Weddingbee boards

I read the article.  It's mostly stuff I've seen before - I took an economics of gender and family course in college and have a problem with seeking out news that makes me angry in general.

I think there's a real confluence of social norms, discrimination, policy issues, and individual choices here.  A lot of high-powered positions are structured like they were decades ago - for someone who had either a spouse or assistant to take care of all the nitty gritty personal life details (picking up the dry cleaners, buying groceries) and did not put a lot of time into childcare.  The rigid gender roles have bent and even broken so that this is not the case in that many families anymore.

When it is the case, though, it is almost always the husband/father who is working with the benefit of the wife/mother taking care of nearly all the household chores.  Men can raise five children and still put in the hours required to make it to the highest levels of business (or the supreme court).  There are exceptions - one of my fiance's professors is a mother of five children who is one of the most prominent and published scholars in her field.  She's brilliant and amazing and also has a husband who stays home and takes care of the kids.  But that's incredibly rare.  There's so many social pressures against men staying home and raising kids (and maybe not also so many men who are personally driven to) that if a woman knows her career is her priority, the rational choice is to not worry about having kids at all.

Er... I'm going to cut myself off here before I start writing a ten page paper... I can blather about this stuff for days, but on a personal level this is just one more thing I file in the "reasons not to procreate" folder.