Monday, March 31, 2008 - Posts
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When law firms institute family-friendly policies (flex hours, reasonable work loads), who benefits? That depends how you measure it. Mothers at these firms are neither more nor less productive than mothers at other firms, as measured by billable hours, according to a new study of 670 lawyers in Alberta, Canada, by sociologists Jean Wallace and Marisa Young. But fathers at family-friendly firms are less productive than fathers at old-style firms. At the same time, fathers with help at home, like stay-at-home wives and weekly cleaning services, increase their productivity at work, whereas women with stay-at-home husbands and cleaning aren't more productive.
What's going on here? Wallace and Young argue that fathers tend to consider breadwinning an all-important family contribution, so when they have more help at home, they respond by working harder. Also, men are far more likely to have a stay-at-home spouses than women are. Women, on the other hand, seem to sink more time into their kids, if they have it. The happy spin from the authors is that the family-friendly policies aren't hurting the firms vis-à-vis their women employees, which makes the policies seem less costly. The finding about the men working less, though, throws a wrench into the discussion, doesn't it? The authors ask, "How are men using their free timeas a result of working fewer hours?" and then cites other evidence that men may plow their time into more leisure activities. Is that perfectly understandable, or is it shirking? Who's modeling the good behavior here? It's hard to tell, but the gender split is there to be mulled over.
Over at Legal Blog Watch, Carolyn Elefant argues that billable hours are a bad measure of productivity. That makes sense to me as a reason that this study may not translate to other professions in which parents can argue they work more efficiently, squeezing more work into less time. But it doesn't seem like a salient criticism of these findings, since hours are firms' explicit measure of productivity.
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Anybody else read the NYT Magazine piece on Harvard's intentional virgins? It was in many ways right off-the-rack: Not all young people who are virgins on purpose are dum-dum religious nuts. Some of them—brace yourselves—have even infiltrated Harvard. And have complicated philosophical reasons for this lifestyle choice. Too complicated, in fact, even to take a stab at explaining. But don't sweat it, because underneath—who would have guessed?—they're religious nuts, too! With hilarious hang-ups, as you'll note when I torture Harvard's Head Virgin with completely disrespectful questions about just how far she'll go. So ciao for now and see you next time, when I pull the wings off butterflies. ...
OK, so it infuriated me, but it did sound one hopeful note. When the head virgin (who doesn't even order dessert after lunch, poor sensually starved child) debated a campus sex blogger (who voraciously gobbles every crumb of her ginger cake with cream-cheese frosting and raspberry compote, get it?) the two women showed mutual respect. They declined to supply the crowd with a catfight and refused to live up to their billing: Harvard's Jezebel Takes On Campus Virgin Mary. "The women themselves saw their encounter as a meeting of two feminist positions,'' the story says, and good for them. Afterwards, they probably headed out for a glass of water and a chocolate martini. Oh, and according to their chronicler, the men of Harvard indicated that after some serious reflection, they would indeed rather marry Mary Ann than Ginger—though I'm not sure either of them would say yes.
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