Collisions with Reality

I’m always delighted to see studies showing that men do an ever-increasing share of housework and childcare. My husband and I do equal amounts of both in our household nowadays, and it’s nice to know that we’re not an anomaly in this way. (We perhaps are anomalies in our lack of multitasking — in particular, I am completely incapable of it — and so our time spent multitasking is far, far below the average.) However, two recent events at work have reminded me that we still have a long way to go when it comes to the work-family balance:

1. At work, there is a long-running speaker series called Women We Admire, “in which women [...] share their insights about career, workplace challenges and work-life balance.” These are all accomplished women who are at the tops of their fields. Yet at the recent talk I went to, the audience was at most 10% male.

2. I am also starting an affinity group at work for other parents — there aren’t a ton of people at work with young kids (let alone in the Bay Area), and I thought there could be a lot of interesting, focused meetings. What schedule flexibility do we have? How are the labor and delivery departments at the various hospitals in our different health care plans? What on earth do you do with school-aged kids in the summertime? The sign-ups are finally starting to roll in, and so far only two men have signed up. TWO.

To be fair, the majority of my co-workers are women. But men are underrepresented in both cases above. Apparently, when a woman works outside of the home, there’s a work-life balance she has to achieve. When a man works out of the home, it’s business as usual!

How can this be changed? Is the framing language the problem? Or is it another symptom of the bigger problem — that women’s issues are considered to be “special issues”, and not issues faced by, you know, HALF THE DAMN POPULATION?

Celebrities are having kids left and right nowadays, and every once in a while, one of them has a natural birth and mentions it in an interview. The response online then ranges from cheers to indifference to disbelief to scorn. (Most recently with Miranda Kerr, but see also Gisele Bundchen.) The questions that frequently come up in the comments generally boil down to “Why is it worth mentioning?” So as someone who had a mostly-natural birth — and without painkillers — here’s why I think it’s important to talk about natural birth.

The general perception of childbirth, at least in the U.S., is that it’s the most horrible and agonizing physical pain that a woman can experience. This perception is so pervasive that people will dismiss women’s stories of natural childbirth to their faces. My son is only fifteen months old, and people have said that I just didn’t remember how bad it was, or I just remembered the endorphin rush from afterwards, or that humans have an amazing ability to forget traumatic events. No. It wasn’t traumatic, and it wasn’t even that painful. Yes, it was long and strenuous, and like any physical activity, required physical and mental preparation by me beforehand (mostly prenatal yoga). But it wasn’t much worse than a day of downhill skiing in the Rocky Mountains. (I hate skiing.)

For those who have not given birth, where does this perception come from? Not from talking to other women, but from pop culture in general. From the way that childbirth is portrayed on television and in the movies — ER, Knocked Up, LOST, and so on. What do these shows and movies all have in common? They were all written by men. But they feed into a public perception that is so strong that people dismiss my experience in favor of holding on to the idea that childbirth involves hours of agonizing pain. They say that there’s no need to be a martyr, but I never said that I felt like one. (Do people say similar things to marathoners? Because that’s the best analogy for childbirth that I can think of.)

In short, women who talk about natural childbirth aren’t doing it to be smug or superior or judgmental. We’re talking about it because we’re trying to reclaim the story of childbirth from the way it’s portrayed by male-dominated culture.

There are lots of things I want to talk about that don’t quite deserve their own post, but can’t be condensed into 140 characters. So here they are, together at last:

• Which is the most egregious omission in one’s literary background: Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” or Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? This is an ongoing argument between my husband and myself. I vote for Prufrock as the most egregious omission, because I actually get a “water, water everywhere” reference, while my husband once missed a “do I dare to eat a peach?” reference. (He also once missed a reference I made to the song, “Maria”, from West Side Story, but that is a different post entirely.)

  Of course, despite having this argument for the past several months, neither of us has actually gotten around to reading our missing poem. Clearly neither of us has been convinced that we have the most egregious omission!

  On a slightly related note, one of my husband’s selling points for the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is that it can be sung to the tune of Gilligan’s Island! And until I saw today’s xkcd, I hadn’t realized that ballads have a specific meter, or that the theme to Gilligan’s Island is a ballad! Now I’m going to spend the rest of the day singing, “. . . and immortaliTY!”

