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SarahC comments on How to Be Happy - Less Wrong
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I went to see a panel of female mathematicians talk about work and life once, and the predictable question came up, "How do you balance work with parenthood?"
Among the answers was the comment "Kids are only small for about five years and they're only at home for eighteen." When you think about it, the period when parenthood conflicts directly with work is a very small proportion of your working life, unless you have lots of kids.
What's disappointing to me about this overlapping proportion of your life is that the kids are small (and most demanding) exactly over the same period of time when your work is most demanding (when you're trying to get tenure). I'm disappointed because I'm not the best parent or the best scientist that I could have been if they were staggered even by just 5 years.
At the moment, I feel more critical of the tenure system and -- to be honest -- am jealous that I am juggling parenting and trying to get tenure while my single colleagues have potentially an extra 20 hours a week to work on their research. While I know that having children is a choice that I made, the biology is such that I should have kids now ... and the tenure system, which requires your most productive work in your thirties, is not sympathetic to this biological fact.
I only recently began feeling dissatisfied. Until recently, I instead felt somewhat guilty and greedy about trying to have it 'all' -- a family and a career. This is because I see that many women in academia chose not to have children. But lately, my self-esteem has been more vigorous and I feel that choosing between a family and a career is not a sensible choice for society to insist upon.
I also recently read the following sentence in Psychology Today, which catalyzed my stance:
Incidentally, I went to a similar panel of female scientists about 10 years ago and I felt they were overly negative about balancing the demands of small children and research. I'm glad that your panel was more supportive. The balancing act makes me grouchy sometimes, but I think it's OK. For psychological support, I rely a lot on my female colleagues that did have children as role models. (I do not have the psychological makeup to have been a pioneer with this, so I am grateful to them.)
Just chiming in to say that "wanting to have it all" is good and absolutely not something to feel guilty about, as long as it doesn't make your failures more painful. Whenever people around you say or imply that you "ought" to be "humble", they're wrong and you're right.
Yes, I needed to first consciously recognize and then reject the meme that trying to optimize beyond what others are doing will be punished by fate.
There is the story of the greedy monkey that is an example of this meme. There's a grain of truth to the parable, so I would have to think about the distinction to be made about when to apply it and when not to.
The fate does punish, through improbability of unusual success. One would be guilty for not taking this improbability into account, and correspondingly for not heeding the heuristics that point it out. Sometimes the heuristics are wrong, and the plan is solid regardless of what they tell (for other reasons), which is where one shouldn't feel guilty for disregarding them.
You're right, it isn't fair. I'm not at that point in my life yet, but I've seen how rough it can be, and I probably don't know the half of it.
From what I can see, on the outside, the difficulty is that academia is a very "career-tracked" world -- you absolutely must do A before you do B, and what's more, it's assumed that you'll do it at a specific age, too. That would have to change to make it less crazy for women.
I'd like to point out that this craziness is not specific to academia or to women. If you look carefully, you'll realize that society in general strongly expects people (of both sexes) to be at certain stages of accomplishment by certain ages, with those who fall off this "track" being penalized by means of a permanent status ceiling.
The problem is that society can't make up its mind about whether it wants to award status based on age or accomplishment. If age, then people should be allowed to start a new career at any age without status penalty. If accomplishment, then most people of any age won't have much status anyway, so switching fields wouldn't be any more unusual or a problem than it is for today's college students.
(There's no need for anyone to reply with the economic, historical, etc. reasons why things are the way they are. I'm just pointing out that I don't like it this way.)
In fact, now that I think about it, this is probably what is really going on with all that mythos about youth in mathematics: the real story isn't that people can only do great work in their 20s, but that youthful accomplishment = status, to such an extent that the kind of people who could make great contributions in middle age if they were given 20 years to study the subject before publishing (or permitted to switch in from another subject) aren't allowed into the field at all.
Erm, I strongly suspect that doing great work in your 20s is not just about status.
Actually, I'm starting to suspect it is. (Well, not literally "just", of course.)
My current theory is that people who do great work in their 20s don't do so later mainly because: (1) their status is already secure, and they don't have to work as hard to maintain it; and (2) continuing to work on the highest level would require them to study the ideas of (and thereby subordinate themselves to) lower-status younger folk.
This theory came to me when I observed that some older academics appeared to have lost their intellectual curiosity, not just their physical stamina (or whatever variable people think it is that causes the [alleged] phenomenon).
