Tuesday, July 22, 2008 - Posts
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Thanks, Meghan, for the pointer to Louis Uchitelle's sharp article in the NYT, noting that women have achieved a new and unwanted equality: equality in unemployment during and after a downturn. At long last we have a front-page correction to the opt-out myth—a myth that the Times has been peddling since 1952, when it first started publishing a decadeslong series of "Career Girls Just Wanna Go Home and Raise Babies" pieces. The most recent and most notorious iteration thereof was a 2003 Sunday Times Magazine article called "The Opt Out Revolution." Besides making many women spit out their coffee and fire off nasty e-mails, that article started up a whole industry of refutations. I published one such refutation in the Columbia Journalism Review last year, called "The Opt Out Myth"; you can find a footnoted version here, with links to some of the underlying social science research about how women get sidelined for "working while mother."
Kudos to Uchitelle for getting the story right—and to the NYT editors for putting it on the front page, above the fold!
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CBS anchor Katie Couric, in Israel covering the Obama foreign tour, gave an interview to Haaretz in which she discussed being a TV anchor: "I find myself in the last bastion of male dominance, and realizing what Hillary Clinton might have realized not long ago: that sexism in the American society is more common than racism, and certainly more acceptable or forgivable. In any case, I think my post and Hillary's race are important steps in the right direction." I find it unseemly for people like Couric and Clinton, who have been rewarded greatly for their talent, skill, and drive, to complain that sexism is the reason when they don't succeed at absolutely everything. (Couric is paid $15 million a year, a higher salary than her male counterparts.) Sure, she and Clinton have both gotten bashed—that's part of the territory of being a public figure. Couric's predecessor, Dan Rather, was widely mocked for wearing sweaters, for his corn-pone sayings, for his penchant for misadventure. Finally, he was kicked out of his anchor chair in a humiliating fashion. At least he couldn't complain all this happened because white guys can't catch a break. Does Couric believe that if she were a black man she'd be No. 1 in the ratings?
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