Speaking at Duke

Someone took pictures at my conference at Duke last week and I got some of me pontificating...




The poses are a little strange, no? I'm holding the slide clicker but have no idea why my hand is on my butt. Funnily, all the people speaking were making odd gestures in the pix. I like the middle one as it shows two of my colleagues there. Matt is on the left, the current director of the Center at Fuqua that I'm part of, and Greg is on the right, the Center's founder and my research partner. They are all wonderful people and the week with them and other friends and colleagues was a delight. They even took us out one night to see some modern ballet at the brand new performance hall in Durham. I put on a slinky black dress and was not overdressed! (Ok, so actually it was a leftover maternity dress, but it does not look like one and I was able to eat dinner without worrying about splitting a seam!) I also connected and re-connected with some wonderful women colleagues, from NYC, London and Singapore. Totally charming.

The fam all did fine here, though Mike was quite worn out when I got home. I took the kids out to the pool most of the day Sat to give him a break and we had a blast! I've got some very happy water babies!! No pix of that day - my hands were on Abby the fish the entire time.

Gearing Up For Work

Just a note that summer is slipping away and it's becoming sadly clear that my nice long maternity leave is about to actually end. I've really enjoyed it this time!! My syllabus and readings for Duke were due this week, and I've begun work on a new project at Duke that has, gasp, real deadlines and milestones. We've put together a job description for a research associate and will be hiring one soon. The Columbia teaching will start in January.

People are inviting me to conferences, to do other contract work, and I have to admit to them that I am, in fact, working again. Ack! Though in fact, I will be doing to part-time dance I've been doing for well, um, about 7 years now, wow. Working 2 days a week and taking care of the kids 3 days a week. Though it will be a much tighter division of time now, made possible by a new babysitter who starts next week. The good news is that I will get to travel again - weekly to Duke and to other locales from time to time, and I really do love that. Someone invited me to speak at an event outside of Portsmouth, NH in December and I noticed today that the incredible hotel they're putting us up in has a day spa. I think I need to reserve my massage now!!! (and yes, I WILL be scheduling my flights around the spa's hours.)

So here's to working. The satisfaction and identity that comes from doing what you love is good for me, and ultimately, good for my family. Not to mention that income! And just as important, here's to great hotel spas (and great babysitters!)!!

Ready to Nest in Peace

Whew! I finished my term teaching at Duke on Tuesday. It was a total pleasure AND I am totally relieved to be through. No more worries about going into labor on I-85. No more worries about my few work-appropriate maternity clothes getting too tight for public view. No more rolling a hugely heavy computer bag full of papers to grade around campus, and no more lifting it in and out of the car.

I still have papers to grade but now I can do it from the comfort of my home, in shlumpy sweats, free to look and feel like the crazy pregnant woman that I am.

They were very nice on my last day - my TA gave me gifts which included a Duke sweatshirt for Jake, a tiny Duke t-shirt for baby, and a Duke mug for me.

All in all, a great experience and I look forward to continuing to work with them. After MARCH, that is!

Between now and then, I'm home free. All I have to work on now is my other consulting projects, Hannukah, Christmas, getting ready for baby, labor, and learning to care for a newborn and a toddler at once.

Now THAT sounds really relaxing, doesn't it??!! :)

Fall: Back into the Groove

Here are some pix from when Grandma was here. The top is Jake and Gram in the yard on Halloween night right before we went trick or treating. Gram is our neighbor, and was an adorable cowboy. (And Jake, of course, refused his costumes, but as you can see was in quite good humor about it.)

Not much new to report today. Am too tired from my travels and work deadlines! Once I got back from Boston, I needed to get my new syllabus together and posted session by session on the university intranet so that students can start bidding on classes. Got that done yesterday. And got some early compliments on it from my invited guest speakers. That was nice!

Also, since the weather has been so balmy (76 today!) for early November, we've been spending a lot of time outside. We've had about 4 out of 6 meals out in the past 3 days, including a great dinner on the downtown mall in the dark last night. Today Jake and I emerged from the main library downtown with about 30 books and then hiked through a field to visit some horses at a nearby vineyard. He kept repeating "Bye, horsies!" all the way home.

Our leaves are now about 80% down and are covering every inch of our yard. Mike needs some help with the gutters. I'm hoping tomorrow the weather won't be as nice so I can turn my attention to the inside of the house, which looks like a cyclone hit it. Yikes!

Over the Boston Harbor

That's where I've been looking most of the day.

