It does appear that the female gender is outnumbering the male when it comes to more advanced degrees. However, as has been pointed out by several people, the number of women that have taken those degrees and advanced them into higher ranking positions still continues to lag behind men. There are a number of potential reasons that this occurs.
The corporate business, law firms, medical practices, etc. are still run by misogynistic boards and senior fellows that will not promote women. Hmmm maybe, probably true in some circumstances.
Many women, forgoe their careers to start families and stay at home with their children. I believe that this is greater influence on why there aren’t more women at higher positions considering the greater number of female graduates, just based upon my friends and my own spouse.
I don’t even think that many of them need to entirely forgo their careers to have an effect, because their careers suffer when they have kids whether they quit or not. One person has to pick up the kid from daycare if they’re sick, take them to appointments, take time off for maternity leave, take breaks at the breast pump, and avoid working 80 hour weeks, and most of the time, it’s the woman.
Even if a woman doesn’t quit completely, it’s likely that the larger burden of childcare is going to fall to her, and that will affect her ability to move her career forward.
Plus there is a simple biological issue; most women have to have kids before 35 definatly before 40. Men don’t. A man can spent the years of drugery that are required and still have a family after he is established. Even with the best maternity leave packages in the world; in highly competative corporate and professional fields being gone six days can see you miss out; never mind 6 months; and thus harm your career.
Plus when you are younger you often have to do a lot of legwork; it is not easy to have to suddenly go to a conferance or an arbitration in London or NYC when you have small children; and women usually do not have as good child care arrangements as their male collegeus, almost all of the women’s partners work; something not true with men.
code_grey, enough of the ‘libtard’ business. It’s either an insult or trolling, and I can’t even decide which. Either way, knock it off. It’s fine to criticize liberal policies if you wish, but stop the name-calling.
I disagree. They cared less then, they care less now. Women tend to have different priorities than men, nor unlike men are they likely to be pressured by their spouse or by society into sacrificing everything else in their life to reach the highest job title and highest salary. Women worry about men leaving them for a younger woman, not for one who makes more money.
What choice did they have? Women can be awfully masochistic, but putting all their self-worth into a career outside the home when this has not been an option for most of them throughout history (and continues to be the case in some countries) seems awfully misguided.
Why would they? It’s not the women who are behaving in an unbalanced way here; it’s the men. Avoiding turning your life into a one dimensional struggle for the very highest salary and position is healthy. Having priorities besides your career is a more balanced approach to life, and so are typically female career concerns like “is it likely to be horribly unpleasant or get me killed?”.
Your assumption that Male Oppression is somehow involved is based on what I consider a questionable idea; that what women are typically doing career-wise is a mistake.
I think 2 may influence 1. In other words, the fact that women may be more likely to take maternity/family leave causes boards to implement a (bit misogynistic) policy of not promoting women “just in case the new CEO takes 9 months off because suddenly her biological clock went off” or whatever.
Don’t be too sure, at least when it comes to lawyers in private practice.
Senior lawyers at the “top table” in a law firm gain a lot of profit from upper middle ranked lawyers but upper middle ranked lawyers are often ambitious. However, right at the moment when most upper middle ranked male lawyers would begin making demands that they be given a seat at the “top table”, many women want to scale it back and are happy to be “parked”.
I’ve never heard it admitted but I think I have seen examples of senior lawyers who promote women, to the exclusion of men, for just this reason.
I think this is particularly interesting- it’s not a matter of lack of ambition, IMO.
What seems to happen is this: Women who become attorneys are not generally un-ambitious, passive, submissive or indecisive. At about that “upper middle” level , which is probably 5-8 years out of law school, they get put in a position where they have to choose between having relationships and/or children, or continuing to work like a dog and sacrificing all that stuff for their job.
Most of these women recognize that, and make the choice to sacrifice the job instead of the personal stuff. There is a LOT of dissatisfaction among woman lawyers, especially the younger ones, and it’s primarily due to the male oriented culture, and the expectations that they’re to act like men with regard to their significant others and families vs. their jobs.
(my wife’s a non-practicing attorney; she quit outright, and of lawyers of her acquaintance, something like 20% have quit to do something else besides law, and the discussions always come back to sexism, misogyny, and having to choose between work & family/relationships).
If you are a lawyer at a hard core litgation set or a corporate firm; you work long and crazy hours, and the pressure is immense. You literally have to do a job which would take 3 or 4 9 to fivers.
Plus the competition is intense; to get connections, to make clients and get involved in the big cases and transactions, because that is how you are going to advance. Thhese major cases and transactions will often take up every waking hour. And usually you don’t have one case at a time; you are handling several.
