Legal Commentary

The most interesting aspect of Lyrissa's fine post, below, is to me not the distinction between men and women who work and raise children.  Nor is it the distinction between working with or without parental guilt.  Those distinctions are probably alive and well, but my suspicion is that the guilt or guiltlessness gap has narrowed.  To me it involves two other things.

The first is the possibility that while both men and women who work may feel guilty sometimes or often about balancing child-raising against work, women attach guilt to different aspects of those job.  Lyrissa, on her own description, feels no guilt about balancing parenting against many aspects of her professional duties.  But she does feel guilt about the act of writing itself.  As she recognizes, in fact very few if any people write like automatons, without time for reflection.  But writing strikes her as a more selfish act, one that provides less reason for her to take time away from family than, say, grading or class prep.  I doubt that men in the same field feel no guilt about these things, but I do sense (entirely anecdotally) that they feel less guilt about writing, or the same amount of guilt that they do about writing and, say, class prep.  And it is this focus on feeling guilty or not guilty about writing, as opposed to other matters, that interests me.  On an entirely speculative basis, I would say that it seems to me that writing guilt seems connected to the idea of selfishness versus selflessness.  It is OK to take time away from one's kids if one is meeting obligations to others, serving others and not falling short of their actual or perceived expectations of you (expectations that women may feel especially keenly); it is somehow not OK if one takes time away from parenting to engage in an act that is solitary, that involves the perceived "luxury" of time and thought, and that largely serves one's own ambitions and little else.  

I'm not valorizing one thing or another.  Perhaps all working parents should feel a certain amount of guilt, or at least tension, about how they balance one set of obligations against another.  To say there is a gender divide does not tell us what the appropriate behavior is in these circumstances, just that there are different reactions to them.  It is worth noting, though, that since the legal academy uses writing as its primary measure for promotion, lateral hires, and so on, to the extent that women feel more guilt about writing than about other aspects of their jobs and men do not, this will tend to disadvantage women.  Again, that doesn't suggest we shouldn't value writing.  But it suggests an important divide with important effects that are worth thinking about.  My own view would be to encourage academics to feel an appropriate amount of need to balance professional and personal obligations, and not to convince themselves that the right approach is no guilt at all.  Perhaps we should all be thinking more about our families.  But I would say there is no better reason to feel guilt about writing than about the other aspects of one's job, even though writing inevitably involves stretches of thought and reflection.

The other point I would make is that, at least in this one single story, when it came time to find a way of accommodating between work and family, it was Lyrissa who found the babysitter.  One story hardly reflects her general experience; I do not know whether this was the norm in her family or an aberration, or what other assignments of duties have been made in her family.  But I can say from my own personal experience that my wife, who is also an extraordinarily busy and talented professional, probably more often takes responsibility for this task.  Consider it a confession.  The reasons may be gender-inflected but are not without complexity.  She may desire more strongly than I do to make a considered decision about babysitters, in which case it would make sense for her to devote more effort to this task.  And there may be some duties about which men often feel more casual (it's OK if a few dishes pile up in the sink) and women feel less casual (those dishes must be cleared before professional work begins).  It doesn't seem to me that one of those approaches is obviously right or wrong.  But as long as those reactions differ by gender, one member of the partnership will take on more family work than the other.  Obviously, I don't want to generalize too much, to assume that this picture is static, or to essentialize it.  The most I will say is that supporting my wife's professional life, which I emphatically and proudly do, ought to entail setting up the babysitter's schedule more often.