I'm in Boston, at a board meeting and conference. I'm co-chair of the board of a nonprofit whose members invest in socially-responible and environmentally sustainable companies.

Our board meeting went very well. The org's leader for over 5 years is on sabbatical this year, and amazingly enough, we are also flush with cash for the first time ever. The staff is doing a great job and we decided to give them a generous bonus pool for the year. That felt very good and they sure do deserve it.

And tonight several old friends appeared and I got to catch up with them. One is a guy who worked for me about 5 years ago. He's now living in London, working at an investment firm chaired by Al Gore, and has an 11-month old girl at home. My friend is a born networker and schmoozer but now hates travelling and tries to spend as much time as he can with her.

His wife is working three days a week, and while she works the daughter is at home with an amazing nanny. They'd like to move back to NY but he cannot imagine he'd ever get to see his daughter if they did. Living in Manhattan, he said, they'd both have to work more and if they moved somewhere affordable out of the city, the length of commuting time would also cut into his daughter time. He says London is easier - great nannies who are affordable AND people just work less, period. He seems quite happy, though apparently the kid's American grandparents are heartbroken that she's so far away.

Another interesting family/work challenge - they do seem to be everywhere when you start to look!

One of our org's members, Matt S., read to us tonight from his book, called Waking. He made an impassioned, very moving argument that the impulse that drives us to want to make our money more connected to the planet is similar to the one that connects our minds and body. He was in a car accident at age 13 and became a paraplegic. His story is about disconnecting, and then reconnecting, his own mind and body. It occured to me that babymaking and parenting also require a new kind of connection with your body. Biology prevails. As will the planet, whether we choose to stop polluting it and exploiting its resources or not. Matt now runs a yoga studio and has invested in social companies for over 12 years. Great guy. And he signed a book copy for me. I feel honored!

Free Day

Yesterday was my Free day. My day for doing whatever I want, whenever I want. Usually it's also the day I get the most work done. Most of yesterday I spent working, with a bit of shopping thrown in.

Two interesting things of note.

The first was a conversation with a colleague, Jay G. He is a former entrepreneur interested in motivating other entrepreneurs to strive to become more socially and environmentally responsible. His idea is to create standards of practice for companies (like the CERES standards or Global Reporting Initiative standards in that they are for companies as a whole), but that act more like LEED standards, in that they are voluntary certification-like guidelines and operate through a self-nomination and licensing structure. The interesting part of it is that if you meet enough of the criteria, you get certified to use a logo, kind of like a UL-listing, that enables customers and other stakeholders to recognize you as a "B-corp," or a for-benefit corp. I think it's an ingenius way to get people to appreciate the kinds of amazing things companies can do behind the scenes, without getting bogged down in detail. They've also done some legal work to get some language used in corporate charters that would allow and actually force boards to consider social and environmental ramifications alongsided fiduciary obligations. They've been putting this together for over a year and are about to become incorporated as a 501(c)3. Good stuff all around. They're sending more info soon on their classification system. I can't wait.

My second substantive experience happened by accident. After dinner and a quick jaunt at the library to pick up a book on HOLD, I decided to stretch my legs and walk around downtown. Imagine my surprise to find a film festival just getting started and one ticket left to a documentary on Iraq that apparently was very popular at Sundance.

So, I bit. I bought the ticket and immersedd myself in thoughts about Iraq from 10 to midnight. The film was called Iraq in Fragments, and was a collection of three separate stories taken over several years, 2002-2005.

New York Magazine Review


Film Forum in NY's description:
"A stunningly photographed, poetically rendered documentary of Iraq today, seen through the eyes of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. James Longley's 3-part opus is a series of intimate, passionately felt portraits: a fatherless 11-year-old is apprenticed to a cruel owner of a Baghdad garage; Sadr followers in two Shiite cities rally for regional elections while enforcing Islamic law at the point of a gun; a family of Kurdish farmers welcomes the US presence, which has allowed them a measure of freedom previously denied."

That sums it up well. There wasn't one overarching clear message. Except that maybe things are really a mess over there, for those trying to live their lives . Not very political and very little about our military, except in the footage, in which tanks and young american soldiers are sitting around in Baghdad, looking like time bombs waiting to explode. They look so ominous and dangerous, especially from the eyes of the boy in the first story. I had to keep reminding myself that most of them are farmboys from Kansas. But looking at the complicated culture they are sitting in, this notion is hardly reassuring. I am certain they are not trained to really understand these people at all. How sad.


