Via Larvatus Prodeo, I became aware of KRudd’s latest gem – a PhD is an “excuse for not having kids”. (What is it with the political leaders in our country at the moment?)
Nina Funnell, a thirty something researcher, attended a function where Kevin Rudd spoke on an ageing population. Her story follows:
I was at a function where Kevin Rudd was giving the keynote address. He talked about the ”crisis” of Australia’s ageing population and the various economic challenges we will face as a result.
Arguments were made about superannuation and the strain on healthcare. But there was a deeper message: young people (women in particular) are failing in their civic duty to reproduce. Apparently, gen Y is to blame for the inverted population pyramid.
There were hundreds of people in the room but only a handful under 30. As one of the under 30-crowd, I shuffled nervously, hoping no one would recognise me – and my empty womb – as the deeply unpatriotic and traitorous felons that we are.
After Rudd came off stage, he spoke to me and the few other under-30s (we had congregated for strength in numbers). He extended his points about the problems with the ageing population and the financial problems gen Y will incur when the baby boomers become pensioners.
At that point one of my friends introduced me, dropping in that I am completing a PhD. At this, Rudd rolled his eyes and in a terse voice lacking any sense of irony remarked that is the “excuse” that “all” young women are using nowadays to avoid starting families. Since then I’ve come up with numerous one-line retorts, but in the moment I just froze in shock. (my emphasis added)
Well. Where do I even start with this one?
First: I am living proof that one can have children and do a full time PhD. I wouldn’t recommend it as the sanest course, though. My 15-month-old son shredded three articles that I’d left within reach the other day. This almost reduced me to tears. Luckily the shredding was repairable with sticky tape.
I’ve only been able to manage doing a PhD with lots of help from my husband, my parents, my parents-in-law and lots of encouragement from my friends when I think about chucking it in yet again.
As a PhD related aside, I think the light is visible at the end of the tunnel – I’m trying to write Chapter 7 at the moment, which leaves only Chapter 8 (the conclusion) to go. And then I have to tidy it all up and make sure I’ve read and referenced everything I ought to have. Sigh. I think my family and friends will sigh a huge sigh of relief when the darn thing is over… Not as big as my relief, however.
Anyway, that was my knee jerk response. But, presuming KRudd’s comment was serious and not a joke gone seriously awry: why did KRudd see a PhD as an excuse not to have children? Why ought women to have children if they don’t want to? Personally, I love children. I have always loved children. It’s no surprise that I have two children. But I recognise that not all women are like me. Some women I know do not want to have children. And you know what? That’s fine. If they don’t want kids, it’s better that they don’t have them. A mother who resents her children is not going to be a happy woman, and nor will the kids be happy either.
Some people I know do want children, but they haven’t met a suitable partner. So they throw themselves into their work or their study. And then there are some people who desperately want children, have a partner, and are unable to have children for fertility reasons. Or there are people who are in same-sex relationships who want kids, and obviously it’s a bit more difficult there than if you’re in a heterosexual relationship.
Why is it always the woman’s fault? Why is it that women who choose not to have children are regarded as selfish or “offering excuses”, while men who make the same choice are not regarded as selfish? Why should a woman not devote herself to career if she wants to? The good ol’ double standard strikes again.
There’s a whole raft of reasons why women (and men) don’t have kids. And you know what? That’s fine. That’s part of being a liberal democracy – you leave it up to people to decide what they want to do. The point is that women shouldn’t be made to feel guilt about their choices (which may be made for a variety of reasons and no one should second guess what their reasoning is). If the PM did indeed mutter this comment seriously, I feel pretty disappointed.
Update:
Deborah at In A Strange Land feels the same way about it as I do.
98 Comments
No problem with any of your observations but when I read Ms F’s piece my suspicion was that it might not have happened quite that way.
Does R have form on the “populate or perish” argument?
And (for all his faults) he does not strike me as a “Kinder, Küche, und Kirche” man, unlike Tony A.
It can’t have been intended that way. The man has an obscure sense of humour, perhaps overt irony just didn’t come across.
Surely….???
TAP
TAP
Ken N, I’ve never been that fond of KRudd (it’s more a question of at the moment of who I dislike less) but I’d never seen him in that light either. Hence my couple of caveats in the piece… After all, his wife built up a business empire.
I do think the “worm has turned” in the press opinion of Rudd. He had a honeymoon, but now the knives are out. It’s weird how they do that. It’s the same with Obama too.
I suspect it was meant to be a jockular comment that didn’t quite work.
Mebbe Sinc. I hope so.
Rudd should not try jokes. He can’t do them.
Humourless b*stard, I reckon. His other attempts to be jocular are ten kinds of FAIL (“fair shake of the sauce bottle”).
KenN has an excellent point – KRudd can’t even tell the Bob-Hawke-getting-a-lift-home-from-the-footy-from-a-car-of-young-hoons-who-wanted-him-to-talk-to-their-mums story very well. And that takes some doing.
And he said “fair dinkum” the other day.
Now, I am old but I think my father was the last person I heard use that expression.
Or perhaps it’s still current in Queensland?
I blame Christianity.
Seriously. TAbb and kRudd come out with gems of misogyny related to sex, family and kids and what do the two perpetrators have in common? Ostentatious Christianity.
(To be more precise, I blame priestly Christianity, but that is a whole other discussion.)
Besides, Rudd is behind the social science curve. Better educated women have better marriages and their fertility rates are, in places where women can get casual/part-time/intermittent career work, moving up rather than down.
I live in Seddon, which has become AngloCeltic Educated Woman With Littlies central: practically nappy valley. Our office is in Hawthorn, and my business partners (who used to run a KinderMusik business) noticed the trend a few years ago. (Before Costello’s baby bonus.) Sure, they are having kids in their 30s rather than 20s, but they are still having them.
And great post too.
I think we have the only PM who is a committed Christian since the War.
Howard was not, nor Fraser…I really can’t think of anyone who went to church every Sunday and showed all the symptoms of being a believer.
Not sure what it means for governance but it is unlikely to be meaningless.
Beazley’s father supported MRA which was a bit scary but i don’t think the son shared that.
I’d be a bit skeptical of Ms. Funnell’s claims. She is one of these serial blog/Unleashed/Online Opinion types who is a bit of crank about “gender”. I think she is doing a PhD in Gender/Media Studies with Catharine Lumby. She is quite the “media tart” as they say, who must spend 18 hours a day writing web articles about her latest gender victimization!
