Year: 2013

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA5Ub6T_fOg]

Readers sound off on the controversial new book and cover-story and the woman behind them:

What Sheryl Sandberg and her ilk don’t seem to understand is that I, and many of my sisters, don’t want to be them. I just want a job with flexibility so that I can earn a few dollars, get some mental stimulation and still have a full family life.  I have a master’s degree and a law degree but realized early in my career that I didn’t want to be a slave to it. I wanted to stay home, at least in part, raise my kids myself and bake cookies.  I don’t “lean in” because I don’t want to lean in.  That said, I want any woman who wants to be a CEO to be given the chance and the opportunities to be CEO, and I don’t think any woman who makes that decision should be criticized for prioritizing her career over her family.

Telling women that they are, in effect, sabotaging themselves shows that Sandberg doesn’t understand many of the women who work under her.  It also shows how women have a long way to go in accepting the decisions that other women make for themselves.

Another:

The “lean in” issue is not just a womens’ issue. I’m a man, and my husband and I had a daughter when I was 30, almost 15 years ago. Just at the moment I should have been leaning into my career, I had just become the youngest producer to win a Tony Award, it became clear to me that I would have to lean out because my husband (partner at the time) had a much bigger, more important, and more lucrative job and he was not going to think about playdates and if there was milk in the fridge and all the billions of other things parents have to fill their brain with to raise a child. It is all about balance, and until there is parity on chores and kid duty there will never be equal opportunity in the workplace. I leaned out (not totally), and I don’t regret it for a minute, but getting back in is very tricky, male or female.

One more point, the woman making $60K cannot lean into the impromptu meeting at 4:45 that might lead to drinks because she knows she’s got to get to daycare by 5:30.  Sheryl Sandberg is not living in the real world.

Another:

I agree wholeheartedly with Michelle Goldberg’s statement that “leadership tomes by wildly successful male executives aren’t typically pilloried for ignoring the concerns of immigrant day laborers” and Jessica Valenti’s take. The following is actually about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, but it’s honest and refreshing and one of the most sane things I’ve read on this issue yet:

Mayer is more honest than everyone else. The workforce divides into two sides: people who try very hard to decrease the conflict in their life between work and home, and people who try very hard to get to the top of the work world. You can’t do both. You know that, you just don’t like that Mayer is institutionalizing it.

Once we get honest about what you need to do to get to the top, we can start having a real discussion about how to make choices in adult life. The reality of today’s workforce is that if you want to have a big job where you have prestige and money and power, you probably need a stay-at-home spouse. Or two full-time nannies. Which means most people don’t have the option to go on the fast track, because most people have not set their lives up this way.

So let’s just admit that most of us are not on the fast-track. Stop bitching that people won’t let slow people on the fast track. Stop saying that it’s bad for family. It’s great for family. It means people will not continue operating under the delusion that you can be a hands-on parent and a top performer. People will make real choices and own those choices.

I have no desire to be on the fast track. But good for those women who do want to be and who go for it. Yes, Lean In has little to offer women who want to focus on child rearing. So what. That’s not Sandberg’s audience.

Another:

I haven’t read Sandberg’s book, but am really looking forward to doing so. I don’t think I need to be a married, straight woman with children and a supportive husband in order to recognize a lot of other truths in the parts I’ve seen from Sandberg’s book. Do women, regardless of their marriage and childrearing plans, lean back more than their male counterparts? In my experience, I’d say, “Yes” and when they do show a more forward approach, their competitiveness or seriousness is sometimes greeted with less enthusiasm than when it’s seen in men. I’ll never forget an accomplished colleague of mine, who’s children were already off to college, who applied for a higher level position she didn’t get. When she asked the hiring committee (it was for a dean’s position at a university) how she could have improved her interview success, she was told, “You could have smiled more.” That was it. There is absolutely no way that would have ever been the feedback to a man.

But I digress. When I see that Kira Goldenberg asked: “(Where do butch women fit into that suggestion to adhere to societal rules of femininity?)”, I saw myself. I’m a 6’2″, athletic looking butch woman who wears men’s clothes to work. What I experience, at least at my university, is that I never get told I don’t smile enough. I’ve noticed men in higher positions do not really see me as a woman in the traditional sense. When I greet them, I’m eye-level with them or taller. I’m expected to be competitive. I get asked about sports and can answer because I played basketball in college. There’s no question of whether I’m an attractive, feminine woman they worry about thinking sexual thoughts about. I’m just not, for them, and that’s a relief. They shake my hand differently than they do more feminine women. And, I look like what they expect a dean or an higher-level administrator will look like … a man.

This idea that I adhere to societal rules of femininity just don’t apply to me and I’ve found a place where that works. At this point in my career and this stage in the evolution of gay rights, I’m beyond surprised to discover that being a butch has turned out to be a bit of an advantage for me. It only took 45 years or so of being on the outside to find that advantage, but I’ll take it.

My podcast with Michael Wolf on the Dish experiment is now up, and embedded below.

Virginia Hughes examines them:

[Rachel Best, a sociologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor who studies the politics of medical research funding] tracked federal funding and patient advocacy for 53 diseases over 19 years. Though it’s impossible to tease out cause and effect, on average for every $1,000 spent on lobbying, the disease received $25,000 more in research support the following year, she found.