• A general house rule is that we don’t watch TV while our son is in the room, with the exception of sporting events. We thought that was reasonable, especially as he didn’t pay attention to the TV, even as recently as during the World Cup. But college football started last night, and he was actually paying attention to the TV for several minutes at a time! I would feel more guilty about this, except that every minute he is looking at the TV is a minute that he’s not attacking a laptop. (Right now he loves opening and closing things: doors, drawers, CD cases, laptops, you name it. If anyone has a recommendation for a toy that has, like, lots of little doors on it, that would be awesome.) Also, this is correlated with him having more of a reaction to the video when we’re skyping with distant family members. Overall, it’s a pretty cool cognitive development. We just have to make sure we’re not ignoring him during football games.
• If you’re in the US, yesterday was 9/02/10 — or 90210! — and the Fug Girls commemorated it appropriately.
• You probably don’t think NPR when it comes to pop culture, especially television. But their Monkey See blog is really good. One of the bloggers, Linda Holmes, recapped at Television Without Pity for many years as Miss Alli, and she always has a great, dry take on the more ridiculous elements of various reality shows.

Next up: three day weekend. Woo-hoo!

I saw this puzzling chart today, which is a bit of good news and a bit of bad news. It’s the fraction of women without kids, split by education level, for 1992 and 2006-2008.

(Source: Economix.)
For most levels it went up, but for the the highest levels it actually decreased! Why is this? A few thoughts:

1. There is some natural mean fraction of women that do not want children, that is independent of educational level attained. Hence all educational levels approaching a 18% childfree point.

2. Once a certain educational level is reached, it is easier to have kids while in academia than while in law, medicine, or finance.
3. Women with master’s degrees and doctorates are more likely to have financial stability.
4. Related to the last point, E recalled the study published last year (behind Nature’s paywall here, but see a good summary here) that showed that while the fertility rate generally decreases as human development index(HDI) increases, there’s actually a turnover at the high HDI end.
   
   (Source: Nature.)
   The birthrate is actually increasing in some countries, particularly in Scandinavia, where the standard of living is extremely high. The childfree rate in the U.S. is still highest among women who have at least a bachelor’s degree. But, that rate has dropped dramatically in the past fifteen years, and the graph in the first article does mirror the turnover seen in the HDI vs. fertility rate plot.

There are lots of other questions to ask about the data. Why is the childfree number increasing in the past 15 years for women with less education? Is this a good or a bad thing? Is there a natural childfree number that is independent of education? What do these data look like for men? What do these numbers look like within different career tracks, or are we running into small number statistics at that point?

But as a woman with a kid and a PhD, it’s sometimes just nice to see that I’m not alone.

Nearly every day since my son was born, I’ve had a cup of coffee or tea in the morning, and a glass of wine or beer in the evenings. (I’ve also showered every day, but that’s a different post.) He’s now eight months old, I’m still nursing, and I’ve never pumped and dumped. Alcohol and caffeine do pass into the breastmilk, but only in the tiniest of amounts if one is consuming them moderately. The rule of thumb that I’ve gone by is one I’ve seen many places: “If you’re sober enough to drive, you’re sober enough to breastfeed.”

Unfortunately, there are a lot of misconceptions out there about breastfeeding, and the biggest one I’ve encountered is that you cannot drink any alcohol while breastfeeding. This weekend I learned (via Lactivist Leanings, on twitter) of yet another product aimed at worried parents — MilkScreen — which promises to test the alcohol content of your breastmilk. I am annoyed by the mere existence of this product, and it doesn’t help that the webpage implies that no level of alcohol consumption is safe while you’re nursing.

I know it’s just a stupid product, but it’s yet another example of a stupid and useless product aimed at worried, first-time parents. And specifically, it contributes to pressure on breastfeeding women to eschew alcohol, caffeine, and medications for minor conditions. (In addition to my daily cup of coffee and glass of wine, I will not be parted from my allergy meds.) In some circles, there’s sometimes an attitude that you shouldn’t bother breastfeeding if you aren’t going to do it for two years while following a perfect diet, and I think that attitude — and the advertising by products such as Milkscreen — drives women away from breastfeeding. It’s bad enough that everyone watches you like a hawk when you’re pregnant; who wants another 1-2 years of that?