Oh, and her writings don’t present her as the sharpest mind around, especially given she is a Ph.D student. A definite Fail in Irony 101.
Where I work, the postgraduate programs have the opposite effect on women — I think we need to spike the water the students drink with the pill so that they stop having so many kids and finish their theses. Alternatively, it does make running a baby lab easy (which one of my friends does), because you can get your subjects from the student population pretty easily just by rocking up to their lectures and asking.
If Australia wants women to participate in the workforce and have children then politicians need to stop blaming women and introduce child friendly policies like affordable childcare not our current ABC Learning Centres subsidies. In France childcare costs one euro a day!
Conrad, I was just saying over at LP that I’ve noticed the same thing. One woman I know has had at least three kids since starting the PhD. She started before me, and she’ll definitely finish after me. Personally I didn’t want the darn thing to drag on too long, but I’ve only been able to get it almost complete with a lot of help from family and friends.
Billie, the original draft of this post diverted into a long rant about childcare and the crappiness of subsidies and yaddah yaddah yaddah. Then I thought I’d better save it for the MEGA POST I’m planning. One day.
I think Kevvie was serious. Anyone ever know Kevvie to actually make a joke?
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Where do I even start with this one?
I know. Kevvie! Fuck off!
And fix the
Awesome AbominationEducation Revolution while your at it. Twerp.I’m sorry. I’ve decided I really dislike Kevvie. He’s a jerk
Through no fault of my own three of my PhD students have had babies during the candidature. This adds, at least, a year to 18 months onto the program. I think people under-estimate the time and effort having a baby takes and takes out of doing a thesis. To the extent that students pay attention to my advise I always suggest they have their babies first or complete their thesis before having a family.
Adrien – we all agree. He is a dorky dork who dorks. He isn’t funny even when others write his stuff for him. So he shouldn’t try.
Rudd’s jokes are a bit like the Pope’s smile.
Watching him on TV I find myself pleading “Please don’t smile please don’t smile it’s horrible”
@ Sinclair Davidson at 17:
And you give this advice to your male students as well as your female students?
(For the record, PhD completed in 3.5 years elapsed time, 4.5 years calendar time, one child born 18 months in, twins born 10 weeks after I submitted.)
Wow, impressive, Deborah. I think it will be 3 – 3 1/2 years for me (hopefully) and 4 years if you count the 9 months I took off after having my son. I did underestimate the impact of having a second baby – I had planned to only take 6 months off, but found I had to take 9 months off.
I’m sure that having children has impacted on my husband’s productivity too (sleepless nights and all that). Also, he’s exceptionally helpful, and shares the caring burden as much as he can. But naturally it impacts on the primary caregiver more, which in this situation is me.
So – if I had a PhD student who planned to be a primary caregiver, I would warn him or her. Actually when my husband did his PhD, there was a guy who chose to be primary caregiver to his two kids, and I know it definitely impacted on his ability to finish. We sometimes wonder if he ever managed it, actually (have lost contact with him since).
“To the extent that students pay attention to my advise I always suggest they have their babies first or complete their thesis before having a family.”
I think many of our students believe the opposite — they think that it will be a good time to have a child whilst studying, and that’s one reason they come back. Perhaps they’re correct about that, although no doubt the university management people hate it.
One of the interesting things is the great variability in how well they cope. We have some students who can basically work right through (god knows how!) until a week or two to go, and then restart almost as soon as they’ve given birth, but there are others that simply taken forever — fortunately for them it’s one of the few things now that you won’t get kicked out for if you go massively over time. It will be interesting to see how long that lasts (no doubt it will based on the government’s declining reward system for PhD/DPsych completion times and how they treat it).
“For the record, PhD completed in 3.5 years elapsed time, 4.5 years calendar time, one child born 18 months in, twins born 10 weeks after I submitted.”
Not 3 years
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No…. not 3 years, but during my time as a student, there were only two people who did it in three years, and most people took four years or longer. I submitted mine a month or so earlier than the other student who started at the same time as me.
Finding I was pregnant (planned) with twins (unplanned! – but a very lucky bonus) was a powerful incentive to get the damned thing finished.
Legal Eagle, my unabashed admiration for you! And my very best wishes for your final finishing frenzy.
Deborah – no. My male students tend not to get pregnant. The gender division of labour is hard on women and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
Yes, I’d agree. I’d put myself in the middle here. Not the best coper, not the worst, not the most disciplined, not the least either.
I had to give up everything at 30 weeks when I had my son – but I’d had to quit work as a solicitor at the same point with my daughter. I still worked on the PhD when I was on maternity leave (and even published stuff), just not at quite the same pace.
It also probably depends on the kind of support you have. The guy who was having real difficulties finishing his PhD and was primary caregiver for his kids had no family or in-laws in Melbourne, and his partner seemed to have severe post-natal depression (as far as I could work out). So it’s certainly understandable why he was having difficulty finishing. I’m really lucky that I have family and in-laws I can rely on, and my partner is able to help as much as he does.
In a previous life I was research dean and the central administrators were working on a supervision rating system that included metrics on student completion time, paperwork on time, and quality of examiner reports and the like. I don’t know what happened to that project, but people taking longer to finish their thesis would have brought the rating down.
(Three years from enrollment to submission. First child born the year before commencement, second child born one month before submission).
Apropos nothing at all, it has just struck me that one of the things I like about this blog, apart from the intelligence and civility (in both posts and comments), is that it is run by three women. As a gay man I like women (typically more than most straight men do), I just do not fancy them very much.
Perhaps not surprising that this struck me while reading this post and its comments.
If this is true (and not just a dorky humour fail as Sinclair suggests), then it would appear that both political leaders are not very good at the LIBERAL bits of liberal democracy.
And thank you, Lorenzo. You are very kind.
Thank you, Lorenzo.
And it was at that point your honor, that all hell broke loose!
I reread your post and got a very different reaction when I read:
There were hundreds of people in the room but only a handful under 30.
Ok, so Nina was a VERY minor, minority. What is Kevin’s job? To make (most) people like him! It sound like he was just saying something to get the audience fired up. Fired up and agreeing with him.
