The headline is a grabber: "Female Ivy League Graduates Have a Duty to Stay in the Workforce." In the piece itself, Goff actually stops well short of endorsing that position wholeheartedly. She acknowledges that "most sane and fair people can agree that any woman has the right to make whatever choice she believes is best for her family--whether that is choosing to stay home full-time or work outside of the home," but in the same sentence she suggests that "women have a definite responsibility to make choices for the good of all women, such as putting an elite degree to use outside of the home."What I'm curious about is this assumption by Goff that women in the workplace can be assumed to be, even in part, doing something that advances "the good of all women." That could be true, but why ought it to be assumed?
Similarly, Goff disavows the belief "that every woman should be made to feel as though [she] must choose between being committed to [her] children or committed to the sisterhood of women's advancement," then in the next sentence affirms that a woman with a Harvard Law School degree who forgoes a lengthy professional career has "wasted" an "opportunity."
There are lots of men who get degrees from Ivy League schools, but it has never occurred to me to think that their degrees do me (or men generally) any good. In fact, the opposite is true: men ordinarily think of other men as competition, and so a man obtaining an advanced degree from a school with a high reputation means that my opportunities are in a certan sense going to decrease, not increase. This is because any job that we might compete for he is more likely to obtain, given the respect his credentials will enjoy.
That is not necessarily true, of course: he could use the knowledge gained while seeking his degree to start a business that could employ me, and that would increase my opportunities. But entrepreneurs don't usually require advanced degrees, let alone from famous schools: given the expense of obtaining such a credential, most seekers understandably put it to use in competition for positions in government, finance, or in universities. That's where the big advantages of high starting pay favor them most. So normally, then, a man (or a woman) who gets an Ivy League degree is occupying a space that is then not available for others to occupy.
Of course, there's a sense in which whatever they do (apart from government), they're contributing to an economy whose expansion increases opportunities for everyone. But if you're a man (or woman) who wants a job, the less competition the better -- and the fewer people with Ivy League degrees seeking the job you want, the more likely you will get it.
Now, Goff might be arguing that women have a duty to get into positions to hire and promote women; but of course discriminating in favor of women is illegal, so surely she doesn't mean to advocate for that. After all, a business who made it a policy to hire and promote only or especially men would be in danger of large lawsuits. Certainly she can't be advocating for women who obtain such positions to put their company at risk. That would be a violation of their duty to their employers.
It used to be said that women being present at all in a job opened opportunities for women, simply because getting their first made the point that women could do it. Surely, though, that is at least a generation past: there aren't any jobs left in the economy that women don't do, except the ones they don't choose to do. We haven't had a female President, but not because anyone thinks we couldn't possibly have one: rather, it is only because Democrats in 2004 preferred then-Senator Obama to then-Senator Clinton. If she had won the Democratic primary that year, it is all but certain she would have been elected to the Presidency.
So maybe Goff's assumption is outdated. It could be the mark of a true equality if women began to regard other women with advanced degrees the same way they think of the men who compete with them: as competitors out for their own good, and if hired, the good of their employer. Expecting them to help you is an expectation misplaced. Not only will they probably not, they probably ought not. Their duties in the market lie elsewhere.
7 comments:
Well Grim, that's clearly just a sign that we're part of the privileged Patriarchy that we don't NEED other men to put aside their families for the "good of men everywhere".
/sarc
What puerile nonsense. This is just more of the "mommy shaming" that I see women doing to each other. The stay at home moms rip at the professional moms who put their kids through daycare as "uncaring mothers" and the professional moms who rip the stay at home moms for not advancing "The Great Sisterhood" or whatever.
For crying out loud, they rip each other over breastfeeding or not. I personally don't get it. My life and worth as a person are not predicated on the actions someone else in my place does or does not take.
What Goff says is:
do the best-educated women in America have a responsibility to use the tools they acquire at top educational institutions to stay in the workplace and shatter glass ceilings?
I think what she's talking about is the idea that we need some critical mass of women in lofty positions in order to render the idea of women being in those positions commonplace. So while, yes, all jobs are open to women, there are still levels of accomplishment where women are a rarity and this makes it harder for other women to reach those levels.
I suspect the other, unvoiced concern is that if increasing numbers of women don't use their Ivy League degrees in a career, Ivy League schools may become less eager to admit women. This is similar to the idea that women who do not return to work after maternity leave make employers less willing to hire and promote women of child-bearing years.
The idea is that what a woman does is considered representative of her entire sex (or gender, never sure which to use when) and so all women have a responsibility to act in such a way that no one can use any woman's actions to justify denying other women gender-neutral achievement.
...women have a definite responsibility to make choices for the good of all women.... and That degree could have gone to a woman who does want to spend her entire life using it to advance the cause of women....
I have to wonder at Goff's pseudo-logic in assuming that "women" have in some way gained this dominion over an individual. Whence this dominion?
Eric Hines
I'd like to know why this moron thinks there are only ten colleges in this country.
The Ivy League was something special 100 or 150 years ago, when they had a near monopoly on advanced degrees. Their monopoly on high government office started to really crumble in the 80s. It will never recover.
Valerie
Anon 6:30....actually, I think it's just the other way around. Ivy League degrees have become far more important than they were 100 years ago, or even 40 years ago. Here's something Peter Drucker wrote back in 1969, in contrasting the European and American approaches to higher education:
"One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…
It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A. and M. is an engineer and not a draftsman. Yet this is the flexibility Europe needs in order to overcome the brain drain and to close the technology gap."
America has now moved much closer to what Drucker defined as the European model..the claim of Harvard Law School to be a Grande Ecole with privileged position for its graduates has been substantially accepted.
The claim of "Ivy League" having more cachet is really linked to cronyism more than anything else.
The original question, I think hinges on the desires of the women in question. Through social media like Facebook, I have reconnected with various women I knew in college, and more of them than not, are not actually working at what they got degrees in, but rather are now working at being upper-middle class suburban homemakers (or whatever term you wish to use).
A lot of this analysis is short-sighted though.
Raising children takes, what? Twenty years with today's small families? Women live into their 80s nowadays.
I stayed home to raise my boys and would do it again, but what about the second half of a person's life? It's not really an either-or (or at least it doesn't have to be).
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