I liked how this film puts you in the shoes of real people, made you go back and forth in your sympathies for them, and defies easy description. There were some interesting themes though. One was about fathers and sons. the first story was about a 11 year old boy (pictured at right) whose father was tortured and killed by Saddam, and who had to work to support his mother and aunt. His abusive boss became his new father figure, and his life was filled with so much instability he was doing the first grade for the 4th time, unable to read or write.


In the second story, the religious leader the filmmaker followed was the son of a much more famous leader. His father was fat and opinionated, but the son was lean, extremely articulate, and spent a lot of time behind closed doors as a democratic negotiator, urging the factions to come together and make sure their elections were democratic. I was totally in awe of their quiet grace (with a notable exception - public self-flagellation at group religious marches, to the point of some of the men being covered in their own blood, but I chalked that up to self-directed religious custom) . Until they took some merchants in the marketplace hostage with machine guns, abused them and held them blindfolded, all for selling alcohol in the market. No warning or anything.

The last story was the most bucolic and pastoral. The kurds are so grateful to Americans for keeping them from being systematically killed by Saddam, and this group lives so far in the countryside as to be unterrorized by the current American occupation. It was kind of the filmmaker to end with it, as it was easy on the spirit and easy on the eyes. The father wishes his son (who is blond and built and could be the next American hearthrob he is so goodlooking) could be more educated and have more opportunities than he did. The son feels obligations to keep the family business, sheep-tending and brick-baking, going. And we see he doesn't realize how lucky he is to be away from any city right now.

There's a great page on the film's website with James Langley's production notes about what happened behind the scenes.

One other clear message: the next generation of Iraqis is going to be affected by our actions there for a VERY long time.

Equity After the Kids?

So, is it possible to have equitable division of home and childcare labor after having children?

I poked around today and found that many women blogging seem to think not. And are peeved that even for highly educated career-oriented women, it just doesn't seem to happen.

The most referred to book on the topic seemed to be: Kidding Ourselves: Breadwinning, Babies, and Bargaining Power, by Rhona Mahony, reviewed here.

The review states:
"Mahony argues that as long as women choose careers that don't maximize their earning potential and that give them flexibility, marry men who have more earning potential and less flexibility, and care more for their children as infants, they will always wind up doing more of the child care and housework."

So three potential whammmies: if you haven't already chosen a "primary earner" type career, OR married a man who earn less than you or has more flexibility OR you are better at or more experienced or devoted to children than he is, you will not achieve equity at home. That is quite a list. Breastfeeding alone would topple the odds within most couples. And then you pretty much have to start out as the primary earner between you. So whether you're my neighbor, a 20-something mother who's worked mostly as a waitress, or my former boss, a politician want-to-be corporate lawyer who would skip seeing her kids to pack in more meetings, you still get to face the lion's share of the work at home.

My old boss, is a very good example of this, come to think. She travelled the globe, earned over 500K per year, flew private jets, regularly was away from her two young boys from 5 am through 11pm at night (I know, because she was with me). She was also, ironically, rather famous for making some legal errors with her nanny. (Congress was unhappy about this and told her so, kind of publicly. Nannygate was the word they chose.) But I digress... And I remember, one day she had a phone call at work with her professor husband who was thus both more flexible and lessor earning from the list above. He was with the kids for the day and had NO IDEA what to do when her son almost suffocated from a peanut allergy, even though all the medicine DH needed was in a kitchen cabinet with typed up instructions. She flew out of her office into mine, nearly in tears: "Why does caring for the kids always all have to fall on me???"

No wonder this equity thing doesn't happen too often!

So, back to those of us in the less than 500K per year category. What do you do about this?

Well, here is a list of 8 tips of what to do to assure equitable division of labor with your husband. #6 is my favorite - choose the right guy! Basically, it says that being a full-time earner before you marry is NOT enough, and you have to consistently reframe and negotiate what working and earning money means.

And here is a response from Mary Tsao.

For a final installment on this topic, see Linda Hirshman's article in American Prospect, Homeward Bound, where she has named my notion that MANY women take years off from work to have children, the "drop-off story," and writes about it with unmitigating shock and surprise.

She asks:
"Why did this happen? The answer I discovered -- an answer neither feminist leaders nor women themselves want to face -- is that while the public world has changed, albeit imperfectly, to accommodate women among the elite, private lives have hardly budged. The real glass ceiling is at home."

