Go Over Here Now

I'd like to point y'all toward two very interesting comment-based discussions going on elsewhere on the internet: Feministe guest blogger Habladora takes on the work/family pressure cooker. At the same site Allison Martell takes on the pay gap. Dang, Feministe has some good guest bloggers this summer. Jill should take the bar exam more often!

Top Chef's Tom Colicchio On Women, Cuisine, and Social Justice

I sometimes think about cancelling cable to save money and brain cells. Unfortunately there are a few shows on cable that make this a really hard plan for me to implement, Battlestar Galactica, The Colbert Report, Project Runway, and Top Chef chief among them. As you may have heard by now (spoiler alert) Stephanie won Top Chef on Wednesday night, making her the first woman in four seasons to do so. Throughout the season, the female contestants never let us forget about the boys club that exists not just within the show's history but in restaurant culture generally. "It would be so great to have a woman win this season," they would say. "It would be so cool to have three women in the finals."

Tom Colicchio, one of the show's judges, blogs about the dearth of women in professional kitchens and why Stephanie's win is significant (skip to page four for the quoted bits):

It used to be for lack of opportunity, but I don’t think that still applies today. None of the great American chefs (or at least not the ones I respect) have a glass ceiling in their restaurants. Quite the opposite: We like to hire women because they work hard without any of the competitive, macho bulls**t you often see among their male counterparts. The women I’ve hired help each other, don’t jockey for position, and work until they drop. So if the opportunities for advancement that make up the early part of a top chef’s career are there, why aren’t women availing themselves of them?

Because the perception of opportunity, on the part of women themselves, hasn’t kept pace. Women are reluctant to enter the culinary world because they believe (and this is not unjustified) that a cooking career is incompatible with raising children, which leaves those of us who want to hire, promote, and mentor women with a slimmer field to choose from than we’d like. And to an extent, they're right: The bottom line is our society does not yet provide women in the workplace with the type of social supports, like high-quality subsidized child care or extended parental leave, that allows them to fully go for it, and the impact this has on the scope and depth of a career is profound. Right or wrong, men plunge into their careers without much thought about how they’ll navigate the work/family balance. They assume someone -- spouse, parent, paid caregiver -- will materialize to take care of it (and usually someone does.) This one assumption opens up an entire world of possibility to a young person in a way that can’t be overstated. Ask yourself how many female Ferran Adrias, Thomas Kellers, or Joel Robuchons have chosen a different path -- say, catering or opening a bakeshop -- because it seems more family friendly? These may be great career choices, but they aren’t the breeding grounds of culinary legend.

So yeah, some of this seems oversimplified to me. Surely it isn't the case that all women want babies and therefore they don't become chefs. And the whole "women play nicer than men" bit is naive. But the lack of social supports for parents, gendered expectations about who ought to be doing the nitty gritty of parenting, and the effect those factors have on career self-selection and career success sound pretty well grounded to me.

I haven't found that level of macroawareness on network yet. So the cable stays for now.

Mommy On The Clock

The UK paper The Guardian recently ran a piece about a trend among US-companies to allow new parents to bring their babies (up to crawling age) in to the office with them. The thought appears to be that it's cheaper than maternity leave. The article is delightfully toungue-in-cheek, with this lede setting the tone:

The United States and Australia are the only two countries in the industrialised world that don't have paid statutory maternity leave (there are exceptions in some US states). At least in Australia, though, your job is protected for a year; in America, even the leave protection only lasts for 12 weeks. It's an astonishingly backward state of affairs, like discovering that France doesn't have a postal service. A Harvard Study of 168 countries, measuring how different governments meet the needs of working families, found the US to be in the bottom five. But rather than do anything so tedious as campaign for reasonable terms, American lobbyists have instead thought more laterally, with a softly, softly, looky-after-baby approach: bring your baby to work with you. Until it can crawl, it can think of your workplace as liberty hall.

The contributing reporters bring their children to work with them and document their utter failure to accomplish anything they're being paid to do. And it understandable that it would be difficult to engage fully in a task while also being primarily responsible for the every need of a needy little being. But these are the darkly comical situations we find ourselves in here in a country that has an singularly bass-ackwards approach to parenthood and parental leave.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

It's all Go-Gos, all the time here at F.F.H.Q. Shiner and I leave at an unreasonably early hour tomorrow for a two-week vacation. I will be updating very little, if at all, until we return. But I've got it in my for one more substantive post before we leave the land of ice and snow for more hospitable climes. And more, er, cerveza.

