Awwyeah, I'm about to post a feminist screed on DailyKos. I am SO READY.
Today on the front page, we see an article about Rudy Giuliani not knowing the price of bread and milk. This is a Bad Thing(TM) for a presidential candidate, because it means that you, Mr. Richie Rich elite politician, do not have a clue about what a regular Joe (and Jane) have to earn to support their family. It means your housekeeper probably buys the milk, or perhaps you have it delivered in using low-paid immigrant labor.
The outrage of the day is this. In that thread, some posters are justifying Rudy's ignorance because he's a man, to wit:
Rudy did no worse than most men would if that question was sprung on them.
How many guys do you think are going to know the exact price of a gallon of milk? Heck, I don't. My guess would have been about $2.00.
Christ on a pony that pushes my buttons.
And you know why. Because I have girl buttons, and I also have a Ph.D. and a highly demanding, full time job, and yet I have to know that detail. I have to be competent in the home sphere and the work sphere simultaneously. I don't ever get a free pass on keeping a household budget, because I'm a woman, and I don't get a free pass at my job because of it either.
But apparently men get a free pass.
I work at a University. (Some) universities are the most conscientious of employers when it comes to trying to provide equal advantages to male and female employees at the same rank. I am endlessly surveyed by my employer (which has just received a federal grant to help advance the prospects of women in scientific and technical fields) and the funding agencies who support my research, about my work environment and how it supports me, as a woman.
I find it hard to answer these surveys. I worked hard, I got a Ph.D. and then a job. I love my job and I work hard every day (when I'm not posting lunchtime screeds on DailyKos). And yet I have never had children, unlike most women my age, and I didn't stay married.
The NIH wonders in their wide-eyed surveys of women like me why so many women are "in the pipeline" as graduate students and postdocs and then why their participation falls off in more advanced positions. Part of it, as I'm sure the Mommy Wars people would tell you, is "voluntary". Part of it is that we tend to marry other academics thus getting ourselves into two-career binds like the one that was partially responsible for ending my marriage, and many women surrender at that point.
But part of it is this. Men so often get a free pass on the details.* Women, always and ever, are required to know the price of milk. And so it's like having a second management job that you wake up to in the morning and come home to after you do the first job, the one that you really love or that you maybe just need to take to pay for the mortgage and the food. Which you have to know the cost of. Not everyone can sustain two management jobs simultaneously.
This doesn't just end careers and cause screaming fits for academic women. I hear this same complaint from my friends who work as office managers or real estate agents or engineers any other thing where they have to be organized and on top of a lot of details. We don't get a respite at night. The second job is always there.
Right now I do my job and am 100% responsible for my domestic sphere, which is small, just me and the cats. There is little incentive for me to enlarge my domestic sphere with a husband or children because that is likely** to increase my daily workload rather than making it easier.
And even single and childless, I am still at a subtle disadvantage among the partnered: those men in my department who don't at least have a working wife rushing, harried, home at the end of the day to buy their milk and pick up the kids at day care, are generally supported fully by a smiling helpmeet who is free to take the cat to the vet and the car to the shop and to generally relieve the day-to-day burdens that one must think about. No one will stay home all day and prepare my house to host a department party; this fact alone may someday render me unfit to be a department chair.
I will always have this subtle disadvantage, for I can not take a wife.
They don't ask us about that one on the surveys.
*Yes, I know, I'm tarring YOU with a wide brush, and YOU are not like that. I wasn't talking to YOU.
**Based on anecdotal observation of my peers, although I am quite sure that there are scientifically valid studies which back up the unfair loading of domestic sphere management onto even full-time employed women.