Quick hit: even in academia, dads don’t do diapers

To help women in academia advance, elite universities should consider scrapping their generous paternity policies. That is the counterintuitive conclusion of a research paper published in the January issue of the Journal of Social, Evolutionary & Cultural Psychology.

The writers, Steven Rhoads of the University of Virginia and his son, Christopher Rhoads, of the University of Connecticut, studied a sample of 181 married, heterosexual, tenure-track professors all of whom had children under two and taught at schools with parental-leave policies. While 69 percent of the women in the sample took post-birth parental leave, only 12 percent of the men took advantage of the available leave—even though it was paid. They also learned that the male professors who did so performed significantly less child care relative to their spouses. Worse yet, they report that male tenure-track professors may be abusing paternity leave by using the time to complete research or publish papers, an activity that enhances their careers while putting their female colleagues at a disadvantage. One female participant quoted in the study put it this way: “If women and men are both granted parental leaves and women recover/nurse/do primary care and men do some care and finish articles, there’s a problem.

[...]

Not quite. As the authors of the paper state: “Most of the academics in our study said they believe that husbands and wives should share equally, but almost none did so.” To be precise, only three men out of 109 reported that they performed half the child-care work.

[businessweek]

What I’ve been reading – burka ban, budget 2011, Ivory Coast horrors, and US revisionist history

Ok, yes, I possibly have been on the Interbets all week. Here’s some of what’s been happening:

• It’s quite unbelievable, still, that France passed the “Ban on the Burka” law last week, but it did. Needless to add, there was outrage. The irony of telling women that they’re not allowed to wear what a patriarchal culture tells them to wear is not lost on Sarkozy, I’m sure, even if he is brainless. You cannot beat oppression with oppression. (Though we shouldn’t fool ourselves that Sarkozy et al were thinking of the women at all here. No, this is thinly veiled – pun intended - Islamophobia at its best.) And as if it’s not offensive enough as it is, the Guardian reported that refusing to comply with the ban will result in a fine or a condition to have lessons in “French citizenship”.  Arrange the following words in a sentence: off, fuck. Within hours of the ban coming into force, women were being arrested for continuing to wear the veil. Well, you would wouldn’t you! There are several excellent blog posts around the Interweb which discuss this issue in much more detail than I do here: thefword, delilah-mj, msmagazine, and lattelabour for starters.

• Budget 2011 leaves women out in the cold (fawcettsociety). The 2011 budget spells trouble for women in Britain. There’s been talk for a some time now of how the vast array of cuts introduced by the coalition government will affect women, and the picture is now becomnig clearer. First, a piece from the Guardian reveals that job losses have affected women the most and, second, a report produced in partnership with the Fawcett Society (‘The Impact on Women of the Budget 2011’) highlights the following issues. It is not looking good.

- The current economic strategy looks set to undermine gender equality in the labour market: if current trends continue, more women than men in the UK will be unemployed, for the first time since records began.
– The bonfire of regulations will remove the protections that women and men with caring responsibilities need in order to be able to work.
– The increase in the Personal Tax Allowance threshold will not touch the most vulnerable, and among those who will benefit, men will gain £140 million more than women.
– Without action to tackle entrenched gender inequality within the apprenticeship sector, where women earn on average 21 per cent less than men,  the Government’s flagship expansion in apprenticeships and training opportunities will not improve the employment opportunities young women face and do nothing for older women.
– The businesses set to benefit most from new tax breaks and other incentives are typically owned and invested in by men while schemes to support women in business are scrapped.

• The Ivory Coast standoff ends, but the nightmare for women continues (msmagazine). Most mornings when I wake up, I’m inclined to be rather discontent with my lot for a few minutes before I come to (I’m tired, it’s cold, I have too much to do; that sort of thing). Reading about the women in the Ivory Coast reminds me that I don’t even know I’m born. Though the conflict in the Ivory Coast has come to an end now, women and girls there are still being persecuted (kidnapped, beaten up and raped) daily. They’ve been through all of this before in 2004 and they’re going through it all again. And we don’t know the half of it.

Pender [a gender-based violence Technical Advisor for IRC] conveyed reports from women of gang rapes, rapes of entire families and sexual slavery, as women and girls are “taken as wives” for weeks at a time. “These women have experienced things that we cannot even imagine–and many for the second time,” said Pender. The collective memory of rape and violence from the last Ivorian war, in 2004, is still fresh. In fact, the recollection of “what happened last time,” and the threat of new violence has driven many girls and women to flee.

• Finally, Americans seem to [want to] forget slavery (prospect). When a research centre asked why the American Civil War took place, a frightening number of respondents answered that they thought it was about the rights of states. The reason for the war is disputed, of course, but even I (a European)  know that slavery was as central a reason as any other.

That so many young Americans believe a revisionist account of the Civil War is, if anything, another sign of our collective refusal to deal with our difficult past. Slaves built the White House and fueled Wall Street, but we want nothing more than to forget slavery and the central role it played in our nation’s history.

Couple this finding with the recent revisionist adaption of Huckleberry Finn (to remove the n-word) and one wonders if America wants to forget all about its sordid past altogether. I hope not.

