4 ms·

A really fascinating personal story. One thing that bothered me though: The author's wife quit her job to become a full-time mom. I would guess that the author

A really fascinating personal story. One thing that bothered me though: The author's wife quit her job to become a full-time mom. I would guess that the author was only able to have so much professional success because of this. Perhaps you can't get tenure/be really successful while also taking care of a child with disabilities. It just happens to be the case that the author didn't have to take care of a child with disabilities (his wife did), and so his professional career was unaffected.

barry-cotter 11y ago
This is the norm. It's not just that you can't have a successful career while taking care of a child with disabilities, you can't be a power couple with two high powered careers and a family without two nannies or massive support from grandparents. IIRC if you match childless single men and women by educational attainment and job experience the gender pay gap is about 3%. But most women downshift or exit their careers after having children and most men don't. Anyone with a really dedicated support staff or person is at a massive advantage when competing against those without. The only single people with support as dedicated as a competent spouse have butlers. Even corporate executives with personal assistants don't have that kind of always available, for all tasks help, not in the overwhelming majority of cases.
- xorcist 11y ago
  A "norm" needs to be geographically and culturally specified. Couples in other countries with working child care systems do not share this experience.
bbcbasic 11y ago
There are evenings, nights and weekends. The distant father-figure-bread-winner is a 20th century phenomenon that is rarer these days, at least in the western world, from what I am seeing.
danharaj 11y ago
It turns out, when you have a whole other human being doing full time unpaid labor that is completely essential to your well being, you can succeed professionally. I find the other comments full of praise tarnished by their elision of this crucial detail. This is the story of a family, not a man.
- barry-cotter 11y ago
  This is an example of partnership, division of labour, and increasing returns to expertise. This is a normal upper middle class marriage insofar as one partner has a successful career and the other provides support to that career. There are other ways of doing an upper middle class marriage. The ones that involve two high powered careers necessitate full time support staff, whether paid, two nannies, or extremely supportive family, usually grandparents. Very few people get to their thirties without realising that a marriage is a partnership and that having a family is a demanding project which requires a lot of work.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    My point was all the comments adulating the one man when there is literally another person putting all of her effort into making their lives possible. The author certainly spares no effort in praising his partner. But this woman is all but invisible outside of this comment thread. Society used to be legally structured around a system where people were paired on a gender system optimized for a nuclear family, where both individuals contribute their labor to their common good while one receives all of the autonomy, financial control, status, praise, and respect; the one who received all of this was always male. The only thing that has changed is that women are legally allowed to be the breadwinner. Enormous social and economic structures still pressure them into being the less valued member of the family unit. Domestic labor is still heavily undervalued, disrespected, and seen as a woman's sphere. The number of full time fathers is still extremely low, and people still judge family units with a full time father as less prosperous than one with a full time mother. When we descend by class and race down the social hierarchy, the picture becomes extremely complicated, of course. But I was just talking about Internet comments, you know?
cma 11y ago
Not a fair reading: >At first, she gave up a promising career in start-ups to care full-time for Bertrand Emphasis added on at first. While jt doesnt sound like she went back to that career, he then goes on to list a lot of achievements that were way beyond simply being a full time mom.
- sum_total 11y ago
  Most people seem to have missed the key piece of his strategy - he made his disabled child an integral piece of his tenure case. Sure, he did a lot of work both related to his child's disease and not, but if they denied his tenure at this point, it would have been like "denying tenure to a disabled child". And nobody wants to be on the record as having denied tenure to a disabled child. So, the true bottom line of this story is that he made a very shrewd political move (in the process compromising the privacy of his disabled child) in order to ensure tenure.
  - WA 11y ago
    I bet you don't have children :)
jakobegger 11y ago
Yes. I really wonder if it is possible to achieve tenure while taking care of your kids. When I was a PhD student, I asked everyone about this, but I could find no role model. Almost every male professor had a stay-at-home wife who cared for the kids, and female professors often had no kids. Even with my fellow PhD students who became parents, it was always the mothers who took extended maternity leave, and the fathers who advanced their careers. (I eventually gave up the PhD programme; as a self-employed software developer I now have the freedom to take as much time for my kids as I want, and I can take an equal part in caring for them.)
- MagerValp 11y ago
  It is here (Sweden), and I think the two most important factors are: 1. Paternity leave 2. Child care facilities Paternity leave is important to break the stereotype that mothers are the ones who have to sacrifice their careers to stay at home and care for the family. Widely available child care allow both parents to work as much as they need. Anecdotal evidence from the senior staff I know here at the University says that male professors don't have stay-at-home wives, and female professors have kids (with no noticeable difference compared to the rest of society).
mattmight 11y ago
Perhaps you didn't read the full reply before commenting: http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum Maybe you don't consider founding and running a 501(c)(3) non-profit like http://NGLY1.org/ http://NGLY1.org/ a career for her, but I do. And, more importantly, she does.
- fensipens 11y ago
  Would you consider (after killing what you've been working towards for the last n·10 years) founding and running a 501(c)(3) non-profit like http://NGLY1.org/ http://NGLY1.org/ a career for you? Because if you answer yes, you are full of it.

