Shriver Report Has More Bad News Than Good for Working Women

I very much agree with this article. I think this continued overmothering and underfathering is holding women's progress back with many ramifications for women, and perhaps just as importantly, for children of both genders.

I think our slowness in reaching equality is also significantly harming children of both genders. I grew up in a patriarchical family and my father's inability to connect and be there for my brother and me has caused us a great deal of difficulty in our lives. It is critical I think to improve the quality of fathering in the US (and this is not just in poor families but also in middle class and wealthy families).

I am a 40-something lawyer and so am not in the Steinem generation of feminism. I grew up with Title IX. I think some women of my generation were naive and unprepared (and perhaps lazy) about what it was going to take to make the final push to get to equality in public life and hence many women of talent (including those who obtained degrees at the very law, medical, business schools to which Steinem's generation worked to get us access) chose to seek high status men as husbands and power and authority over children by being stay-at-home mothers instead of balancing this with the final trudge to equality in public life. It is indeed a terrible shame, as we have wasted a generation or two in women's progress, and many children are still suffering from not enough fathering.

kansasrefugee of CO 9:30PM October 20, 2009

Anthropologists say women & children, gathering seeds, roots & leaves, brought to family diets MOST of the family diet. Males, physically bigger & stronger, no doubt killed lots of animal food. But who says women didn't invent slingshots when they were making animal skin totes for babies? Maybe women invented bows & arrows after they chipped flints to scrape skin off meat? There must have been large, tall women who threw spears. Tracking would be natural for women who had to keep close watch on children. Surely women & children helped cut up & bring home prey. Women probably made footwraps for everyone. Did a man or woman notice fire could be carried in a burning branch? Who first noticed that after distant thunder there were floods & mudslides and told tribes to go uphill? Humanity survived through cooperative use of natural skills. Through natural selection, the most intelligent people were attracted to like kind, not always the most handsome or beautiful. When women abort conceptions because they don't want to bear offspring of a particular man, they are beneficially eugenically advancing evolution of humanity. Equal pay for same work will help everybody.

aura dawn veirs of CA 11:54PM October 18, 2009

There is going to be a huge torrent of vital statistical data concerning the affect of the current U.S. president on workweek produictivity and self-organizing. It can be said at this point that this year will have seen a radical shift of productivity to the front of the week.

Monday is traditionally of course the weakest day. So I guess if you like ramrodding, if you liked the David Stockman approach, the current president has "been effective." But in statistics there is never a single final outcome. Just as Tchaikovsky never repeats the beginning of "Swan Lake" which is its only well-known part, a year-long result of effort being forced to go to the front of the week is simply one of many events which the wonder of statistics will reveal.

Don Treact of WA 8:28PM October 15, 2009