Isn’t that his job???
Christian, I’m sure you’re right – the context produced the reaction (whether joke or serious comment). The question is – is that his job – to just pander to what the majority of people want to hear? If he was at a gathering of 30 somethings, would he put on a different guise and act all sympathetic? If so, ugh.
I happen to think that’s not his job. His job is to lead our country. One of the things I really dislike about him and have disliked since the start is my impression that he just says and does stuff to stay popular – he’s not genuine, and he’s not a person of principle. The problem with politicians who want to stay popular is:
(a) sometimes they just do nothing because they don’t want to upset anyone;
(b) sometimes they institute short term measures which may make them popular but which are ultimately ill-thought out and bad for the country in the long run;
(c) sometimes they’re just at the behest of “lobby groups” of whatever stripe.
Look I still dislike Rudd less than I dislike Abbott, but I’ll say this for Abbott: at least he says what he believes, even if it’s unpopular.
Hmmm, seems like the public is coming to the same conclusion as mine about Rudd.
If Kevin Rudd really believes women are just baby factories, why doesn’t he have real policies to make it easier? Promising paid maternity leave if we vote him in again just doesn’t cut it. It still irks me that women who don’t want kids are seen as selfish, yet men who don’t want kids are seen as normal. And women who do want kids are clucky/clingy/needy/trying to trap a man. You just can’t win.
Newswithnipples, I couldn’t agree more. As I said to Billie, when I initially drafted this post, there was a long diversionary rant about maternity leave, childcare, the difficulties in coping financially etc, etc. Rebates for childcare just drive up the prices accordingly. Paid maternity leave doesn’t help self-employed women, women who do contract work, women who choose to stay at home. And, like it or not, paid maternity leave does impose a significant burden on small employers if you’re going to ask them to foot the bill.
I do wonder if the difficulty I have faced in getting an ongoing position is in part because employers want to keep employees on contract so that they don’t have to offer any of this stuff.
One of the ideas which SL raised with me was the possibility of an income-splitting regime, where the income of the major income earner was split between the primary carer and the income earner and taxed on that basis. I really like this idea.
But I’m still not sure what would happen to single parents in that event’
- how would they get the same benefits? I think of a friend of mine whose husband turned out to be a total dropkick, and it can frankly be said that she and her son are far better off without him. She struggles so much. I wouldn’t want her to be disadvantaged because she didn’t have a partner to split income with, through no fault of her own.
Perhaps the problem is thinking there’s a one size fits all solution. What about a range of options available? Like a lump sum baby bonus, staggered payments, vouchers for baby furniture (like some European countries offer), cheap childcare, options where you can split income, and many other great ideas suggested by people who know more about it than I do. It’s time to accept that, shock horror, not everyone is in the same financial/employment/relationship situation.
OMFGoddess, we’re not going to start playing “damn feminists need to get a sense of humour” bingo, are we?
I’m slightly to the right of Ghengis Kahn, as the saying goes, and if Tony Abbot was such a patronising a-hole and got called out on it, I’d have no sympathy whatsoever.
One might also think Rudd would run a WWJD test over such (alleged) humour. Ms. Gillard has certainly shown zero tolerance towards those who think she needs any “excuse” for not having children or a wedding ring.
Those who believe Australia is overpopulated or nearly so would argue against anything making it easier for women to have children.
I pointed out on another blog recently that if you want to slow population growth you have three levers: births, deaths and immigration. The consensus seemed to be that the birth rate was the easiest to control.
I make it clear that I do not believe we are overpopulated. I support childcare and such not to increase population but to widen choice.
Looking forward to reading your affordable childcare blog!
The European countries, Italy & Greece, with the least child friendly work practices and limited child care have the lowest fertility rates and a prevalence of 30+ year old children living at home
Christian
Actually, it sounds to me more like Nina wallows in being a minority victim wherever she goes. The probability that a man like Kevin Rudd, who works 1,000 hours per week, married to a woman like Theres Rein, who also works 1,000 hours a week traversing several continents in the process, all the while bearing and raising three young children, is also a man who doubts that young women can walk and chew gum at the same time is practically zero.
The Kevin Rudd I know meant nothing like Nina’s sham victim outrage.
LE/Deborah
We all know innumerable women who turn up every day to the office, until they are practically in labor, and many who are back in the office not long after. Now, if that is a sight we are all accustomed to, I can’t imagine anybody who would doubt those women could easily be commuting to the library, or banging away on their laptops at home, emailing experts and scholars for info, doing lit searches, constructing research questionnaires, analyzing their results, and so on, even while eight months pregnant.
The challenge of course, as you yourself know, is when the little bundle/s of joy are no longer blissfully silent occasionally kicking your tummy, but screaming every couple of hours for a feed, or for no reason at all. I imagine during that period, productivity might decline, but not stop altogether.
Newswithnipples, yes a range of options would be good. From where I stand now, the options are limited. I have found childcare and all that stuff so hard. If you don’t book your child in eons in advance, you can’t get a place anywhere. And then there’s absolutely no flexibility. I know a lot of women who keep their first child in care when they have the second child simply to keep the place open.
For me, also, creche didn’t work particularly well. My daughter HATED IT. Everyone says, “she’ll settle in time”, but she didn’t. It just got worse and worse. Plus, she got really really sick, and that didn’t get better after over a year either. It just mucked up her sleeping patterns. I didn’t have any other available options in childcare near me – the waiting lists were immense. Sigh.
Anyways. The point is that the government does not really provide incentives for people to have families, even if one takes the “baby bonus” or “childcare rebate” into account. (Rebates and stuff are a crock – more a measure to look like you’re doing something than something that makes a difference, because providers tend to increase the price proportionate to the rebate).
Legal Eagle, I look at what Rudd’s offered (if we vote him in again) and I look at what Abbott’s offered (completely uncosted and highly unlikely) and neither option is good enough. Shiny New Coin has a great post about how half of the population is still considered a niche market: http://shinynewcoin.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/half-the-population-cant-be-a-niche-market/
Funny thing is, billie, Australia is a lot better a place for kids than France. It is even possible that this is partly because Australian kids don’t get shunted off to childcare and school from age 3 months (up to 9 if they are lucky) when the mandatory (and thus maximum) maternal leave runs out. Compounding it all, the average Australian school is hands-down better than the average French school (taking an average of my personal and vicarious experiences only lol).
