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Javier E

Silicon Valley Is Growing Up, Giving Parents a Break - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Long hours in the office and the expectations of being connected at home are familiar to workers across industries, not just Silicon Valley. Fifty-six percent of parents in dual-income households across the wage spectrum say they find the work-family balance to be difficult and stressful. But tech takes the high-stress, high-stakes American work culture to the extreme.
  • “The tech industry’s love for scrappy, accessible founders adds to the pressure,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, the online real estate company. “You’re expected to lead by example, to roll up your sleeves, to know everything going on.”
  • “Being a tech founder is all-consuming; you can never really turn off,” said Clara Shih, founder and chief executive of Hearsay Social, who recently had her first child with her husband, Daniel Chao, also a tech founder and chief executive, of Halo Neuroscience. “You can’t skimp on your family, and you can’t skimp on your start-up, so you end up skimping on yourself.”
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  • One reason this has recently become an issue could be that Silicon Valley is aging. There are, of course, many established companies with older employees, but many people who work at the hot companies of the web era are now also becoming parents. And start-ups stay private for longer periods now, meaning employees work at them longer before cashing out.
  • Tech companies also employ a disproportionately small number of women — one-third of employees at many companies, and often less than one-fifth of technical employees. Over all, parenthood affects women’s careers more substantially than men’s, and women tend to be the ones who ask for family-friendly policies at work like paid leave or flex time.
  • One symbol of the cultural change in tech, fair or not, is the criticism of executives who seem to prioritize work over family. That happened to Marissa Mayer, chief executive of Yahoo, when she announced she would take only a very short leave after having twins.
Javier E

'Not all cultures are created equal' says Penn Law professor in op-ed | The Daily Penns... - 1 views

  • In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian on Thursday, Wax said Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior. 
  • "I don't shrink from the word, 'superior,'" she said, adding, “Everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify” these values. “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”
  • After earning a degree from Harvard Medical School, Wax switched course into law and spent eight years
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  • During her conversation with the DP, Wax emphasized that her view was not meant to imply the superiority of white people specifically. “Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” she said. “The irony is: bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.”
  • Wax has previously fielded criticism for a 2013 lecture she gave at Middlebury College, “Diverging Family Structure by Class and Race: Economic Hardship, Moral Deregulation or Something Else?” Her lecture pointed out the declining marriage rate among minorities and “indicated that family construction among blacks is on average characterized by higher divorce rates, higher rates of extra-marital fatherhood and multiple partner fertility,” according to a recap in the Middlebury student newspaper.
  • “Enduring injuries to human capital are now the most destructive legacy of racism,” Wax wrote in the WSJ article. “Evidence suggests that soft behavioral factors, including low educational attainment, poor socialization and work habits, paternal abandonment, family disarray, and non-marital childbearing, now loom larger than overt exclusion as barriers to racial equality.”
  • At Penn, Wax has previously drawn sharp rebukes from her colleagues for taking a stance against same-sex marriage. According to a DP article from June 2006, Wax expressed support for “Ten Principles On Marriage and the Public Good,” a report that, among other things, called for marriage to be defined as solely between a man and a woman.
  • In the previous year, she penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, headlined “Some Truths About Black Disadvantage,” which spawned criticism from the Black Law Students Association at the time.
  • Some members of the audience greeted Wax with signs proclaiming “racist” and, after the lecture, Margaret Nelson, a Middlebury sociology professor, told the student paper that “students of color were being attacked and felt attacked.”
  • Wax knows her beliefs are not typically shared with students at elite, Ivy League universities, whom she told the DP can be "totally clueless, out of touch and oblivious."
Javier E

Male Labor Force Participation Rate Drop Is About Masculine Identity | National Review - 0 views

