Why the bloodbath? Well I grow more frustrated daily with the inability of Journalists to critically evaluate a situation from an unbiased perspective. It is possible that articles like this one are a result of an editor saying to a journalist "write me an article about girls in college who just want to be moms." I guess it isn't really there fault that they are forced to draw false conclusions, but y'know whatever.
Echidne has a good post on this article but unsurprisingly I can't resist adding my two cents.
This article uses completely biased interviews. And then it goes on to quote statistics of alum surveys without even questioning for a second that maybe women who both work and have children don't have time to answer a stupid survey! So that maybe these results could be biased to show a higher percentage of non working people. Duuuur.
This quote actually made me vomit a little:
Sarah Currie, a senior at Harvard, said many of the men in her AmericanI've got to say, if some guy told me how it gets him hot thinking about me staying home and raising his kids, I'd beat the living shit out of him. And I don't think that I am even a little alone in that. It is true, a lot of women want to raise their own kids, but one has to wonder why that is? I also think it is important to keep in mind that it has really only been 50 years since women were out in the workforce in any real capacity and expecting a complete reversal or neutralizing of gender roles in 50 years is just a little much.
Family class last fall approved of women's plans to stay home with their
children.
"A lot of the guys were like, 'I think that's really great,' " Ms.
Currie said. "One of the guys was like, 'I think that's sexy.' Staying
at home with your children isn't as polarizing of an issue as I envision it
is for women who are in their 30's now."
This article accepts this quote at face value but I think that it indicates what the real problem here is, the status quo.Ms. Ku added that she did not think it was a problem that women usually do most of the work raising kids.
"I accept things how they are," she said. "I don't mind the status quo. I don't see why I have to go against it."
2 comments:
This article annoyed me too. It was as if the "journalist" started with the thought, "I feel like a lot of young women might not want careers" and went from there.
A better treatment of a similar subject was a study (where? when? I forget . . something done in response to that comment from the Harvard president ) about women in university science departments. Beginning with the statistic that a large percent of the dept heads and faculty generally (as opposed to the grad student population) are men, the research went on to discover that, low and behold, women aren't promoted, tenured as quickly, aren't given responsibility or taken seriously in certain academic settings. Not that they choose to avoid a career . . . they just leave in frustration.
I remember reading that study.
I think it would be interesting to see a nationwide sample of women of all ages and how they chose to deal with children/careers etc. I think this article really limited the scope of the ages it compared. It was just generally stupid.
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