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Emily, Hanna:
Two points.
are showing that men, too--maybe not those at the crazy-competitive high end of the spectrum, but still, a lot of them--want to spend more time with their children, but feel forced not to by the current order of things. They work in offices that value inputs not outputs, to use the language of economics. Or they support wives who don't work because (they feel) they've been forced out by professions that do the same. Or they just can't manage their anxiety about whether they're masculine enough. Whatever. A workplace in which it was considered desirable for employees to be good parents--perhaps such a workplace would only exist if created by government regulation, but it could exist--might protect such men from themselves.
2. I take
your point, Hanna, though it seems to me that you don't need to have a single person working a story for hours at a time, no matter how fast-breaking it is. There's no reason not to put teams of people on a story, and indeed, I see more and more joint bylines, which strike me as a good thing, a humane thing. The real problem in journalism, from the point of view of labor, is the move to the Web and the sweatshop ethos that it engenders, in which you the writer and you the editor (more and more the same person) have to post and edit seven million times a day. This is not a professional issue. It's a money issue. You Slatesters are absurdly overburdened, keeping up with a magazine that gets more and more bloggy and podcasty and video-based, because the Washington Post Company still isn't sure which aspect of the publication will take off, and they aren't going to invest huge sums of money while they find out. We won't discover the way out of this trap until our bosses figure out how to turn a profit at this thing, which could take a while.
But that's no reason to despair. What if the way to make money on the web turns out to be providing value-added specialized information, rather than glorified newswire copy or know-nothing bloviating, such as I'm engaging in now? Then we'd see less reliance on general-assignment reporters and pundits and more reliance on reporters and writers with expertise. This is already true to a certain extent. I can already imagine several stories in which you simply have to have, say, Dafna Linzer or Hanna Rosin, despite their nannys' deadlines, because they know more about Middle East weaponry or evangelicals or what have you than anyone else on staff. A focus on conceptual scoops over plain-vanilla news scoops would do wonders for the flex-time crowd. I realize that this doesn't make life easier for the junior metro reporter, and that the more journalism is a commodified object rather than a specialized, artisanal product, the worse off she is, which is to say, this is a class issue more than a gender issue, but hey. Maybe she can put in her time before she has kids.
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I realize this is a problem most relevant to those enslaved to billable hours. But it is ringing my bell, too.
Remember, from nearly a decade ago, the name Joyce Purnick. She is the New York Times metro editor who caused an uproar by saying that female reporters with kids didn't perform nearly as well as the childless. Actually, that's not what she said. What she actually said was, that she didnt think she could have risen that far if she'd had a family. She was candid and wistful, about being 52 and childless. Still, that wasn't enough to keep the mothers from coming down on her head. Now, I didn't have kids at the time and didn't work at a newspaper, but even then this struck me as perfectly logical. Once I did start working at a a newspaper, and then had kids, it struck me as undeniably true. Newspapers don't have billable hours, but they run on a clock. What matters is not the pointless Japanese concept of face time but actual availability. News breaks at all hours (and most often later in the day). The more time you have to report, the better your story. If I were an editor looking at a big, complicated, breaking story, I would think twice before assigning it to someone who had to worry about relieving their nanny at 6. I imagine this is true if you're a manager at a graphic design firm facing a deadline, a surgeon, a salesman, all manner of professions that don't begin and end at a fixed time.
What's interesting to me about Susan Pinker is that she loves Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir and yet has come back around to some modified version of biology is, in fact, destiny. She has not had some conservative conversion or disowned feminism, she has just arrived at what feels like the obvious. Pinker is a child psychologist, and her starting point is all the boys she saw in her practice who were obsessive, anti-social, mildly autistic. Then, 20 years later, she began to see these same boys showing up in the newspaper as successful entrepreuneurs and writers and lawyers. It turned out that these same traits that seemed to doom them in youth turned out to be helpful later on, by making them more prone to risktaking and singular focus. She then compared them with girls who'd started out with all the best grades, the best skills, the most promise. This pairing fascinates me because it happens to mimic exactly my household constellation. But also because it's a very clever way to structure the argument. By interviewing groups of such people, she finds that women, faced with the same opportunities and more, still make very different choices than men do. That all the years of gender-equity legislation haven't led to equal results. That men succeed at the extremes, both high and low, while women tend to moderate. She even gives some props to (gasp!) Larry Summers, whose views about women in science her research confirms. She writes in a voice that seems outside both the gender wars and cold science. Somehow, it hit home with me.