  • some economists think identity plays a starring role in the economy. “Some of the decline in work among young men is a mismatch between aspirations and identity,” said Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University. “Taking a job as a health technician has the connotation as a feminized job. The growth has been in jobs that have been considered women’s jobs — education, health, government.” The economy is not simply leaving men behind. It is leaving manliness behind.
  • The problem is not working women, the problem is genderphobia, the half-century growth of the pervasive ideology that acknowledging the basic realities of gender and gender difference is somehow a crime against women
  • Here’s what humanity understood for thousands of year that we’ve forgotten or trashed: If you want good men, you need to admire, idealize, and reward masculine goodness.
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  • for most of human history, men worked in really nasty jobs that damaged their health for three reasons: to support themselves, to support their families, and because that was what manliness required.
  • we have simply failed to replenish what we inherited from the Greatest Generation of these sources of identity for the Americans who cannot pat themselves on the back because they’ve made it to Harvard
  • : religion, patriotism, community, and yes, pro-social masculinity.
  • For most of humanity’s history, masculinity was something achieved, not given, and it pointed men in directions that their society defined as pro-social
  • Above all, in modern times, to work and marriage. The connections between work, marriage, fatherhood, and manhood unleashed enormous social energy
  • Being a husband and a father was a socially and sexually reinforced masculine identity. It wasn’t just being a parent or a caretaker
  • A good husband and father worked. The guy who didn’t was not just a deadbeat, not just a social menace, but a failure as a man.
  • The redefinition of masculinity into personhood has not produced a generation of men who act like women. The deep sources of motivation are not the same for both genders.
  • Today we’ve defined men as the enemy unless they pretend to conform to the idea that gender doesn’t matter.
  • Adult men are now retreating to the world of video games where their aggressive impulses are valorized, not despised — without risk and without real reward.
  • If the future of work isn’t quite biased against men, it certainly seemed biased against the traditional idea of manliness. Construction and manufacturing, two male-dominated industries, are down 3 million jobs since 2008. Most of those jobs are dead, forever.
  • Meanwhile, the only occupations expected to add more than 100,000 jobs in the next decade are personal care aides, home health aides, medical secretaries, and marketing specialists, all of which are currently majority female.
  • What are these young men doing?
  • “The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one for one with leisure time. Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games.” And, so far, they like it pretty well this way: “Happiness surveys actually indicate that they [are] quite content compared to their peers,”
  • this situation is largely voluntary: Not only are these men not looking for work, “only a minority report that they’ve left the labor force because they cannot find a job.”
  • “Ever-greater numbers of working-age men simply have dropped out — some for a while and some forever — from the competition for jobs. These men have established a new and alternative lifestyle to the age-old male quest for a paying job.”
  • Almost 40 percent of all Americans without work are now male.
  • Between 1948 and 2015, the proportion of women between 25 and 64 in the workforce doubled from 34 percent to 70 percent, masking the continuing retreat of men from work.
  • By the late 1990s, women’s workforce participation stopped rising. “Only then did the overall work rate for U.S. adults begin to register a decline,” he writes. “For two full generations, the upsurge of employment for women disguised the steady decline in work for men.”
  • the number of working-age men without work is still almost 10 million, or about 10 percent of the working-age male population.
  • Between 1965 and 2015, the share of working-age men who are jobless more than doubled, from 10 percent to 22 percent. Among “prime age” men, the percentage without jobs shot from 6 percent to nearly 16 percent
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: The Moment of Truth For Brexit and Trump - 0 views

  • her speech at the U.N. rang completely true to me; the generational injustice is massive. There is no evidence that she is being coerced into this. In fact, her autism-related capacity to focus obsessively on what is in front of her nose is better than the denial, forgetting, and apathy of the rest of us
  • there is suffering behind anyone truly, implacably dedicated to changing the world. And the suffering she is trying to halt — of future generations of humans, and of animals and plants over which we humans have dominion — is on a different scale entirely.
  • rather than criticize a teenager for leading this fight, or her family for supporting her, we might do well to ask ourselves why those far older than she have done so little for so long. And seem to suffer nothing.
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  • The latest CDC data show a 69 percent rate of births to unmarried mothers among African-Americans, including mothers who live with their children’s father. The equivalent data for other groups are 52 percent for Hispanics, 28 percent for whites, and 12 percent for Asian-Americans.
  • mes where their unmarried parents cohabit, based on the Census and the American Community Survey: 65 percent for African-Americans; 41 percent for Hispanics; 24 percent for whites; 15 percent for Asian-American kids.
  • t this pattern of family structure gives black kids an objective disadvantage in life
  • The social science is unanimous: “Children who grow up with only one of their biological parents (nearly always the mother) are disadvantaged across a broad array of outcomes … they are twice as likely to drop out of high school, 2.5 times as likely to become teen mothers, and 1.4 times as likely to be idle — out of school and out of work — as children who grow up with both parents.”
  • black fathers who live in the same house as their kids tend to be more dedicated than fathers from other racial groups.
  • And a key statistic in this study is that 24 percent of black fathers live apart from their kids, compared to 18 percent for Hispanics and 8 percent for whites.
Javier E

Opinion | Can Dads Have It All? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In the discourse of the upper-upper, don’t-call-us-rich middle class, an old stereotype of fatherhood — the dim, affable, useless-for-housework Pop — has lately been supplemented by a new one: The credit-hogging, pleased-with-himself Good Dad, who does just enough housework to pretend that he’s an equal partner
  • when you add up housework, paid work and child care, married fathers today are doing slightly more work than married mothers.
  • in one data set the male-female work gap has actually expanded slightly since the 1960s, from 1.5 to four hours.
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  • a more optimistic reading might be that the current division is actually a reasonable balance. Maybe it’s fair for men to work slightly longer hours overall because work outside the home really is less grueling (and certainly less so than pregnancy and childbirth). At the same time, maybe women’s longer home-hours reflect genuine female preferences, a widespread maternal desire for part-time work, and not just the dead hand of patriarchy.
  • The optimists, though, have to reckon with the fact that everyone is working longer hours, notwithstanding increased wealth and technological convenience, and the presumably related fact that parents everywhere seem harassed and exhausted, while marriage and childbearing both are falling out of fashion.
  • the sexes have fallen into two traps together. One is what I’ve called “the one-income trap” — the way that dual-earner couples establish a norm that forces everybody to work harder to keep up, leaving couples that might prefer a single breadwinner stressed or far behind.
  • The other trap is one of rising child-watching expectations, reflected in the fact that the overall parental time spent on child care has nearly doubled since the 1960s
  • reflects anxieties specific to our era — the fear of letting kids play together out of sight, the fear of giving them unsupervised hours, the fear that some well-meaning busybody will report you to child services
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