Friday, July 12, 2013

Weekend Reading: The Not Quite Back to Normal Edition

I'm still trying to get back into my usual routine, so I have links but haven't had the spare mental capacity to organize them into a topic or write much commentary this week.

Also- if you have any advice on navigating the two-body problem, particularly if one of the two bodies is not American, please go to yesterday's post and leave a comment.

Here are the links:

Jeff Eaton has a great post about why we need things like anti-harassment policies at conferences. I really like the analogy to coding standards.

The Wired profile of Melody Meckfessel, a lead engineer at Google, commits the cardinal sin of discussing a powerful woman's wardrobe, but at least this time it is in support of a more general point. And it is an interesting profile- worth a read.
I almost don't believe it- a New York Times article about motherhood that doesn't make me want to scream. I like this quote:

"Women and men slip into these gender roles easily, however egalitarian we think we are. After pregnancy comes maternity leave, and before we know it we mothers are the resident experts on child care, thus boxing ourselves into a responsibility that is so much lighter if truly shared and also depriving fathers of a deeper relationship with their children than many can imagine."

And think it is something we should bear in mind as we think about how parental leaves should be handled. I really credit the early sharing of child care responsibility (we split the work week during our kids' 4th months) with helping establish our egalitarian child care patterns. But I'm too brain-fried to say anything more about that right now.

Whitney Johnson writes about the fallacy of the idea that only young people make good entrepreneurs:

"Twice as many successful entrepreneurs are over 50 as under 25."

 Kim O'Grady writes about discovering gender discrimination when making it clear that he is a man completely changed his job search luck.

And let's end with some sweetness and light. The We Are The 15 Percent tumblr with pictures of inter-racial couple is awesome.

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous5:02 AM

    I find it really hard to believe that the NYTimes posted something on motherhood that isn't cringe-worthy.

    I was just playing with age stats for the self-employed last night when working on an ask the grumpies post. And yes, they skew older.

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  2. Anonymous5:04 AM

    p.s. My 6 year old's front teeth are still going strong with no signs of wiggles.

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    1. There is so much variation in teeth timing! This was the last front tooth to go. The top two hung on and on and on and got all snaggly and frankly creeped me out. I was really glad to see them go in the end! Her bottom two new teeth are already on the way in.

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    2. Anonymous1:08 PM

      I was almost 7 before I lost my first tooth, so I figure it runs in the family.

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    3. Anonymous5:41 PM

      Speaking of loose teeth, DC1 has a wiggler! He's growing up.

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  3. I hear what you're saying about parenting leave and splitting care, but I had a different experience, which is that even though I took extended maternity leaves (in the realm of 7 months), my husband and I established very equal parenting. To me, saying that maternity leave sets up unequal parenting is like saying breastfeeding sets up unequal parenting. My response is: No, unequal partnerships set up unequal parenting. I think you can have one full time stay at home parent and still have co-parenting. I mean, I'm all in favor of opening the doors to let men have more parental leave and more paternal involvement in child care! But I wouldn't want to see any kind of system that says it has to be set up like X because that's the only way we can get dads involved. When my husband came home from work, I handed him the baby and said, here, he's yours until you put him to bed, and I walked away.

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