So I think a normal person would not be feeling woeful during her spring break.
No such thing as a normal person. :-) Holidays help me to stop feeling stressful, but if you have to write papers then it isn't really a proper holiday. Woeful for me is usually caused by other people (or the lack thereof) so is fairly independent of breaks from work/school.
I haven't read Maureen Dowd's book, though I'd read this article: http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2005/11/08/dowd/index.html , which made me interested in reading it. My thoughts about women, femininity and careers are very confused. I don't understand women who have no interest in finding rewarding work at all, but I do sympathise entirely with women who want to have families and not work for some period &/or work part-time. But in my field of academia (astrophysics), at least, there's something odd going on that seems related to Maureen Dowd's ideas about educated women and educated men: nearly all the male academics either (the majority) have accomodating wives who have given up their careers to follow them round the world, or are such single-minded ambitious types that they haven't ever had long-term partners. OTOH, I have never yet met a female academic in my area who fits into the second category, I've met *one* who has a partner with a flexible job who has been able to follow her around, and all of the rest (myself included) have a male academic partner (usually more senior) for whom they've had to make varying degrees of career sacrifice to be in the same place. Far more women than men get to PhD level and then leave the field because they can't find a job in the same place as their partner. I think there are two interesting things going on here: firstly bright, highly educated women end up in relationships with bright, highly educated men (often in the same field), whereas a much larger fraction of bright, highly educated men have less educated female partners (ignoring non-hetero relationships for simplicity here), and secondly, women end up being the accommodating ones career-wise no matter what (usually for what seem like logical reasons within individual relationships, such as the man earning more and/or having a permanent job, or wanting to have kids). I think the first of these is most interesting: obviously it's partly because age gaps in relationships tend to go in one direction, but I think the fact that nearly all female academics have academic partners, whereas a far smaller fraction of male academics do also says something about differences in how men and women choose partners. I don't actually have any statistics to back up what I'm saying here, but my anecdotal experience suggests this applies to all the natural sciences. Is the situation different in arts subjects?
This is way too long, so I'll shut up at this point. :-)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-03-28 06:22 pm (UTC)No such thing as a normal person. :-) Holidays help me to stop feeling stressful, but if you have to write papers then it isn't really a proper holiday. Woeful for me is usually caused by other people (or the lack thereof) so is fairly independent of breaks from work/school.
I haven't read Maureen Dowd's book, though I'd read this article: http://dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2005/11/08/dowd/index.html , which made me interested in reading it. My thoughts about women, femininity and careers are very confused. I don't understand women who have no interest in finding rewarding work at all, but I do sympathise entirely with women who want to have families and not work for some period &/or work part-time. But in my field of academia (astrophysics), at least, there's something odd going on that seems related to Maureen Dowd's ideas about educated women and educated men: nearly all the male academics either (the majority) have accomodating wives who have given up their careers to follow them round the world, or are such single-minded ambitious types that they haven't ever had long-term partners. OTOH, I have never yet met a female academic in my area who fits into the second category, I've met *one* who has a partner with a flexible job who has been able to follow her around, and all of the rest (myself included) have a male academic partner (usually more senior) for whom they've had to make varying degrees of career sacrifice to be in the same place. Far more women than men get to PhD level and then leave the field because they can't find a job in the same place as their partner. I think there are two interesting things going on here: firstly bright, highly educated women end up in relationships with bright, highly educated men (often in the same field), whereas a much larger fraction of bright, highly educated men have less educated female partners (ignoring non-hetero relationships for simplicity here), and secondly, women end up being the accommodating ones career-wise no matter what (usually for what seem like logical reasons within individual relationships, such as the man earning more and/or having a permanent job, or wanting to have kids). I think the first of these is most interesting: obviously it's partly because age gaps in relationships tend to go in one direction, but I think the fact that nearly all female academics have academic partners, whereas a far smaller fraction of male academics do also says something about differences in how men and women choose partners. I don't actually have any statistics to back up what I'm saying here, but my anecdotal experience suggests this applies to all the natural sciences. Is the situation different in arts subjects?
This is way too long, so I'll shut up at this point. :-)