That said, my comment was actually about why we don't see people do great work later after failing to do so in their 20s, not why we do see people who do great work in their 20s fail to do so later. The point was that, after some had done great work early, having-done-great-work-early became a coveted, even necessary, status signal.
This sounds right.
When looking at the people who started scientific revolutions, it is the middle-aged, not young, who are overrepresented.
It also needs to be noted that during the last couple of hundred years, the amount of scientists in the world has been constantly increasing. The net result has been that there have always been more young researchers than old researchers, since more members of the younger generations have chosen to become scientists than happened in the previous generations. This has led to an illusion of youth being a requisite for scientific discovery, since there have been more young scientists and therefore also more young scientist geniuses than old scientist geniuses.
Scientific performance, as measured by the number of publications and the frequency of citations for those publications, increases steadily over time and reaches its high point around age 40 at least in chemistry, geology, mathematics, physics, psychology and sociology.
References:
Cole, S. (1979) Age and Scientific Performance. The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 84, no. 4, 985-977.
Wray, K.B. (2003) Is Science Really a Young Man's Game? Social Studies of Science, vol. 33, no. 1, 137-149.
Also, I seem to have lost the reference, but I recall seeing studies claiming that at least in academia, your creativity does drop as you age - but this is a function of career age, not chronological age. In other words, once you've been in a field for a long time, you stop having new insights. If you switch to a new field, you can start innovating again.
It's not necessarily the low status, but the fact that spending effort to study an idea is an investment, and an old person will get to enjoy that investment for a shorter time. It's apparently a relatively standard idea in economics that as people get older and their expected remaining lifespan shortens, they will stop investing as much in learning new things, since they'll have a smaller payoff from them. Richard Posner writes in Aging and Old Age:
Later on, he also notes that various careers vary in when they reach their peak:
I think you can explain almost all of this by the fact that within the rules of academia, middle-aged professors do MUCH more administration, grant-writing, editorial work, and "management" in general than people in their 20's and early 30's. The scientific world appears to need management, and we've decided to allocate the management work by age/seniority. My experience with senior professors is not that they've gotten too dim or lazy to do research (ha!) but that they wish they had more time to devote to research.
That's the standard explanation (at least among people who don't buy the traditional magical theory of youth), and was my previous theory.
Actually, really, they're theories of different phenomena. People who don't do as much research simply because they're busy administrating aren't really "declining with age"; they just literally aren't spending as much time. The hypothesis I presented above was an attempt to explain the nature of specifically-age-related (but non-medical) intellectual decline, such as it exists.
The two cases can be distinguished by observing whether the senior professors return to pre-administration levels of productivity after they become emeriti.
Every time I hear that question asked of married heterosexual female professionals, I want them to answer "More or less the same way my husband does."
I'd prefer that their answers about equal responsibility for parenting be consistent with their answers for equal right to be awarded disputed child custody. Holding either consistent position (mothers' parenting presence is essentially special in very important ways that can't generally be replaced by fathers, or mothers and fathers should be treated equally) seems less wrong than opportunistically switching between one position to justify extra parental rights and roles in divorce and the other position to justify equal parental responsibilities and roles in marriage.
(Of course, my simple dichotomy shatters into more possibilities if marriage is considered a custom contract defined by negotiation between the spouses. But marriage and family law in general seem very nearly a one-size-fits-all status defined by government, with only a small admixture of contract (pre-nups and such) having AGAIK almost no legal force regarding child care and custody. Thus I don't think the dichotomy is a gross distortion.)
Similar things are true about attitudes towards adoption by same-sex couples, and about single parenthood in general.
Anyway, for my own part, I endorse the idea that parenting is not a gender-specific attribute, and that it's a job far more easily shared by several adults than entirely handled by one.
That said, I also endorse the idea that parenting is a skill that develops with practice, and my priors for a given parent having put significant time and attention and effort into the practice of parenting is higher for women than men in my culture.
I would add that divorce does not in any way obviate either parent's obligations towards, or relationship with, their child. In particular, I'd say that to think about child custody as a privilege that some parents are granted and which other parents deserve equal access to, or as a resource that parents have contractual obligations regarding the dispensation of, is already getting it backwards: rather, both parents share equally the obligation to make custody choices in the child's interest.
I recognize that many divorcing parents are unable to discharge that responsibility, and that courts often have to step in. And I agree that the courts generally adopt a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn't reflect the actual interests of each individual child, and that's unfortunate.
Come to that, I recognize that many married parents are unable to discharge that responsibility, and that's unfortunate too.
It remains their responsibility.