The data also revealed more subtle consequences of lobbying. For example, the general classification by advocacy groups of people struck by disease as helpless ‘victims’ may have led to less funding for diseases that are stigmatized because they are brought about by the affected individuals’ own lifestyle choices. Liver cancer (caused by alcohol and hepatitis infections) and lung cancers (driven largely by cigarette smoking) received less and less funding over the past two decades than would be expected on the basis of their prevalence and mortality rates, she found. “That’s potentially a problem,” Best says. “We need to guard against these considerations of worthiness and deservingness becoming more influential on scientific decisions.”

In a follow up, Hughes wonders if the sequester will impact disease lobbying:

[I]t’s interesting that the rise of disease-specific organizations came at the same time that the NIH budget was growing rapidly. During that period, advocacy wasn’t a zero-sum game: the government could put more money into one disease without taking from another. With the budget cuts, though, advocates could get much more competitive. “It would be a shame if that meant that diseases that had stronger advocacy would be preserved at the expense of diseases without advocates,” says Clay Johnston, director of UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. “We would all suffer from that.”

According to a recent study (paywalled), they’re happier:

Out of 140 people over the age of 63, a pretty surprising 61 percent of the subjects said they played video games occasionally, and an even more surprising 35 percent said they played once a week. Okay, so some old people play video games — read: solitaire and/or Angry Birds — and they’re better off for it.

Scientists said that the gamers “reported higher levels of well-being,” while non-gamers reported more negative emotions and a tendency toward higher levels of depression.” The study’s abstract concludes, “Findings suggest that playing may serve as a positive activity associated with successful aging.”

Kevin Charles Redmon warns that the illegal “rhino horn trade is flourishing”:

Twenty years ago, a kilo of horn went for $4,700. Today, it sells for $65,000, making it more valuable than either gold or cocaine. Poaching is on the rise, and by some accounts, the number of endangered (but not yet extinct) white rhino killed doubles each year. By 2035, African wildlands could be devoid of the animal.

One possible, controversial way to avoid this fate? Horn farming:

“Rhino horn is composed entirely of keratin and regrows when cut,” writes [Duan] Biggs [a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland]. “Sedating a rhino to shave its horn can be done for as little as $20.” A white rhino produces about a kilo of horn per year, and the current global demand could be met by “farming” as few as 5,000 animals on a private, well-guarded preserve. (Natural rhino death “would also provide hundreds of horns annually,” even as the herd continues to grow at a rate near 10 percent.) The millions of dollars generated by the legal enterprise could be used to fund further conservation efforts, such as wildland preservation, sustainable rural development, and field research.

Jill Filipovic makes the case for women keeping their surnames after marriage:

Your name is your identity. The term for you is what situates you in the world. The cultural assumption that women will change their names upon marriage – the assumption that we’ll even think about it, and be in a position where we make a “choice” of whether to keep our names or take our husbands’ – cannot be without consequence. Part of how our brains function and make sense of a vast and confusing universe is by naming and categorizing. When women see our names as temporary or not really ours, and when we understand that part of being a woman is subsuming your own identity into our husband’s, that impacts our perception of ourselves and our role in the world. It lessens the belief that our existence is valuable unto itself, and that as individuals we are already whole. It disassociates us from ourselves, and feeds into a female understanding of self as relational – we are not simply who we are, we are defined by our role as someone’s wife or mother or daughter or sister.

Alan I. Abramowitz thinks not. But racism isn’t the main reason why:

The nonwhite share of the electorate in the states covered by Section 5 is expected to increase over the next few decades. Given the racially polarized pattern of voting in these states, this trend is likely to pose a growing threat to the dominance of the Republican Party in many of them. As a result, the political incentives for Republican leaders to pursue changes in election laws, rules and regulations in order to suppress or dilute minority voting strength will almost certainly increase in the future, making continued federal review of proposed changes crucial in order to ensure fair elections. Far from being outdated, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act may be needed more than ever in the coming decades.

Earlier Dish on the subject here.

Colin McSwiggen examines where we place blame in a technological society:

Do guns kill people or do people kill people? Is it television or bad parenting that’s destroying the American family? Were the Fukushima meltdowns a man-made disaster or are nuclear reactors inherently unsafe? These questions all spawn from the same worn-out false dichotomy about the political nature of technology: is the problem us or it? …

As a cognitive scientist, [Don] Norman [seen in the video above] researched technical screw-ups. He observed people “making errors – sometimes serious ones – with mechanical devices… computer operating systems… even airplanes and nuclear power plants.” What he found is that guilt interferes with improvement, that people will invariably “either try to hide the error or blame themselves for ‘stupidity’ or ‘clumsiness,’” and as a result no one calls for better designs that could have prevented the problems in the first place. Norman’s great contribution to design discourse has been to shift the blame to the things, and demand that they be fixed.

A reader adds to this post:

Living in Colorado, we are impacted by fracking – not only on the Western Slope, but also in the counties north of Metro Denver. Missing from this discussion is the significance of water. Water is scarce in the West, and Colorado is situated in the High Plains Desert. Typical precipitation averages 15″ annually, and the West continues in a serious drought pattern.  There are already conflicts between agricultural needs, thirsty Front Range cities, stream flows necessary for fish and animals – plus water required by downstream states.

Fracking uses significant amounts of water, and it can’t be reused. The deep pockets of energy companies are outbidding farmers for extra water, drying up agricultural lands and putting more pressure on farm families to sell out. Increases in air pollution from well gas fumes escaping, and drilling that encroaches on housing developments also complicate the situation.