The other funny thing is that I don’t think you have cause and effect sorted out insofar as children living at home in Mediterranean countries goes.
LE, the incentives aren’t that bad. The baby bonus is not negligible, and the Centrelink amounts are worthwhile even up to around $70-80k pa, which is not a bad income all things considered. Then there is the babies themselves.
“Funny thing is, billie, Australia is a lot better a place for kids than France”
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Why? France seems pretty fine to me for kids. Even public schools seem fine if you are away from the poor areas (although my experience with them is limited to friends), the medical system is better than here, there are lots of parks, and everything is generally pretty civilized (people are also probably more kid friendly than here). Alternatively, despite the fact that child care is free, I’m not convinced the trade-off works, since of course the level of taxation in France that pays for everything is pretty brutal. So, it’s hard for me to see why France is worse (or better).
France is a bad pick to criticize, because it has a high birth rate and a ‘system’ that seems to work — in ways that other European countries have not been able to replicate, including Britain, I might add.
French schools also have a completely different ‘logic’ to Anglophone schools. It is still possible for a person to walk into a school in Toulouse on a given day and for his best mate to walk into a matched school (let’s say, three months into 9th grade) in Bordeaux on the same day and see the teacher in both delivering exactly the same lesson. If you come from Australia or the US or Britain with their federal-style educational diversity this can be very, very freaky. This system has Napoleonic origins and makes very few concessions to difference: the disabled, non-English-speakers, the disadvantaged.
I do not want to replicate the French system (it is, as Conrad points out, punishingly expensive), but I do think we have to take it seriously. This is not just on the population front, but also on the multiculturalism front (the French do not buy it), the energy front and the health care front. In France, you will remove that headscarf before walking into school and you will learn that Western civilisation is superior to Islamic civilisation. You will also have nearly 70% of your energy needs met by nuclear power (so the French can give Putin and his bullying friends the finger) and you will be very unlikely to get fat. Oh, and the French smoke everywhere. Doesn’t seem to effect their life expectancy.
I can understand the logic behind having children while completing a PhD, simply because it’s a hell of a lot easier to return to study than it is to a workplace. And for most people the next step after university is work.
Women are fully aware of the negative career impact of having children (it’s written up enough) and reasonably expect this to be even worse if they turn up to a job and then drop out on maternity leave in the first three years. So if they’re considering children within the next six years, having them during the PhD makes a lot more financial and career sense.
Lorenzo sweetie, I’d offer to be your fag hag but I’m just not stylish enough.
“and you will be very unlikely to get fat. Oh, and the French smoke everywhere. ”
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Strangely enough, the French are getting fatter, and more recently, smoking less and in less places — some of this due to the government (the 2008 reforms), and some of this due to popular pressure. Perhaps the world really is becoming more homogeneous, although I can’t see them giving up free childcare unless they’re really just 10 years behind on contemporary cultural attitudes (which is what it feels like sometimes to me) — and perhaps we’ll begin to catch up on the nuclear front.
Not sure how much tax is too much but Australians do not pay enough tax. We have to top up for what the state doesn’t provide so we
1. pay child care fees upto $90 per day
2. pay school fees of upto $30,000 per year
3. pay private health insurance and pay high Gap payments if we are hospitalised with private health insurance
4. pay university fees
5. top up our compulsory superannuation, which for skeptic lawyers generation will have a capped pay out of $40,000 per year in today’s terms
Stop looking to the American social experiment, it’s failed!
Conrad
Smoking is legendary as a weight-loss method, maybe that is why the French are getting tubbier?
Bille, if you mean anything it appears that you must mean that other Australians don’t pay enough tax.
But I can’t work out why anyone should want to pay your private school fees (almost never $30k pa, incidentally) – no-one pays them for the French, either, they just have much crapper schools with much poorer facilities, extremely limited sport, musical and other non-academic options and usually nary a patch of grass.
Also, French people pay approx 1/3rd of their salaries in other people’s superannuation and benefits, whereas we have possibly the best super system in the known world. To quote a (French) friend of mine: ‘Quit? Why? I certainly won’t have any retirement (pension) so I had better do all I can to die by 60‘
SL, I agree with the French on nuclear power. I think their views of multiculturalism are, whilst superficially appealing, in many ways woefully inadequate – otherwise, why does it work so much better in Australia than there? How did Le Pen get the second highest votes in a Presidential election? Why are so many outer suburbs in Paris/Marseille/Lyon other large urban areas so dangerous?
As for smoking, the reforms Conrad is referring to amounted to basically banning it everywhere. No wonder it is declining (albeit from a very high base)!
“I think their views of multiculturalism are, whilst superficially appealing, in many ways woefully inadequate – otherwise, why does it work so much better in Australia than there? How did Le Pen get the second highest votes in a Presidential election? Why are so many outer suburbs in Paris/Marseille/Lyon other large urban areas so dangerous?”
This thread is getting side-tracked a lot (sorry), but I think the reason is pretty obvious. It’s because a reasonable proportion of the people we took in were highly skilled or came from ethnic groups that succeed everywhere. So for the most part, they never created any major problems for anyone (quite the opposite — just look at who the doctors are now in our hospitals!), and most people liked the culture they brought with them (that’s why Melbourne is the best city in Australia — because even poor Greeks and Italians have more taste than the English
. It’s true). Alternatively, France took in lots of poor people without the sort of characteristics Australia either took in deliberately or by accident. That included a massive group from Algeria that came all at once. It also included groups that are reasonably sexist (just look at the gender ratios in the immigrant bars in France!), and this no doubt contributed additional problems because it excluded half the population from being successful.
Patrick why do you assume that I mean other Australian’s don’t pay enough tax. My family send their children to the traditional protestant private schools, university, pay private health insurance, make additional super contributions so that we can earn enough money to provide what the state won’t.
From a productivity standpoint I believe that a more equitable society generates a higher GDP and allows more of its population to thrive.
The Americas are the home of small government and low taxes which is fine if you are doing well but if you lose your job or become sick or can’t access a post-high school education you join the third of Americans living hand to mouth existences in poverty. Not shown on TV because Americans believe poor people deserve it.