I try to personally counter these misconceptions, but I’m a busy person. There are only so many times I can publicly nurse and then have a drink. So in the meantime, I’ll just have to blog about it.

My husband and I swear a lot. And we haven’t always been good about filtering ourselves when around children, my parents (uh, sorry), or civilized society in general. Not wanting our son’s first words to be rated PG-13, we recently instituted a swear jar.

To our pleasant surprise, it worked. We put a ton of money into it the first week, of course, but the amount tapered off over the next two weeks. That’s pretty consistent with all the articles I see every January, telling me it only takes three weeks to develop a new habit. There have been two unexpected side-effects from this experiment, though, in kind of opposite directions from each other:

1. We notice swearing much more if we’re out and about with our son. The words just really leap out of the background noise, and sometimes I see what people mean by the demise of civility!
2. We still swear a lot when we’re not around S. The other day I crashed into a chair at work, and while it didn’t particularly hurt, I was annoyed, and letting out a hearty, “Mother McFucker!” was really satisfying.

There’s definitely a bit of cognitive dissonance there, but a well-placed swear can be as satisfying as a good cry. Poor E nearly had a coronary from trying to watch Game 7 of the NBA Finals last night without swearing in front of S. And then this MORNING, oh my god, WHAT THE FUCK, WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT GOAL DIDN’T COUNT?!?!?

Ahem. Clearly we still have a ways to go. But hey, the swear jar goes into the college fund, so everybody wins! (Except for the U.S. in the World Cup, apparently. Argh! Now I’m worried about Algeria. Algeria!)

I’m sure by now, many of you have seen this article about parental leave in Sweden. Like many countries, Sweden has a generous amount of parental leave that can be split between the parents. The key in Sweden is that two of the months are reserved for the father. Use it or lose it!

The article left me both a bit envious and sad. Although part of me was ready to go back to work at 3 1/2 months, a little more time at home would have been nice for all of us. But what made me sad was that this is just another example of how traditionally feminine jobs don’t suddenly get respect because of more awareness or publicity. They get more respect when men start doing them. Look at Sweden — until two of the months were reserved for the father, few men took any of the leave available to them. They viewed it as a stigma. But with nearly all men in Sweden taking leave nowadays, they no longer view it as stigma for themselves — and by extension, they likely no longer view it as a stigma for women, either. This is true for everything from cooking to parental leave to stopping a tenure clock — it’s lazy/wasteful/frivolous until a man does it.

Sure, this is an example of social engineering. If you want an egalitarian society, and you think that society reflects the family structure, then to change society at some point you need to start changing the family. But it’s worth remembering that our current (and barbaric) model of parental leave in the U.S. is also social engineering. Just because it’s entrenched doesn’t mean it’s not social engineering.

Many of you know that my husband, E, is also a physicist. We’ve been married for 3 1/2 years, and living together for five, and we’ve always had a totally egalitarian partnership. It’s just always what came naturally to us. The housework has always been roughly evenly split, and I never referred to his contributions as “help”. It’s simply not “help” when it’s both of our jobs. Study after study shows that women still do the majority of housework — even if they work full-time — so I’m glad that we’re a counter-example. Now that we have a kid, it’s important to us to keep modeling that kind of relationship.

Of course, other things got slightly more complicated when we had a kid. I’m breastfeeding (7 1/2 months and counting!), and no matter how many diapers E had to change, the time he spent baby-wrangling was far less than the time I spent baby-wrangling. The term “baby-sitting” never, ever comes up — you don’t baby-sit your own kids — but I confess that if E is taking care of a meal (of solids), I think of that as helping me. Because of nursing, I feel like feedings are my job. I also view it as a favor to E if I change a diaper, so at least it goes both ways. But I definitely have had to make an effort to not view childcare duties as primarily my job, whereas I never had that problem with housework.

That’s just the difficulties I have at home in terms of framing our contributions to the household. Now that I’m back at work, people often ask me what my son is doing, or who’s taking care of him. No one ever asks that of E. Do they assume that I am still at home? Or do they think of daycare as something that allows me to work, not something that allows both of us to work?

How do you all split the housework and/or childcare duties in your homes? And do you find yourself referring to the man’s contribution as “help” or “baby-sitting”?

(This sprung from a discussion on FB, after H posted this article on professional women hiring housekeepers.)