Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Every year at about this time we at work are asked to take part in "Take Our Daughters to Work Day." Every year, someone -- usually single or childless and younger than I -- comes up to me and gleefully asks whether I'm going to participate. And I give him/her a baleful look and say "no," and (s)he looks at me like I'm some sort of fun-squashing anti-feminist. In the interest of professional courtesy, I bite my tongue and change the subject. But inside I'm hopping mad.
You see, I'm a father of four girls: 15, 13, 11 and 10. That gives me approximately 15-plus years more experience than most who ask me to attend. The idea, perhaps innocent at first glance, behind this day is to "bond" with your daughters and show them career choices and encourage them that there's nothing standing in the way of whatever they want to pursue. Noble ideas maybe, but ...
1. Since when does bonding only happen on one day out of the whole year? I take them to work plenty of other times, and they have fun drawing on my board or playing with the Razor scooters folks use to cross campus.
2. It's MY job (and my wife's) to help them to grow up, to help them believe they can do whatever they want. There's an implicit message in this that somehow we're lacking. Like, we need a day to be with them sanctioned by work, and they need a day to find out what working is like?
3. They're still kids, for God's sake. Why should they get caught up worrying about careers just yet? This is a culture and an industry (I work for a high-tech company in Silicon Valley) that works too hard. Furthermore, it's driven on hype and the illusion that working insanely hard gets you some piece of a $500,000 outhouse. I've told my kids repeatedly I want them to be able to stay in school as long as possible. I don't want them to have to work as hard as I have.
4. Since this is a software company, there's some kind of special urgency with getting girls comfortable with "science." Bullshit. Most programming in this industry is NOT science. It's drudgery, and it's hard work. It's re-implementing the same, tired, first-year programming solutions, over and over again. It's propped up by young men, increasingly from overseas, willing to put themselves through this ringer, believing the illusions I outlined above or being too green or unassertive to say "no." Maybe there's some neat programming going on somewhere, but it's more likely in academia, or in research arms of companies like IBM, MS or Xerox. Yes, it's overwhelmingly male, but I say girls -- women -- are smarter than to subject themselves to it. And yes, there are other choices, like management or marketing, but that's not "science" either. Ultimately, one sells out and buys in to the hype and the overdriven hours.
5. I can't help but feel this "day" is compensation for the guilt-ridden women who make (in my estimation) the terrible choice to have their kids raised by someone else. I've been fortunate enough to have made enough to not require my partner to do the same. She works now, anyway, now that the kids are fairly self-sufficient. I'm not against mothers working. I'm against the decay of families, and I'm against the glib acceptance of dumping your newborn-to-toddler off somewhere in favor of "career." Since I have not fully accepted this separation after 15 years -- I miss them terribly, every day -- I cannot imagine a young mother doing this.
6. Last year on this same occasion, I walked out of the cafeteria and stumbled on a company-wide party for the day's participants out on a patio. A speech was being given by a "suit" (or should it be "suitess"?) to the girls. She was saying, "Look at me. I'm 30-something years old and I'm not married. You TOO can have this life!"
And I thought, whose agenda are you promoting? Girls aren't imprinted with having to marry anymore! Girls are -- if you just follow effing popular culture -- imprinted with an utterly confusing hodgepodge of anti-feminine messages, like you have to be sexy, but you can't be a slut.
7. Lastly, what about the status of boys? When I was a kid back in the '60s, there used to be school- or church-sponsored father-son days. They were wonderful and not work-related. My dad and I went on a ride on a submarine or went to a baseball game, for example. That was cool.
-- John Graham
You state clearly what I see as a father of three teenagers -- two boys and a girl. I am confronted with the feminization of my two boys at every turn. It is expected for the girl to compete and succeed while the boys are expected to rebel and fail. The girl can compete for whatever she wants, succeed in whatever she wants, dress up or down.
If the boys compete, they are encouraged to be bad sportsmen. If they can't win, they are not expected to try, because failure would bruise their famously fragile egos. They are not expected to compete just for the love of the sport but are told that winning does not matter. They are not told the other half of that saying, though -- that it is your effort that counts. After a close girls' game, the winners often clap for the losers or genuinely praise their skill and daring on the field. After the boys' ice hockey games, though, there are fights and taunts, even when the outcome was never in doubt. The coaches and parents participate and think it is cute.
The girls are expected to make the grades, and the boys are excused for bad grades. My son's English teacher thinks that the only books interesting to the boys are those that involve fighting and killing.
-- B.W. Landstreet
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