Getting back to the original post, much as I loath Rudd (how I do), I think it pretty unlikely that he could handle being married to such a successful woman if he didn’t have a decent attitude toward women. I suppose the other explanation is that he’s so focussed that he doesn’t care about his marriage, but that isn’t the feeling I get.
The other thing is, for all the ridiculous and unctuous things he does say, it’s hard to conclude that this particular comment lacked any sense of irony. “All” young women are using the excuse of doing a PhD to avoid parenthood? He’s not a moron and he can’t really have meant it.
The wider point raised leads me to say that one of our community’s great failures as it attempts to reform and achieve gender equality is to perpetuate the view that there is only one form of career success; one which involves commercial or professional achievement. It discounts child rearing as a valid career choice.
That’s not to say that we should be teaching women to be happy with their lot. The point of validating child rearing as a career choice is to make anyone who chooses it, male or female, feel that they’ve done something worthwhile and be recognised (as opposed to patronised) for it.
As a gay man I like women
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Not all gay men like women. The worst misogynists I’ve ever met are gay men. Just sayin’.
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It discounts child rearing as a valid career choice.
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It’s not a career. It’s a valid lifestyle choice. It’s a honourable way to spend your time, male or female. It’s not a career choice.
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Sorry. I just don’t like the tendency to express all aspects of life in terms of the economy: social capital etc.
Adrien, I’m not sure what your distinction between a career and a lifestyle choice is. To me, a lifestyle choice is choosing to live at the beach and commute to work or choosing to ride a bike to work. Not sure I would categorise the work involved in raising kids that way.
I don’t think I’d categorise raising kids as either a career or a lifestyle choice. It’s something more complex than either of those. You don’t get paid for it, and there’s no progression or promotion or anything like that, so it’s not really a career. But it’s so much more than a “lifestyle choice”. I’d call it damn hard work, actually.
“You don’t get paid for it, and there’s no progression or promotion or anything like that,”
Yes there is. If you did a good job, your kids will still love you in your old age! Lots of families don’t make it that far (like mine!), so you can progress from helping with feeding, nappys etc. to good kids.
Conrad hopefully that’s the case.
Although I’ve seen families where parents have been as loving and supportive as they can be and the kids have gone off the rails. Or other variations. It’s not as simple as painting a beautiful picture – i.e. you put in effort and skill and something good comes out.
No one gives you a manual, and sometimes you think you’re doing the best thing by your child, but you might not be. Certainly, becoming a parent has made me a lot more forgiving of any “mistakes” I perceived my parents made when I was younger.
Adrien@55 said re kids “It’s not a career choice.”
Ummm. It certainly makes you make career choices. Hmmm… jobs with lots of travel… bigger bucks… or a job where I could work 10:00 to 16:00 at the office, then put in a few more hours at night when kids are settled? And a compassionate boss who understands single parents need unscheduled time off when kids are sick?
LE@57 “I’d call it damn hard work, actually.”
Yep. And I’ve got to start all over again with 9 days notice. Daughter and grandson moving in… and my daughter’s arm is still pretty useless a year after a car accident. Thought I’d got over the having-to-deal-with-toddlers-all-week-without-a-days-respite a couple of decades back… Glad I had my daughter mid twenties! Dunno how older dads have the energy.
Which brings me back to a point in LE’s original post. Why didn’t KRudd roll the eyes and joke (or not) about parental age in a gender-neutral way? DNA methylation over time in parents over time affects the kid (as we are now STARTING to discover), and it’s looking like epigenetic damage in fathers is more consequential in their kids than epigenetic damage in mothers, at least for some things (why there are age limits on donors of sperm for reproductive use). So it looks like there’s MORE reason for men to start families earlier,(again, glad I had my daughter mid twenties!), so if he WAS making comments about age of parents, if he was better informed, and wanting to make it gender-specific, the males would be the more logical target.
As for the hypothesis that a thesis lets you “flex”… no such luck if it’s based on lab or field work… test-tubes that need changing in the middle of the night are just as demanding as nappies that need changing (although at least you know in advance, and maybe you have a partner who can look after things while you go back to the lab). At least most thesis supervisors are more forgiving of what hours you work than most employers, I’d imagine.
Oh, and for those who don’t know… I was a single custodial dad working full-time. At least I was able to work with my infant daughter in a sling, and I only had 1 to deal with on my own.
Dave – when I started my PhD, my scientist parents said, “But what about lab time?” When I said there was no lab time, they just looked really confused and said, “What on earth will you do then?” (both of them did postgrad Chemistry degrees). And those damn experiments that need babysitting – my husband still has to go into work to babysit some bloody test tube which must be put on at 7:30 am or some such… Although at least the test tubes don’t throw tantrums…most of the time…
Good luck with your daughter and grandson, Dave.
This sums it up in a nutshell, I think, and is consistent with what French friends and rellos have told me. They wish they had our Chinese, Italians, Greeks and Vietnamese (especially the latter, who often speak excellent French).
It is not PC to admit it, but all immigrants are not equal.
LE@61 said “Although at least the test tubes don’t throw tantrum”
Depends what you’re cooking in them. Sometimes overcooking can leading to an explosion.
Christian@31. As a gay man, I am really against leaders inspiring large majorities against small minorities. Your Jewish friends may have a similar perspective.
Conrad@52. Oh yes, Oz has been much cleverer than the French–or Europeans generally–in these matters. The one partial exception (Mal-Frunction PM bringing in all those Muslim Lebanese in one wallop and letting them congregate in Oz’s most socially divided city) being the exception that proves the point.
Adrien@55. Sadly, there are misogynist gay men. Pathetic dears that they are.
On an irony of history note, now that women can control their fertility far more precisely than in the past, misogyny tends to be its own reward because if you discourage part-time/casual work, intermittent careers and the odd house-husband, then it raises the cost of having children, and so they have fewer of them. (Catholic Europe–excepting secularist France–and Japan being cases in point). The biggest drop in fertility rates ever recorded is apparently contemporary Iran: why would women bring daughters into the world of the mullahs?
Bugger, that should be ‘large majorities against small minorities”.
[Admin: fixed]
There’s another thing going on, too, at least in Italy. Childcare in Italy is handled at the commune or regionale level. When I lived and worked in Umbria, I discovered a region that had excellent childcare provision, but very low take-up. Various Italians (both male and female) explained that they would prefer the mother to stay home with their children until they start school, and that as this choice was not being facilitated, they would rather not. It was clear that these decisions were being driven by women, too.