Daily Mail says mothers should stay at home

Yesterday saw yet more “women should know their place” propaganda from the Daily Mail. The Mail reported from a recent meta-analysis that children suffer when mothers return to work in the year after giving birth:

Youngsters are less likely to succeed at school if their mothers return to work within a year of their birth, according to a major study. Children of mothers who resume work during their first year of life end up faring worse in formal exams and show signs of being more disruptive. The child’s success was particularly affected if the mother’s work was full-time, the study spanning five decades found.

Unsurprisingly, the Mail has taken some of the the findings from this meta-analysis and construed them for its own ends. It neglects to point out, for example, that issues around socio-economic status and family structure are equally important.

This message from the Mail resonates with John Bowlby’s thesis in the the 1940s when he conducted research on child development and “found” that mothers should stay at home for their children’s benefit. It transpired that Bowlby’s research was part of a wider government campaign to force women back into the home after WWII so that men returning from the war could regain employment. There is every reason to believe now that that the Daily Mail has the same agenda. Indeed, this agenda may be an indication of the current government plans in the coming years. It is now believed that women will suffer most from the financial cuts which were recently announced, and will be most likely to lose their jobs, so it is all too plausible that the government is planning to force women back into the home under the pretence of “child welfare” in order to alleviate pressure on the economy. Such an agenda would never be explicit, of course, but I don’t have any doubts that Cameron is devious enough to exact it. We will have to wait and see.

In brief: HA! 95% of US adults have sex before marriage

This is music to my ears. See, ever since George Bush and Sarah Palin would not shut their vile mouths about abstinence-only education, I wanted ALL the world to have sex ALL the time with everyone. Or, at least, I wanted everyone in America at it! And it seems I’ve had my wish.

According to a Gallup poll, 38% of people in the U.S. think that pre-marital sex is morally wrong but 95% of people in the U.S. have sex before getting married anyway (if they ever get married, that is). NINETY. FIVE. PERCENT. That’s huge. That is, indeed, just about everyone. They’re all at it! Nice one!

And listen to this: even among people who chose to abstain until at least 20, 81% of them still did the deed by the time they were 44. Surprising? In 2010, probably not. But apparently, these trends have been prevalent since the 1950s. Excellent!

I had a latte with an extra shot the day I read about these polls by way of celebration (well it was 10am). That’s how damned happy I was. Abstinence-only my behind!

Still victim blaming

I actually had an argument about this issue elsewhere on the web some weeks ago. It was all over the blogsosphere that the Church of Scientology (yeah, that’s not a terrifying crowd at all!) is forcing women to have abortions, sometimes late on in pregnancy. Now, my first thought about this was that Scientologists are anti-abortion. As it happens, they are. On the surface. And let’s face it, them Scientologists aren’t all about you digging deeper now are they? But someone did.

Jezebel, a mainly feminist online magazine, reports that members of the Church of Scientology, or more precisely members of the religious order Sea Organization (the management wing of the church, it seems), are claiming they were coerced and pressured into having unwanted abortions.

More than a dozen women have come out against Sea Org, reports the St. Petersburg Times. They say the organization began pressuring them (or women they knew) to have abortions from the moment they got wind of the pregnancy. Many of the members were young, relatively vulnerable women, who had known no life outside the church. Instead of being presented with their options, these teens were made to feel as though they didn’t have a choice. Pregnant women were shunned by other members, called “degraded beings,” and criticized for their unethical and selfish decision. Claire Headley, a former member who had been in the church since age four and a member of Sea Org since 16, says she had two abortions while working within the organization, both of which she regrets. Headley, now 31, has filed a federal lawsuit against the church. She will go to court in January.

(Now, before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy and contradiction for being one minute pro-abortion and the next minute condemning it, I note here again that it’s all about the choice. HER choice.) Apparently, in the 1980s and 1990s, members of the church were allowed to have children but since then the church has changed its rules. The new policy did not specifically talk about abortions, but noted that any church members wishing to start a family should be immediately expelled from the program. Yeah, really! Children, you see, were forbidden within the organisation. The only children permitted were the ones recruited, who were, notably, often encouraged (coerced? bullied?) to sign their billion-year contract at ages as young as 12.

Does all of this strike anyone as just completely f-ed up? Good!

But anyway, the point: in the discussion I got into elsewhere, I was informed that these women were lying, that it never happened, that the church would never do that, that these accusations were fabricated because of someone else’s agenda. When I asked who else’s agenda that might be, the response was vague at best. The implication of the doubter’s argument? These whores are just making it up to get their hands on some cash.

And this is what women and girls of any age have to endure whenever they try to bring to light that their boyfriend hit them, their boss groped them, their step-father raped them: she’s a whore who’s just making it up because she wants attention, money, revenge, or is promoting someone else’s agenda. Or, at best, if it did happen, she brought it on herself. In any case, it’s more than likely not true. This is our first call and there is seldom an acceptance that what she is saying is true and that she is saying it because what happened to her is wrong and unacceptable and she needs people to know about it for whatever reason. Even people who think they know better still victim-blame, and we attribute what happens to women to their own behaviours and not the behaviours of those who do it to them (she shouldn’t have been drunk, she shouldn’t have been walking alone, she shouldn’t have talked to him for so long at the bar). And every single one of those reactions makes it that little bit harder for a woman to come out and tell someone what happened to them because they fear the ridicule and the blaming. Call me naive, but I just cannot believe that we still live in a world where it’s more acceptable to victim-blame women, and question their motivations, than it is to try to help them.

The patriarchy has never been so alive and well.