So in short its not a “anti woman” enviroment it is anti everyone and the stresses are placed equally on all people. Women I suppose find it harder to adjust. You can fall behind if you take a two week vacation; I cannot imagine what even a 6 month maternity leave would do.
Believe me, I know. My wife was a civil litigator for many years, and one of her friends was one of the lead attorneys on the Texas Rangers sale last year, so I’m pretty familiar with the demands of the legal profession.
Thing is, most women will perceive a profession that is anti-pregnancy or anti-family to that degree to be explicitly anti-woman, because those are their traditional roles, while the man’s traditional role is to work.
I also think men get wrapped up in the macho bullshit that comes with working crazy hours under high pressure, etc… and most women think it’s patently retarded.
Really, why shouldn’t men also have the opportunity to raise families in such workplaces? I should think reform of the law firm atmosphere for all employees, so both men and women could have the opportunity to build healthy non-work lives, would be good for all of us. I recall the big shots in my old law firm, men and women, all having screwed up personal and family lives because of the amount of time spent working.
Well, it kind of is anti-women in that at least men with a stay at home spouse don’t really have to take time off work. For a woman, between doctor’s appointments and physically taking time off to have a baby, even a pretty bare-bones six weeks is a long time (depending on how long it takes her to recover). Add in breast pumping breaks and I can see women seeing it as explicitly anti-woman just because of biology. Even if their husband is a SAHD, they still have to take time off where a man wouldn’t.
They generally won’t take it. Either because they really buy into the work-work-work ideal of masculinity, or are afraid that their wife will leave them for a man that does.
That all rests on the assumption that taking time off work for your family is bad.
I agree. Both that women feel that way, and that they are right.
Law (and professional services/consulting) firms could easily get a better life/work balance by reducing the number of billable hours that are required.
Mid-range law firms require about 2000 hours per person to be billed to the client, independent of any overhead or other non-billable stuff like doctor’s appointments, snow days, etc… Some firms require significantly more than that. I’m sure the big 4 accounting & consulting firms and the firms in the next tier down are much the same.
If they required 1600 hours a year billable, then the employees wouldn’t be nearly so harried; that’s a little more than 6 billable hours a day, every work day, plus a 2 week vacation.
How many of us actually do more real work than 6 straight hours per day? I don’t mean how long you stay at work, I mean how long you stay minus time taking a crap, time looking at CNN, time talking to your cubemates, getting cups of coffee, reading administrative non-project emails about potluck lunches, etc…?
The thing is work “work-life balance” and “taking time off” are good ideas and in an ideal world would be followed and we all wpuld be better for it.
But lets say you have a client; a corporate client whose bank accounts are going to be forzen tommorrow morning by the taxman because of a new tax assessment. Or a client whose ship is off a port suffering demmurage charges because the port authroity will not clear his ship? Now imagine you have multiple cases like this a week in addition to regular run of the mill stuff. You need a stay tommorrow morning,you are going to sit late at night preparing the case, work life balance be damned. You are going to be on the phonw with the harbour master till the wee hours trying to get a berth allowed; your family can wait.
I can assure you if it was up to lawyers we would work less hours; 100 hour weeks are frigtening enough in theory; they are murderous in practice.
It’s not just that: if you are looking to promote someone, who are you going to promote: the ones where the clients are always happy because their needs always, always, always come first, or the one who has a good “work/life balance”. It’s the prisoner’s dilemma in action: no one can afford to be the one who works the least, so everyone has to work more hours than they ever would have chosen otherwise.
This came up in the alimony thread a month or two ago. There are professions out there where a stay-at-home spouse is a tremendous professional advantage even if you don’t have kids: 100 hours weeks are hell for everyone, but they are a lot easier if everything else in your life–chores, errands, laundry, food, bills–simply happens seamlessly. You can’t hire that kind of service. Not only is a woman less likely to find a spouse who wants to stay at home, there’s a pretty serious social stigma against it: when a woman has a stay at home husband, people think “doormat supporting a deadbeat”: the same does not attach to a man.
That’s why I’m not a lawyer. Nothing infuriates me more than unplanned for things by other people, which is for the most part, what you describe there.
I can’t help but think the old saw that “at the end of their life, nobody ever wished they’d worked more.” is probably more true than most people are willing to admit.
I can make a comfortable living on 40 hrs a week, so I see no reason to work more hours, even if I get more money out of the deal. At least this way I get to enjoy the money I have.