I suspect you will find horses for courses based on different countries: in secular France (even Jefferson and Franklin discussed the liberated women of the French salons, so it has been around for a while) a policy that makes child-care cheap drives up the birthrate. In Italy (and, I suspect, Spain), income splitting (where the income is split between the worker and non-worker and taxed at a much lower level) would be far more effective at achieving the same thing. It may not be in accordance with preferred feminist ‘outcomes’, but it would facilitate choice, which is at the heart of liberal politics.
SL: Useful detail. Still, in other words, policy was not being driven by what women actually wanted …
If my male supervisor had ever presumed to give me advice about whether or not to continue trying for a baby while doing my phd – or to choose between the candidature and the possibility of a child – I would have told him in no uncertain terms to mind his own business, for his own good as well as for mine.
As it happens we tried all through my candidature and have had no success yet, meanwhile my slender chances continue to decline with every month that passes.
If I’d been advised to wait until after the PhD was finished, that would have set me back a minimum of three years on the dealing with infertility process. That’s not a responsibility any PhD supervisor in his or her right mind should contemplate taking on, completion rate be damned.
Laura, good luck, and my thoughts are with you. That’s all I can say.
You have to be so careful with these things. I worked with a guy who didn’t have kids. I wondered why, but of course I never asked. Then, one day, he said, “Thanks for never asking why we don’t have kids. I appreciate it. We can’t, you know. People can be so presumptuous and nosy.” He said that his typical answer was, “No we can’t have kids, but we can still have fun practicing making them…” which generally shut people up.
Well, SL, I am not so sure. That great chunk of Algerians that France got at once included a hell of a lot who spoke great French, and included a lot of educated and skilled Algerians. They can’t have been on non-racial grounds ‘worse’ than our first waves of wogs, vietnamese and chinese.
I think it is at least as much that not all host nations are equal.
Patrick: but they were a large group from the same background which maximises the chances of difficulties. Moreover, there were pre-existing difficulties and antipathies from being a fraught former colony. And the Muslim identity-secularist state/culturally Christian thing does not help either.
But I would agree that France also made some major mistakes, starting with their disastrous labour market regulation.
SL@46 How much of the high French birthrate is their Muslim minority? Answer: we do not know because the French refuse to collect such statistics. So the point only holds if “mainstream” Frenchwomen are indeed having higher fertility.
“SL@46 How much of the high French birthrate is their Muslim minority?”
Based on my eyeballs, my bet is a fair bit, although perhaps that’s partially due to the area I work/visit each year (i.e., not Paris where things might be different!). It’s also certainly the case that people have a different attitude to kids vs. other places in Europe. They’re a bit like something you inevitably have, versus something where you make 100 calculations about before having them, even the first (say, like Germany, not that I have much experience there).
The relative birth rates among different ethnicities raises another really significant uniqueness about Australian multiculturalism: the high rate of inter-ethnic/cultural marriage.
This is one area where Pauline was dramatically wrong. She complained that Asian immigrants ‘don’t assimilate’. But Australia is full of ‘Asians’ who married non-Asians, whether Anglos, Aborigines, Greeks, Italians, and so on. Similarly, the rate of inter-marriage between Aborigines and non-Aborigines is extremely high.
I have seen data that confirm – what also seems intuitively correct – the relatively low, very low, rate of Muslims marrying ‘outsiders.’ Maybe, hopefully, that the next generation of Muslims might become more comfortable in their ‘Australian/French’ skin and embrace the melting pot.
This is a very strange attitude. In my experience students approach me for advice – not that they always take it, but that is another issue. Furthermore you’ll find that the rules and regulations require staff and students to consult each other over matters relating to the PhD and to the successful completion of the thesis. An aggressive and hostile relationship does not bode well for either the student or the supervisor.
Sinclair, I think I’d probably tell my supervisors if I were undergoing fertility treatment. But I know others who feel very differently about the matter.
A friend of mine who is generally very open and gregarious hid the fact that she is having fertility treatment from almost everyone except her family and myself. She ended up having to tell work eventually. Her words were very similar to Laura’s: “it’s nobody’s business but mine”. Perhaps it’s easier not to tell because then you don’t feel the pressure of people’s expectations. Also, I know that my friend has said that she feels like a failure as a woman, and although I’ve assured her that this is not the case, perhaps she still feels like that that deep down, and that’s why she doesn’t like telling people? I’m not sure – I just respect her point of view.
LE – it is a tough problem. I’m not denying that. I would have thought it always best to keep your supervisor (in both a work and a study sense) in the loop. This is especially the case when undergoing traumatic private life events. To the extent that supervisors are in the loop they are able to offer support and understanding that might otherwise be lacking. Now I’m not suggesting that people have no privacy in their lives, but I’m suggesting that circumstances that have the potential to adversely impact upon your work or study life should be discussed with supervisors. I’m always banging on about cooperation under the divisision of labour, now the more cooperation there is the greater the gains from trade.
“This is especially the case when undergoing traumatic private life events.”
I agree. The problem is that if you don’t, and you have an annoying supervisor (which is often the student’s fault — if they are historically slack, then supervisors may try and get them through via a regimented “what have you done in the last two weeks method”) then they will still be annoying, which can lead to resentment despite the supervisor doing their job. The same is true of all the compliance stuff. If no-one knows about the problems, then you can get kicked out without as much consideration as you should get.
I must say I’m with Laura on this one: I’d never tell my supervisor, or my boss for that matter, if I was undergoing fertility treatment. I’d certainly inform them, very generally, if I had personal or health reasons which were affecting the quality and the progress of my work, but I’d expect them to keep the relationship professional. I’d be appalled if my male supervisor tried to advise me about when I should have children, or how I should plan them during my candidature. I’d also be surprised if university regulations allowed this kind of ‘briefing’. I think if someone attempted to offer me that kind of induction into the PhD experience in the early stage of the candidature, or before enrollment, I I’d be very likely to have second thoughts about whether that person was really suitable for the job. Sure, it’s great to have a supportive supervisor who can understand your concerns and guide you through the torturous research and writing process, but I wouldn’t want them to overstep the personal/professional mark. Many women choose to do postgraduate study while having children, or while they are raising children, because in most instances a week of study is more forgiving on the young family than long work hours. I’ve really enjoyed writing a thesis while raising two children.
