A woman’s work

This is a story about a job interview, and it is also a story about millions of job interviews. First, some context: I am an academic who works on women’s issues, and I teach at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. My papers have been published by major journals. I am also a woman in my thirties with two young children. I am incredibly fortunate; I have a massively supportive spouse and extended family.

I recently interviewed for a position at a fancy liberal arts college. Actually, let me go back even farther. I went on a job interview at the same college five years ago, prior to having children. The academic hiring process is long and laborious, and in the middle of it, I found out I was pregnant. Wanting to be as fair as possible, I disclosed this to the hiring committee—an all-female hiring committee—and they effectively ended my candidacy. Two of my mentors—both female—reacted in different ways to this event. One was outraged, calling the act illegal hiring practices.  The other was pragmatic, arguing that I would not have been able to fulfill the contract to the best of my capacity. Hmm.

Five years and two kids later, I applied for another opening at the same college.  This position offered more money and stability than what I currently have, so I thought it was advisable to apply, despite my previous experience there. In the middle of an interview, I was asked by a professor why the college should hire me, as “only women would ever enroll” in my courses. I paused for a moment, responded as best I could, and then moved along, shocked but needing the work. I did not get the job.

The issue is not particularly that this one department in this one college is tinged with misogyny. Rather, this brings up a host of issues about assumptions about women, their fertility, and the hiring powers and processes that be.

First, we know that having children is a setback for women’s careers. Many women, privileged women who have had educations and choices, opt out of paid work because of the cost of child care and the demands on their time. Society continues to be structured around the ideal of the stay-at-home parent. (Let’s not even get into the inequities that these parents face on a daily basis, that their work is defined as unskilled and unpaid. Spend a day by yourself with a two-year-old. I dare you.) Thus life becomes a series of schedules and schools, camps and sitters, which drain the pocketbook, making it unrealistic for many people to work at all. Since we know women earn less than men, it is women who disproportionately leave their jobs. When they do drop out of the work force, the penalties and barriers to their re-entry are severe.

And yet I think we can all agree that women have proven that they have much to offer in the workforce, that their brains are not, as once was suggested, inferior or diminished in any way due to the presence of a uterus. (Here I am referring both to the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau AND to former Harvard president and Obama cabinet member Larry Summers, and their many compatriots who link them.) After all, it was only in the last generation that women were admitted to the highest echelons of education, and they continue to make strides.

The country also benefits from women having children at all—replacing the population, enabling entitlement systems to operate with some degree of rationality (however limited), and ensuring the future of the nation.

We need a new feminist legislative revolution, one which allows for some degree of flexibility for all people to work, to have a family, and to do so without having to sacrifice so much. In various places around the world, companies and governments have begun to understand this, and liberal parental leave policies, heavily subsidized daycares, and flexible work environments are becoming the norm. It will be interesting to see the dividends these policies reap in terms of economic and population growth, particularly over the long term. I hope people in the United States are reading and observing.

So I guess here is my response to that professor: your very question reveals an extreme lack of knowledge about the issues facing all women and all men in modern-day society. The fact of your ignorance is dangerous, not only for you as an individual, but for all those students who you do teach. And make no mistake, these issues touch us all. As an academic, as a teacher, it is your responsibility to expand the boundaries of knowledge, not assign it to particular groups. Non-Jews may learn about the Holocaust, whites may learn about our checkered racial and ethnic history, and men may learn about women’s history; in each case, we emerge stronger for understanding other people’s experiences.

Your department would clearly benefit from having a professor who could educate young men and women—and you—about the complex history behind gender definitions and limitations, the difficult, continued reality of living with them, and the potential ways people might combat them going forward.