boys expect to raise children in a father-led parenting situation — egalitarian parenting is as far away from traditional norms as the vast majority of respondents were prepared to go. While it might be inevitable that within most couples there will be one primary parent and one primary careerist, can’t a world be imagined where the identity of the primary careerist wasn’t uniformly male?

When I was in college, I had no formed notions about such things. Kids and a husband were far off concepts to me.

That’s always struck me as strange, even though I’ve long since come to recognize that such is really the norm amongst the college-aged population. Like Harry, it was something that I wondered and thought and stressed about at great length–but then, I was brought up in an environment where keeping an eye on marriage and family was something we were both directly and indirectly encouraged to maintain from a pretty young age.

There are two quite different questions: what sort of social reforms would make it easier to achieve egalitarian situations for those who want them and, absent such reforms, what can families that want some sort of egalitarianism do.

Though I’m not entirely certain that, within our postindustrial, late capitalist world, the answers to the two questions would be all that different. Structural changes in the nature of education, training, work and wages would, of course, result is a fairly radical reconstitution of what we consider to be egalitarian (or not!) gender roles within a family with children, but failing that, certain practices–in which you make choices as a couple cognizant of stuff like zoning, public transportation, day care, public education, commuting times, standard of living, maternity and paternity leave policies, and the like–are going to have to be part of every egalitarian wanna-be’s toolkit, whatever the likelihood of overall social improvement.

I’m still skeptical as to whether an interest in taking care of the brats makes for differences in male and female commitments to work rather than vice versa. If work stinks, as it does for most people, you’ll take any excuse to avoid it–including brat-care. And for most women work really stinks.

Try thinking out of the box for a little bit folks and recognize how utterly lousy work is for most people, in particular, for most women.

LF — without trawling back through the whole thread, I can’t say this for certain, but I don’t think that anyone has made any actual proposals about what to do. Smearing people as Stalinists doesn’t help much, still less when no-one has said anything remotely recognisable as that. Preferences about career/family split, like the behaviour they lead to, are quite sensitive to institutional arrangements and social norms (it is in response to changes in these that men do a great deal more hands-on parenting in the US than they did 30 years ago, and women have far more investment and involvement in careers than 30 years ago). No-one here has even proposed a desirable goalof all marriages being egalitarian. I would like to see more egalitarian child-rearing arrangements, and more fluidity in arrangements, than we currently have, and I would like to see this because I think more people would flourish that way. I don’t think they’d flourish that way if coerced into it (as, in general, people tend to flourish better in roles and ways of living that they are independently committed to, which is why personal liberties are so important), so I, like all the gender-egalitarians in this thread, look for policy levers which enhance people’s ability to make considered choices. There’s nothing remotely Stalinist about either the goals that I have or the methods I would sanction in their pursuit, and if you want to persuade anyone you’d do well to refrain from insulting them.

“2. Providing tax credits for the things that two-income families spend money on that one-income families generally don’t—not just childcare credits (which do exist), but also tax credits for, say, home cleaning services, laundry services, meal delivery, lawn services, home repairs, etc.”

Bipsy, did you see this amusing little check we got from the Treasury just for keeping the help around? Quite sporting of them! I do believe it will cover the costs incurred for that…little incident…with the speedboat the other weekend. Speaking of the staff, what the hell is taking Jorge so long with the sangria?

harry b – “Smearing people as Stalinists doesn’t help much”

Well, Stalin said something like, “It’s not the votes that count, but rather who counts the votes.” Since we haven’t read anything here along those lines yet, you’d be right in saying that it would be unfair of me to accuse people of being Stalinists. But that wasn’t my intent anyway. I was merely establishing how egalitarianism, in and of itself, is neither a worthy nor realizable goal. I did use the word ‘policy’ at the end; it was not intentional, and I regretted it after posting. My apologies if anyone felt smeared upon.

harry b – “men do a great deal more hands-on parenting in the US than they did 30 years ago”

But not more parenting overall. I was there during that oh-so horrible time. But I will say that, in my particular case, I do more than my father did. That’s mainly because I have more flexibility with regard to time. But it’s probably not the “hands-on” type that you are talking about, so you would probably categorize us as a B family. I see us more as a C family, but in the sense that we complement each other equally. Equal but not the same, so to speak.

Rothko haha why do you insist on capitalizing the word “feminist”? haha

Piglet – “But how does the present compare to the situation one, two, three generations ago? Would you really claim that nothing changed?”

That’s a fair question. I’d say that the Soviet Union served as a mentor to egalitarian movements in the past. Since its collapse, the militancy of such movements have become much quieter. In fact, there’s currently a surprisingly right-wing phase going on in the Nordics. Furthermore, Nordic economies have become considerably more liberalized, and, not surprisingly, the standard of living has risen. Society is beginning to take on a much more natural shape in terms of family norms, and traditional arrangements are making a comeback among a larger part of the population than ever before. On the other hand, there’s also more freedom to express one’s inclinations, which means that care giving by a certain segment of males coexists with this trend.

Piglet – “gender roles have changed significantly in recent history and are likely to change further.”

Keep in mind that this has been going on for longer than 30-years in the Nordics–I’d say 50 is more like it. Egalitarianism has been elusive and will continue to be so, because it simply is not natural. Based on my observations, egalitarianism is a byproduct of economic and social disarray. In that sense, the United States is on the right track: keep going with the cycle of expansionist wars and resulting financial collapses, and you’ll continue to have the most egalitarian society in the world :-)

What percentage of boys and girls think they want to have children?
Did you explore the relationship between their career aspirations and their desire to raise children?

I obsess a little (too much, perhaps) about birthrates, especially among women who hold PhDs.
http://badmomgoodmom.blogspot.com/search/label/Birthrates

Piglet – “Which perfectly explains why we happen not to live in a slave-holder society any more.”

You think so? I’d say that societal and economic instability (as I mentioned above) is precisely what causes the enormous level of poverty in America. Instead of wearing shackles and leg irons, the modern day slave carries a load of consumer debt and unpaid medical bills that he hasn’t a hope of paying off within his lifetime. Thankfully, Europe has avoided much of that.

Piglet – “That is his response to my question whether he thinks that gender roles haven’t changed over the last two or three generations in the Nordic countries.”

Perhaps I hurriedly tried to put the issue into a historical context. Maybe this will give you better insight into the Nordics than my clumsy attempt to enlighten you?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4833310.ece

Piglet – “Serves us right to feed a troll, I have to admit.”

By your definition, is a “troll” anyone with whom you disagree?

haha, i just did it to compensate for LF’s “feminist”

I agree that egalitarianism isn’t natural LF, that the best person for the job should get it, so how come they’re using equal rights legislation, affirmative action, to get boys into university? Even though they’re less qualified than their female counterparts? If its not meant to be equal, stop forcing it. Its funny how everyone bitches and moans when they use all black shortlists or all women shortlists but everyone thinks its right and proper if we use it to give boys a lift, even if they’re underperforming compared to women.

Owl, come on. Most of our choices arise as a result partly of our socialisation and partly as a result of our natural proclivities, all in interaction with the opportunity set confronting us. All that is needed for this to be interesting is that socialisation plays some role. I can’t give (Cartesian) decisive proof that it plays some role, and, of course, that means that we can’t give (Cartesian) decisive proof that there are social justice issues here. But you can use your judgment.