Work-life balance and gender

Salon has an interesting interview with two successful network news women, Claire Shipman and Katty Kay, who wrote a book on how women can balance career and family and make the latter more of a priority, perhaps the same as the former. It is a subject of perpetual interest and one that often fires up people of varying points-of-view on women’s and men’s roles. The comments were even more interesting to me, and a few things stuck out.

(1) It is admittedly difficult to talk about how women can downgrade their efforts at promotion without sparking debate about whether women are denying themselves opportunity and making stereotypes about women’s role. Personally, I think work-life balance is something men as well as women are entitled to work towards or try to establish early on. One guy on the board says, rather harshly, “Meanwhile, we men STILL do not have any option in life other than WORK UNTIL YOU DIE, thanks largely to a static anti-male agenda supported by, you guessed it, WOMEN.” I think the first part is a fair critique, even if the last part isn’t.

(2) Someone on the messsage board brought up Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker article about young adults’ use of stimulants like Aderall and other amphetamines. She says: At the time I thought, “you know, I don’t want to LIVE in a society which requires people to take drugs just to get everything done.” Big ole’ word. Of all of the drugs in the world, the ones that make the least sense to me are intense stimulants like those found in Red Bull, Mountain Due, Aderall, etc.

(3) A lot of people on this chat say they wish they could entertain the prospect of working less but can’t because of the job market. We are a truly overworked country, and there is a great stigma around asking for time off, if everyone else in the office is willing to stay late, because then one appears lazy.