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From: ed@mtxinu.UUCP (Ed Gould)
Newsgroups: net.women,net.politics,net.social
Subject: Re: Discrimination against women and statistics
Message-ID: <429@mtxinu.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 7-Jul-85 22:32:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: mtxinu.429
Posted: Sun Jul  7 22:32:20 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Jul-85 04:59:57 EDT
References: <482@ttidcc.UUCP> <8203@ucbvax.ARPA> 
Reply-To: ed@mtxinu.UUCP (Ed Gould)
Distribution: net
Organization: mt Xinu, Berkeley, CA
Lines: 55
Xref: watmath net.women:6337 net.politics:9865 net.social:810
Summary: 

In article <1035@ames.UUCP> barry@ames.UUCP (Kenn Barry) writes:
> [responding to Cheryl Stewart's critique of Will Martin's comments
> re his wife's economic benefits]
>
>	I think there are two issues in danger of being confused, here.
>Women *do* suffer discrimination against them in the job market, and
>are frequently underemployed as a result. This is patently unfair, and
>is a particular hardship on women who are raising a family alone. But,
>if a woman is in the fortunate position of not needing to work, and also
>feels no desire to work, what is wrong with that? Is it your position
>that such a woman must be a victim of brainwashing by our male-dominated
>society? Is it not possible for two people to be sanely happy together
>even though they choose to play contrasting roles in their relationship?
>Must the Puritan ethic of measuring everyone's worth by their material
>achievements become the standard for everyone?

The problem is that currently, most women who choose not to work do it
for the wrong reasons.  They choose not to work because they haven't been
brought up thinking that that's what they *should* do, rather that what
they should do is stay home, care for the family, and pursue hobbies.
This isn't *necessarily* wrong, but so far as I can tell, there are
some *very* large pressures on women to take this course.

If there weren't a societal predisposition for women to care for the home
and family - and if correspondingly there were an equal societal desire
for men to do the caring - then it would be easy to accept that a woman
made the choice freely.  As things stand now, it's very unlikely.

Let me illustrate a bit with a comment about a friend, who is now
in her early thirties, is trained as a carpenter, has a Bachelor's
degree from Radcliffe, and has a two year-old child.  Before having
the child, she worked full time, and made a reasonable amount of money -
a comparable amount to what her husband, a research neuro-biologist
doing post-doc work, made.  All was well, everybody was making money,
and everybody was happy.

At about the same time the child was born, or perhaps shortly before,
her husband gave up research (for a variety of reasons, one major one
was that to get a reasonable job in his field he would have had to move
away from where they were living) and went into (what else?) programming.
My friend stopped working shortly before the birth, and stayed off work
for a couple of months after - so far, so good.

When she was ready to return to work, she found it very hard to go back,
mostly because, as she realized, "his desire [to work] was much greater than"
hers.  It seems to me that this incident illustrates the problem very well.
She had trouble going back to work, not because she didn't like what she
had been doing, not because she hadn't made enough money, but because she
didn't have the career drive that he did.

-- 
Ed Gould                    mt Xinu, 2910 Seventh St., Berkeley, CA  94710  USA
{ucbvax,decvax}!mtxinu!ed   +1 415 644 0146

"A man of quality is not threatened by a woman of equality."