barry-cotter 11y ago

This is the norm. It's not just that you can't have a successful career while taking care of a child with disabilities, you can't be a power couple with two high powered careers and a family without two nannies or massive support from grandparents. IIRC if you match childless single men and women by educational attainment and job experience the gender pay gap is about 3%. But most women downshift or exit their careers after having children and most men don't. Anyone with a really dedicated support staff or person is at a massive advantage when competing against those without. The only single people with support as dedicated as a competent spouse have butlers. Even corporate executives with personal assistants don't have that kind of always available, for all tasks help, not in the overwhelming majority of cases.

xorcist 11y ago
A "norm" needs to be geographically and culturally specified. Couples in other countries with working child care systems do not share this experience.

bbcbasic 11y ago

There are evenings, nights and weekends. The distant father-figure-bread-winner is a 20th century phenomenon that is rarer these days, at least in the western world, from what I am seeing.

danharaj 11y ago

It turns out, when you have a whole other human being doing full time unpaid labor that is completely essential to your well being, you can succeed professionally. I find the other comments full of praise tarnished by their elision of this crucial detail. This is the story of a family, not a man.

barry-cotter 11y ago
This is an example of partnership, division of labour, and increasing returns to expertise. This is a normal upper middle class marriage insofar as one partner has a successful career and the other provides support to that career. There are other ways of doing an upper middle class marriage. The ones that involve two high powered careers necessitate full time support staff, whether paid, two nannies, or extremely supportive family, usually grandparents. Very few people get to their thirties without realising that a marriage is a partnership and that having a family is a demanding project which requires a lot of work.
- danharaj 11y ago
  My point was all the comments adulating the one man when there is literally another person putting all of her effort into making their lives possible. The author certainly spares no effort in praising his partner. But this woman is all but invisible outside of this comment thread. Society used to be legally structured around a system where people were paired on a gender system optimized for a nuclear family, where both individuals contribute their labor to their common good while one receives all of the autonomy, financial control, status, praise, and respect; the one who received all of this was always male. The only thing that has changed is that women are legally allowed to be the breadwinner. Enormous social and economic structures still pressure them into being the less valued member of the family unit. Domestic labor is still heavily undervalued, disrespected, and seen as a woman's sphere. The number of full time fathers is still extremely low, and people still judge family units with a full time father as less prosperous than one with a full time mother. When we descend by class and race down the social hierarchy, the picture becomes extremely complicated, of course. But I was just talking about Internet comments, you know?

cma 11y ago

Not a fair reading: >At first, she gave up a promising career in start-ups to care full-time for Bertrand Emphasis added on at first. While jt doesnt sound like she went back to that career, he then goes on to list a lot of achievements that were way beyond simply being a full time mom.

sum_total 11y ago
Most people seem to have missed the key piece of his strategy - he made his disabled child an integral piece of his tenure case. Sure, he did a lot of work both related to his child's disease and not, but if they denied his tenure at this point, it would have been like "denying tenure to a disabled child". And nobody wants to be on the record as having denied tenure to a disabled child. So, the true bottom line of this story is that he made a very shrewd political move (in the process compromising the privacy of his disabled child) in order to ensure tenure.
- WA 11y ago
  I bet you don't have children :)

jakobegger 11y ago

Yes. I really wonder if it is possible to achieve tenure while taking care of your kids. When I was a PhD student, I asked everyone about this, but I could find no role model. Almost every male professor had a stay-at-home wife who cared for the kids, and female professors often had no kids. Even with my fellow PhD students who became parents, it was always the mothers who took extended maternity leave, and the fathers who advanced their careers. (I eventually gave up the PhD programme; as a self-employed software developer I now have the freedom to take as much time for my kids as I want, and I can take an equal part in caring for them.)

MagerValp 11y ago
It is here (Sweden), and I think the two most important factors are: 1. Paternity leave 2. Child care facilities Paternity leave is important to break the stereotype that mothers are the ones who have to sacrifice their careers to stay at home and care for the family. Widely available child care allow both parents to work as much as they need. Anecdotal evidence from the senior staff I know here at the University says that male professors don't have stay-at-home wives, and female professors have kids (with no noticeable difference compared to the rest of society).

mattmight 11y ago

Perhaps you didn't read the full reply before commenting: http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum http://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/#addendum Maybe you don't consider founding and running a 501(c)(3) non-profit like http://NGLY1.org/ http://NGLY1.org/ a career for her, but I do. And, more importantly, she does.

fensipens 11y ago
Would you consider (after killing what you've been working towards for the last n·10 years) founding and running a 501(c)(3) non-profit like http://NGLY1.org/ http://NGLY1.org/ a career for you? Because if you answer yes, you are full of it.