Over the past week, as I've been delegating portions of my project tasks to my colleagues to handle in my absence and reminding others that if I have drafts out to them for review, they must speak their edits now or for two weeks hold their peace. Maybe it's because my coworkers are lawyers, and by definition a little Type A, but people could not believe that I would be gone for two weeks straight. Everybody thought it was great that I was doing it, seemed jealous, even, but most of them seemed unable imagine taking such a long vacation themselves. Some of them will spread their days out and take a few long weekends here and there, and others will just fail to max out their paid vacation this year.

Let's think about that for a second. Well-paid individuals, who as a matter of policy get between three and four weeks of paid personal vacation per year, and who could probably take more than that without anyone caring so long as they were meeting their billable hours for the year, think they cannot--not even with forethought and planning--miss ten consecutive days of work. The hell? What is the point of having all that vacation if you don't feel free to use it?

I have always thought of paid vacation days as sort of like civil rights. The "use 'em or lose 'em" principle: it's much easier for everyone if you don't rock the boat by claiming what you're entitled to, but there's no fun in that. And furthermore, you have a responsibility to exercise your rights (read: vacation) to keep the whole system from getting rusty, and to make sure your fellow citizens (read: coworkers) can continue to use theirs. Just like free speech is one of the bennies that theoretically comes with life in the US of A, your paid vacation is part of what you sign up for when you take your job. It's part of your compensation package, like a salary or 401(k) match. Not using those days is like gifting back part of your pay. Oh no, really, I have no need of this! I just couldn't possibly take it. Can you imagine someone doing that with part of their paycheck? No way! So what makes vacation so different?

I have one friend who thinks it's a function of egotism. He advised me early in my career: "Take a vacation. You're not that important." He thinks a refusal to take vacation to which you are nominally entitled is an act of person who wants to believe that without her personal expertise, the whole department will quickly go to hell. By leaving your vacation days on the table, you are refusing an opportunity to be proven wrong in that belief. Let the false sense of importance persist!

And although I think he's a bit harsh in blaming only the individual employee, I do think he's got a point. Though the atmosphere might suggest otherwise, a well-run company can handle periodic planned absences of more than a couple of days. My job might periodically feel like a tilt-a-whirl missing a couple of key bolts, in which I must hold on tightly at all times lest I be thrown in a mangled heap onto the midway, but ultimately it's just a job. My expertise is not fungible, exactly, but neither am I unique and special snowflake, whose day is filled with tasks no other mere mortal could conceive of accomplishing. My coworkers help pick up my slack, and I help pick up theirs. We all take our vacation, and we all come back ready to line up for the tilt-a-whirl again.

My dad, who travels a lot for work, can't stand the thought of using all of his vacation time in a given year for yet more travel. But he takes his days all the same. He catches up on laundry, takes long weekends with his grandson in the city, watches live broadcasts of major international track and fields events that require him to get up at absurd hours for days at a time. He savors the fact that he can wear his mangy flannels all day long and never has to even look at a pair of Dockers. Simple pleasures, simple freedoms.

Don't let lack of travel funds or energy dissuade you from taking your vacation this year. That time is yours. Use it to recharge yourself. Consider it your duty to your fellow citizens. Pretend you are French.

The Myth of the MRS

Hardhitting reportage from CNN.com on undergraduate women prioritizing "acheivement goals" over "relationship goals." Do I smell a smackdown with Lisa Belkin?

Changes in family economics likely play a role, too. Now that most families have dual incomes, Klosson says, "men may feel more freed up to prioritize as they did in this study [to prioritize relationships over career]. There is less pressure, because of a shift in their role definition, to put their careers first."

Note that this was a survey of undergraduates. I wonder what would happen to these men's priorities as they enter the workforce. I'm not willing to pin my hopes and dreams on this, but I do believe that work-life balance, family/parental leave, and related issues will not improve so long as they are seen as "women's issues," so seeing more and more young men valuing this sort of flexibility is heartening to me.

More on this article at Young and Broke.