Call it a glass ceiling (implying a societal dysfunction that penalizes women who try to move up), or call it a bunch of extremely high-achieving women (her sample is just these, unfortunately) who have decided that domestic life may be as important at times as the work they are being paid scads of money to do. This all may be about the inconsistency between corporate norms and expectations and the values of creating a healthy family. What if it turns out that the life feminists were viewing through the glass in 1960's is not all that great, we see now in 2006 that we've been invited in. It ain't what we hoped for. And after the mergers of the 80's and lay-offs and tech bust of the 90's, and the extreme pressues for quarterly earnings, blackberry-driven responsiveness, and globalization, this employee/employer compact really doesn't work so well, on a full-time basis, for most women with children. Hirshman never acknowledges this possibility.

Whichever way you state it, the point is that women are chosing to leave the workforce for a while. And that this is a completely different model than what the 1960's feminists argued and fought for, which her language of glass ceiling reminds us. It's not really about the ceiling if you're not pushing it or looking through it with envy. You're down by the window, opening it a crack to breathe in some fresh air, climb into the trees, explore places that are not run by corporate norms, and play with your kids for a while. And it may be for many that staying put in the company, or job-sharing or working part-time, or even taking a break from paid work, may be more consistent with your life values. And as a society we are truly unprepared to deal with this reality. Or support it, or reward it. What a shame.

And she has some rules too:
"There are three rules: Prepare yourself to qualify for good work, treat work seriously, and don’t put yourself in a position of unequal resources when you marry."

There's other really provoking stuff in there. She's seems afraid that the dropping out trend will lead back to the pre-feminism days of being uninvited to succeed, or stuck in the dead end job. I'll stop here and just urge you to read it.

I don't think any of it is a solution to equity in childcare and housework, but I think the broader context of realizing that society (and those that reward the primary earners) does not understand or condone drop-out behavior, which might in fact be the most rational response to the demands of today's employers. And unless we see these pressures for what they are, how can we negotiate a home life that benefits all?

Balancing Act

I spent the afternoon with a new and very good friend of mine, who is freaking out, having 8-day long migraines, from tension and stress. She and her husband are fine-tuning the details of their new life at the Lake. They moved here so she, the main bread-winner, could work part-time and spend the bulk of her time with her one year old son. The plan was that her husband would find a job once here with full benefits, and then she'd start having their second kid. The plan has not worked as planned so far: her job is part-time, the only one he's found is part-time, and they do not either of them earn good maternity benefits, so she feels stuck. In addition, it emerged that she has not been paid in over 2 months and when she was her employer, a major university, paid her half of what they were supposed to. She loves her neighborhood and new friends but misses CA and they both dream of moving back.

I gave her whatever practical advice I could muster (including skipping her meetings to stand over the lowlife in HR who is not returning her calls about not being paid), but thought about it long and hard. It is so tough to balance work and family when your roles are untraditional. She was the main earner, so they moved for her, and the new model is that while here he would become the main earner. But without being sure he could find the perfect thing in our relatively small labor market, it's possible that he will not. And it's also possible that she will have to work more to get full benefits and more pay to make their desired scenario work of being here to have a second kid. Apparently, she might be able to work just one more day a week and get much better benefits. It might be worth it!

I fear that the work-family balancing act is all much easier for people where the father is the main earner and the mother either works some, fulltime, or stays home. When the mother is the main wage-earner, all the pressures are magnified. She must worry about money and children and not offending the spouse about what she needs from him all at the same time. This 60s liberalism we all grew up with is much harder in reality than it was in Bob Dylan songs!

This all makes me feel very lucky that:

1. Our scenario is working, so far, at least. We both work part-time and can afford it, and calculated very good benefits that we buy directly into our costs from the get go. And if we do decide to have another child, neither of us has to negotiate with anyone over maternity leave. We don't get paid for being off, either, but at least we seem to be able to stretch or shrink the work we do to fit the time we have.

2. My husband works entirely from home and can timeshift nearly every major task, making my part-time work and trips possible. I didn't quite realize how unique and helpful this would be when he quit his fulltime job at the end of my pregnancy. It is a coup to the balance struggle.

3. We are planners. It may have seemed to many as if we jumped before looking but in actuality, Mike and I ran many different scenarios before settling on this one. And we bought a house that was relatively cheap and financed it cheaply to make our plan possible. And we are trying to live cheaply too. Emphasis on the "trying."

Speaking of cheap, much of my day was spent unpacking my last boxes from our move, over a YEAR AGO, in preparation for a yard sale we want to have next weekend. Nice to find some things I really like, and nice to be able to part with many we do not need!