From my employers guidelines for responsibility of supervisors
From the responsibility of candidates
But I do take your point Tatyana, if you don’t trust your supervisor to have your interests and concerns at heart you shouldn’t study with them. I’m just surprised that some many in this thread have an inherent hostility to the advice and experience that supervisors can offer.
These, to me, are two very different things:
a. “Encourage and support a candidate’s career aspirations and planning and help them develop the personal and professional capabilities that will enhance their career options.”
b. “To the extent that students pay attention to my advise I always suggest they have their babies first or complete their thesis before having a family.”
Quote a. is broad and generic advice. Quote b. seems to assume a level of authority that I think most women nowadays would find unacceptable. It seems to me to overstep the boundaries of a professional supervisor-student relationship, and assumes that the best outcome for the female student is achieved if the student does not have a baby while doing a PhD. I don’t think that a supervisor’s role is to tell a woman when or whether she should have children, or to openly express their opinion on the matter. Compounded with the fact that this is usually an older male academic in a position of authority and power advising a younger woman about very personal choices, it seems extremely problematic, and potentially quite confronting.
This is not about whether a student trusts that a supervisor has their interests at heart (a student should expect that the supervisor will do their job professionally), it’s just that a supervisor’s role is not to express opinions or offer advice about personal matters and choices. I think the same principles apply to most work situations. Of course, there are many problems facing women who undertake postgraduate study and who decide to also manage pregnancies and/or other children, but universities are quite supportive environments, offering many flexible options, clearly regulated by university policies that support the balancing of family and study.
When I had my PhD confirmation I was pregnant with my second child. One of the academics at my confirmation asked what my plans were after I had the baby, and I said that my plans were to take six months off. He looked at me, and said, “You do realise that you might need more time than that? A child is a lot of work. You can’t just keep working on as before.” I said, “This is No. 2, so I have some idea as to what I’m getting into fortunately.” (Actually I didn’t really realise how much more work two are than one child – more than 2x the work!). The academic then explained that he only raised the issue because his daughter was about my age and had just had her first child. She’d had all kinds of plans of working and things, and they all went out the window after the baby came. I then told this academic that when I found out I was pregnant with my first child, I told my then-boss, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back 6 weeks after I have the child”….whereupon he grinned (he was a father of four) and said, “Let’s just wait and see, eh?” Actually I never went back to that job, but that’s another story…
I think there can be a tendency for women to underestimate the work that a child can bring. I was one of the first of my friends to have a child, and I quite literally had NO IDEA. There’s this kind of idea that you can have it all – job, child, study, everything – and you can’t – or if you do, you’re stretched so incredibly thin that you’re liable to snap all the time. If a man has experience that might be helpful, as long as he puts it forth sensitively, I’m happy to listen to his advice. Still, I’ll also be quite vocal in putting my own point of view forward.
(P.S. As it happened, the academic at my confirmation was right – I did need longer, and took off 9 months, but don’t tell him that!!! :-0)
Tatyana – I don’t disagree that people should have professional relationships but that does not mean that supervisors shouldn’t take an interest in the welbeing of their students. Your statement that university rules don’t cover this is quite false as I have demonstrated. At the same time those rules also mandate the kind of professionalism that you expect. I expect that too.
If you read LE’s comment immediately above you will see exactly what happens in practice. I have never heard of a supervisor be they male or female telling a student they cannot have a baby when they want. Maybe that happens in Arts faculties, I don’t know.
This becomes very important when students, thinking like LE don’t take enough leave of absence time and get hit down the track with completion time problems. Students can find their scholarships run out 6 months too early, and/or get hit with fees.
“it’s just that a supervisor’s role is not to express opinions or offer advice about personal matters and choices”
Maybe your supervisor is a robot, but when you know/help someone for years on end, life just doesn’t work like that. Indeed, sometimes students give us advice. I’ve had “you smell at the end of the day when you wear that t-shirt in that fabric (true — don’t wear that really thin fabric they make running gear out of in the tropics!), “why don’t you take your girlfriend something nice for her birthday” etc.
Similarly, a lot of rules universities use (which are essentially given to them by the government) do impinge upon your personal life. For example, if the government said it would stop funding PhDs after students have been going for 5 years, no matter what the circumstances (which would then no doubt be enacted by most universities), then students need to know this, because it would stop them getting booted out. I know where I work there are absolute cut-off deadlines, and pretending that these don’t exist because they might interfere with someone’s personal goals isn’t very productive.
I agree with you, Conrad: being aware of deadlines and leave provisions is very important. And, of course, supervisors are not robots and students develop a close working relationship with their supervisors, and that’s rewarding for both parties. But it is a work relationship, of sorts, and postgraduates are adults. If you feel things are going well when your student is comfortable to tell you that you smell, well, that’s great. I’d probably have to tell you too if the room was not properly ventilated, but I might just feel a bit uneasy about it. And sure, why not tell them about your personal circumstances, your girlfriend, their boyfriend, and offer each other the sort of advice colleagues give each other when they collaborate together on a project. We’re all human.
What prompted me to comment was Sinclair’s remark, where he mentions that he advises his students to have babies first before commencing their PhDs, or to wait until they submit their thesis. This, in fact, may be very sound advice, as far as completion rates, future career prospects, care for their physical wellbeing etc are concerned. But, the point is: you can’t tell your students if or when they should have babies, it’s inappropriate, it encroaches on personal matters, it can rarely be done well, even if it’s meant well. Maybe you can say that it’s not an easy choice, if a female student happens to tell you that she is thinking of conceiving, say 12 months into her PhD (I imagine this to be an unlikely scenario), but you’d have to be careful not to discourage them. I can’t imagine a situation where you’d say it at the start of the project: ‘By the way, if you’re considering having babies, here’s what I think …’ Of course, the issue of leave, scholarship management and completion will inevitably be very important, among other things. I just don’t think that it’s supervisor’s business to tell a female student how she should manage her fertility.
Can a woman do a PhD and have children? I’d be inclined to say definitely yes. It’s difficult, but it’s doable. I’d even say it’s more doable than combining work with children in some industries, and the experience can be quite satisfying. The statistics on PhD completion rates for women with children are pretty grim, but there are many encouraging examples of women who have successfully, with a lot of support, advanced their careers while also having children.
