I'm warning you, this is going to be a vent.
I am so sick of women who fall into the "martyr" complex, where everything in their lives (esp. kids) is so much more important than their work. I'm doing a PhD right now and the only way I can survive in it is to make it my top priority. I do not understand these women who go into something as demanding as this (or any career that takes up a lot of time and significant amounts of "leisure time") with a couple of small kids, aging parents to take care of, etc. I mean if you can handle all those things, that's fine. But they never can, and they spend all this time complaining about why they can't get their work done or meet their deadlines. One woman today was talking about how this year, she's moved house, helped her mother move, looked after her mother-in-law after surgery, and helped her daughter find an apartment...so she hasn't had any time to write her dissertation.
Women complain all the time that they're not treated the same as men, not paid equally etc. When's the last time a man couldn't complete a work assignment because he had to look after a sick relative? Would a man leave work halfway through the day to pick up his daughter from day care because she had the sniffles? Interestingly this woman has a female partner, but she is always saying things like, "Well, Jane can't take time off easily because her job is too important." I think the key question is why does anyone need to take time off work to deal with this stuff? Deal with it in the evenings or weekends.
Because I am MNK, people make dismissive comments all the time like, "Well your life is just simpler than mine," or, "It's not that easy when you have kids." My life is simpler because I make it simpler, and my family members place reasonable demands on my time and understand when work takes precedence. That's it. My mother worked full time, all her friends worked, and never did they leave work early to look after some house or child related issue (they were nurses, so impossible to leave work). What has happened to today's women that they are so easily walked over and can't handle the life-work balance that my mom and her friends could thirty years ago?
We all have things in our lives that demand our time and attention: aging parents, house problems, money problems, health issues. But what I find with my colleagues with kids is it's just another excuse for why they need special treatment, need more time, need different deadlines. One woman took 10 yrs. to finish her PhD because she had at least two kids during her time here (I was only here during her last two years in the program, so I'm not sure how many she had). It's not like I haven't had problems during my time in academic life (for one thing my dad had surgery and was recovering for a few months afterwards) but it's never been a reason that I couldn't complete things on time.
If we as women want to have equal opportunities and equal pay, we have to stop playing this "poor me, I'm special" card all the time. It just makes all women look like they can't handle a regular workload, and frankly why wouldn't you prefer to hire a man in that case? Women are definitely in a male-dominated workplace at most universities, and one of the reasons they still face so much discrimination is that they're constantly asking for more time, more space, more whatever, to suit their family life. Men don't ask for these things.
I realize most of you don't fall into the "poor me" group but I'm sure you can sympathize!
