The XX Factor: What women really think.

Sounds Familiar Even to the Nonlawyer

I realize this is a problem most relevant to those enslaved to billable hours. But it is ringing my bell, too.
Remember, from nearly a decade ago, the name Joyce Purnick. She is the New York Times metro editor who caused an uproar by saying that female reporters with kids didn't perform nearly as well as the childless. Actually, that's not what she said. What she actually said was, that she didnt think she could have risen that far if she'd had a family. She was candid and wistful, about being 52 and childless. Still, that wasn't enough to keep the mothers from coming down on her head. Now, I didn't have kids at the time and didn't work at a newspaper, but even then this struck me as perfectly logical. Once I did start working at a a newspaper, and then had kids, it struck me as undeniably true. Newspapers don't have billable hours, but they run on a clock. What matters is not the pointless Japanese concept of face time but actual availability. News breaks at all hours (and most often later in the day). The more time you have to report, the better your story. If I were an editor looking at a big, complicated, breaking story, I would think twice before assigning it to someone who had to worry about relieving their nanny at 6. I imagine this is true if you're a manager at a graphic design firm facing a deadline, a surgeon, a salesman, all manner of professions that don't begin and end at a fixed time.

What's interesting to me about Susan Pinker is that she loves Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir and yet has come back around to some modified version of biology is, in fact, destiny. She has not had some conservative conversion or disowned feminism, she has just arrived at what feels like the obvious. Pinker is a child psychologist, and her starting point is all the boys she saw in her practice who were obsessive, anti-social, mildly autistic. Then, 20 years later, she began to see these same boys showing up in the newspaper as successful entrepreuneurs and writers and lawyers. It turned out that these same traits that seemed to doom them in youth turned out to be helpful later on, by making them more prone to risktaking and singular focus. She then compared them with girls who'd started out with all the best grades, the best skills, the most promise. This pairing fascinates me because it happens to mimic exactly my household constellation. But also because it's a very clever way to structure the argument. By interviewing groups of such people, she finds that women, faced with the same opportunities and more, still make very different choices than men do. That all the years of gender-equity legislation haven't led to equal results. That men succeed at the extremes, both high and low, while women tend to moderate. She even gives some props to (gasp!) Larry Summers, whose views about women in science her research confirms. She writes in a voice that seems outside both the gender wars and cold science. Somehow, it hit home with me.