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Judith, you nailed the efficiency vs. availability conundrum. I'm sure there is room for law firms to dethrone The Hour—and here's a good recent Slate piece by Lisa Lerer explaining why the push for them to do so is coming from their clients. Perhaps most law firm work could be judged in terms of who does good work fast instead of who posts the most 12-minute increments. But for reality's sake, I feel compelled to recognize that sometimes, availability is the golden egg. Some clients see premium value in being able to reach their lawyer at all hours, and that's why the firms cater to this demand. It's possible that the market overvalues availablity—I'd like to think so—but I'm not sure. (Anyone got any good evidence on either side?)
One more point: In her new book The Sexual Paradox, Susan Pinker writes about studies of academia that mirror the finding that intense career paths play out differently for men and women. In a large study of the University of California system, Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden found that married male scientists have a productivity edge over married female scientists, and over single people. For one thing, many more of the men have stay-at-home spouses.
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Dear Emily,
Once, at a dinner party honoring the retirement of a friend of my father-in-law, I sat next to the law firm's former managing partner. You would have heard of the firm; it's one of those with huge offices in New York and Washington and all over the world. And perhaps because this man was himself retired, he was unusually frank about things. One thing he was frank about was the way law firms treat women.
He wasn't going to talk to me about sexism or harassment or anything like that, he said. His complaint was a structural one. Given that half the graduating classes of the top law schools are women, he said, and that as many women rank at the top of their classes as men, law firms that want to stay competitive in their recruiting have to figure out how to make their workplaces more appealing to women. I was thrilled to hear that the young women he had been interviewing had been very clear about wanting to have families and very forward-thinking in the way they negotiated before they even took a job. I don't remember my generation—my college classmates—being so realistic. We were going to muddle through, and in the end vast numbers of us dropped out. Young men were also asking about the firm's family policies, he said. They saw their female counterparts negotiating deals that would let them spend more time with their children, and they wanted deals like that, too.
But, my friend said, law firms are never going to be able to keep their promises not to discriminate against lawyers who turn into caregivers, are never going make their workplaces truly family-friendly, unless they change the way they do business. The billable hour, he said: That's the problem. As long as the measure of productivity is the billable hour, lawyers fighting to get home to their children will always look less productive than lawyers who can work all night. Said my friend the managing partner: We all know lawyers who can get twice as much done in the same time as other lawyers, but those lawyers are not rewarded for their efficiency, or, at least, they're not rewarded enough—because they're not bringing in money. And we all know women who become twice as productive in the same time after they've had children, because they know they've got no slack at the end of the day. They're not rewarded, either. To take an obvious example of how status is allotted to the lawyer with the most available hours, he said, imagine you're a partner who has to pick someone to head up an important case. You are never going to chose someone who goes home at 5 p.m. Your team leader will to be a person who can put in as many hours as it takes, both to keep the client happy and to keep the firm's bill as high as it can be.
In other words, he said, in the through-the-looking-glass economy of the law firm, efficiency is a lesser criterion than availability. The irony of this upside-down ethos, my friend observed, is that it costs clients quite a lot of money. Imagine, he said, that law firms billed by the project, rather than by the hour, and that they bid against each other for projects. And now imagine how much lower a bid a firm could make if it rewarded its lawyers for working quickly rather than giving them incentives to work slowly. Clients would save money, law firms would be more competitive, and efficient lawyers would advance to the heads of their firms. All this is quite obvious to everyone involved in managing a law firm, he said. But for reasons too complicated to get into here—though the word "inertia" appears in each of them—no one wants to change the way things are done. Or maybe they don't want to be the first to do so. And yet until they do, he said, the needs of law firms and the needs of families will always be at odds with each another.
Now that's just one man's rant, of course. But it struck me as worth repeating.
Best,
Judith
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