Equality For The ‘Talented’ and ‘Ambitious’

Break out the champagne, ladies—the men-folk have solved our problems!
Right on the heels of John Tierney’s profound article on What Women Want (apparently not to compete with big, bad men), Matt Miller solves women’s work/life dilemmas by listening to his wife.
Both men seem to have the same answer for a problem that women apparently haven’t been able to solve—just change the structure of the workplace. Wow, we never thought of that!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m appreciative of the interest and coverage on the issue. But both articles smack a little too hard of condescension for my taste.
Pandagon’s responses to Tierney’s What Women Want say it all, so I’m not going there.
While Miller’s piece is a much-needed call to men, like many pieces on women and work it ignores the fact that the majority of American women don’t have a choice. Working is not an option. And of course—again, like most coverage on this issue—he includes a one sentence class disclaimer: In a world where most people are struggling, the search for “balance” in high-powered jobs has to be counted a luxury.
Miller then ignores his own admission to basically shit on anyone who isn’t the upper class:
Still, there is something telling (if not downright dysfunctional) when a society’s most talented people feel they have to sacrifice the meaningful relationships every human craves as the price of exercising their talent.
Nowhere is there a greater gulf between the frustration people feel over a dilemma central to their lives and their equally powerful sense that there’s nothing to be done. As a result, talented people throw up their hands. Women are “opting out” after deciding that professional success isn’t worth the price. Ambitious folks of both sexes “do what they have to,” sure there is no other way. That’s just life.
My unreasonable wife rejects this choice. If the most interesting and powerful jobs are too consuming, Jody says, then why don’t we re-engineer these jobs – and the firms and the culture that sustain them – to make possible the blend of love and work that everyone knows is the true gauge of “success”? As scholars have asked, why should we be the only elites in human history that don’t set things up to get what we want?
I’m pretty damn sure the elites are—and have been—setting things up the way they want. That’s why we’re in this mess where women are paying up to half of their salary for child care.
…In a globalizing world, many senior jobs are already impossibly big. If they need to be restructured anyway (we’re working on how), why not do so in ways that give folks the option to have a life? Skeptics should recall that everyone once “knew” that a weekend or a minimum wage would spell economic ruin, too.
It’s time workaholic males took up this cause, because top jobs will never change unless we do.
Naturally I’m all for structural change at the top, but shouldn’t our priority be reworking things for women who have no choices?