In my experience, I found that the combination of study and children is far more favourable than spending long unforgiving hours in the office. The flexibility of a working week in a university environment, once the domestic/study boundaries have been well established, have caused me far less stress than a full-time job in an industry dominated by long working hours and non-negotiable deadlines.
The author of this blog is juggling a PhD with young children. It’s quite inspiring to see that.
While I agree with this, I’m wondering what the practical consequencs are. The next a student asks me about having a family while doing her PhD, should I say, ‘it’s inappropriate for me to comment on that’ in violation of the expectations of my employer and perhaps to the disappointment of the person seeking my advice?
“If a female student happens to tell you that she is thinking of conceiving, say 12 months into her PhD (I imagine this to be an unlikely scenario)”
Not where I work! It’s like a little baby factory (we have lots of students from about 25-40, most of whom are female). This isn’t such a problem because taking time out to have kids isn’t considered a very big fuss if people are even moderately sensible about it (e.g., don’t do it when you are collecting data from an organization that might only let you do it once), so no-one really cares. Indeed, it’s so little bother, we almost always find out about it in the 6 monthly review sessions the students have where they give a presentation about what they will be doing in the next time step. So I’m surprised Sincs worries about that in economics, which I would have thought would have been similar, although that may be due to his university rules vs. mine.
I thought the unlikely bit was that the student would tell the supervisors she was thinking of conceiving! Certainly, I conceived my son 12 months into my PhD and I didn’t tell my supervisors that I was thinking of trying to have another baby. To be honest, I didn’t even get a chance – it was wham, bam, thank you ma’am for me…my mother always warned me that women in our family were generally very fecund.
However, once I found out I was pregnant, I told them (even though it was very early days at that point) because I get so morning sick that it really does impinge on my productivity.
Tatyana, you’ll make me cry. I’ve had a very tough week this week – we’ve all come down with gastro (husband is the latest domino to fall).
But yes – I chose to do a PhD for two reasons. First, I enjoy study and research, and I want to get into academia on an ongoing basis. Secondly, doing a PhD is a lot more flexible than being a solicitor, even though it’s a lot of hard work. So it has enabled to me to spend a lot of time with my kids.
Y’know L’eagle I’ve wanted to make a comment here but I try and avoid conventional commiseration if I can. I did, however, look for an online Get Well card. But they’re all naff.
I can only say that you’ve been sick a bit lately, which happens. Given the stress it’s expected. I reckon getting out of the city if you can would be the best. It’s a toxic sump.
Conrad – taking a leave of absence isn’t normally a problem. One instance I’ve had was with convincing the student to actually take leave. When I was dean I advised students to take more than just 6 months (the minimum amount). The other problem we have is that the uni works on semester time and from census date to census date, while research students work in calandar time and babies don’t care about government determined census dates. I don’t know if it has changed in recent times, but there is also a maximum amount of leave that can be taken in a candidature and the uni administrators have really clamped down on submission times.
Thank you Adrien! Now I am going to cry. :’-(
I think the illnesses are just a part of small kids and bad sleep. After I called a doctor friend last night in a panic over my daughter’s gastro, we were discussing that we never had so many illnesses before we had kids. “Except,” added my doctor friend, “when I did that stint in the Children’s…” Apparently she had a couple of bouts of gastro in a six month period during her stint. Ugh.
The especially annoying thing was that for this ONE WEEK, I did actually have a social life planned. It’s so freakin’ rare that I have anything on! What are the chances? Grrr, gastro, I shake my fist at you.
“I don’t know if it has changed in recent times, but there is also a maximum amount of leave that can be taken in a candidature and the uni administrators have really clamped down on submission times.”
Yes, this is the case where I work (which is why I mentioned that these things are really up to the government whose rules the universities essentially implement) — although I’d be interested to see whether anyone would really follow that through with, say, someone that had 3 kids whilst doing their PhD. Seems like it might be law-suit central to me.
There are problems with faculty rules also. Where I work, on the workload model that is used (which I think never gets completed anyway), they won’t give you any time to supervise someone if they have hung around too long (4.5? 5 years?) — I know this happens at a few places, and is supposed to encourage the staff to encourage the students. Now, most people that are supervisors with these sorts of people aren’t going to drop them if they think they will finish soon. However, if a supervisor leaves (which is common enough), then there is a student that essentially no-one will want, which means they often get left with people resentful of it because they are forced to supervise them or people that arn’t very good (e.g., have never published anything in their lives, and probably don’t know what the thesis is about). My bet is the non-completion rate of these guys would be exceptionally high since the university is basically trying to get rid of them.
Being a mother is the hardest job in the world and the most rewarding, infuriating, dispiriting and creative. What more could you want?
You don’t need to physically leave the city, as toxic as cities may sometimes seem to be. We in Australia are lucky enough mostly to live near a patch of green or even gosh a sliver of bush or much more. And there’s always the shape-shifting, inconstant clouds, a perennially overlooked fount of spiritual solace, sensual nourishment, and existential, intellectual joy.
Alicia, it’s true – I live next to a bike path which is nicely forested. We often get cockatoos flying over. I took the kids out this afternoon to get some fresh air. It was all good until they started to squabble over who got the plastic duck (an old toy of my daughter’s in which she has showed no interest, at least until my son decided he wanted to play with it…kids!…yes, infuriating, funny and rewarding all in one).
Thank you Adrien!
.
Anytime sister.
LE, the fact not even the sight or sound of birds in the inner city just blows me away.
I’ve always lived in the inner city or as currently, a little bit out and regardless the wildlife that co-habits with us is a total blast.
Birds, all sorts of birds from all over the world fly at eye level and nest or feed in close proximity and possums, foxes, frilly tailed lizards, bats and even rare bandicoots flit in and out of my environs.
Conrad – we have the uni withdraw support for students who go over-time, so the school must pay fees and whatnot for the student. Whether the supervison time in the workload is dropped, I don’t know. In my school that doesn’t matter much because a PhD student is only allocated one hour per week – so after years of ‘doing the right thing’ I have cut back my supervision and now only have two students. I’ve told the reources director I’d rather teach classes where you get sufficient time allocation and won’t be taking on more research students until the work plan better reflects the work effort.
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