As I
mentioned in a previous blog post, in the United States, people are often not
sympathetic to issues involving the challenges of parenting. At least in the red states where I’ve lived,
people reject the notion that “it takes a village” to raise a child. Instead, the attitude is that if one brings a
child into this world, one is on one’s own to raise that child. When this attitude is expressed, there is
usually a failure to account for the harm to the child when parents get no
support. Christian concerns about family
values and the vulnerability of children often fall on deaf ears in this
context.
And many
people are also unsympathetic to the notion that the juggling of paid work and
family responsibilities disproportionately fall on women in our society. Many people of both genders simply want to
ignore any inequality between men and women.
There is a tendency to want to view everyone as on equal footing: we’re
all the same. I disagree with that
attitude. It is equivalent to the tendency
to want to be colorblind to the extent it permits glossing over racial injustices
that continue in our society. Perhaps it
is easier to think we’re all getting the same opportunities and being judged
equitably than to acknowledge difficult problems without simple solutions.
Last year I
had an interesting experience with this tendency to want to gloss over issues
impacting women’s advancement in the professional world. I wrote an article touching upon this issue specifically
in the legal profession. Prior to
publication, I asked a dear friend of mine to review it to give me
feedback. She is a talented lawyer who
was a bit of a mentor of mine when I was in practice; she juggled a demanding
career while raising her kids, who are now young adults. I asked her to review the article because I
thought she would have some unique insight since she had faced the issues
described.
Her
reaction surprised and saddened me.
Though she agreed with the premise of the article, she urged me to
re-write the article from a completely different perspective to ignore the
gender impact of the issue. She
explained that as a working mom of nearly two decades, she knew first-hand that
people didn’t want to hear about such gender issues.
I was shocked
to hear this advice from this particular friend. She is a compassionate human being and a brilliant
professional. She is also a
feminist. But she was adamant that
raising the concern in gendered terms would not be well-received. She did not for a minute dispute the premise
of the article that women disproportionately bear family responsibilities,
which forces many to leave the legal profession if that is economically viable
for them. However, my friend knew the
hornet’s nest that would be stirred to challenge the status quo. She probably has a point.
For folks
who aren’t inherently concerned about family values or gender equality, I have
a third reason why you should care about the difficulty of women with families
to participate in paid employment: the
health of our nation’s economy.
The health
of our economy is dependent on productivity and growth. Women make up more than half of the adults in
our society. Over 90% of women will be
mothers at some point in their lives. If
the workplace is inhospitable to women with family responsibilities, then many
women will either not work in paid employment or they will work just
part-time. That is a significant loss of
productivity in our economy. Making the
workplace more hospitable to women can be a source of economic growth.
In support
of this third rationale for policies that empower women to more successfully
balance paid work and family responsibilities, I offer three articles of
relevance.
1 Corinthians 12:12
We were all baptized by one Spirit into one
body, whether Jew or Greek, or slave or free, and we all were given one Spirit
to drink.
No comments:
Post a Comment