Role of Women

This posting's issue is gender. Would a better tomorrow see a change in the roles held by men and women? Would they be more equal? Plato's Republic is one example that seems to suggest they would be, not that the issue is entirely resolved there.

Contemporary author Sylvia Ann Hewlett suggests that gender is an issue in current society, and that women continue to be marginalized. It is likely she would agree that greater equality would be appropriate in any more utopian tomorrow. What form do you think would that equality take? It's useful to consider both far-fetched and reasonable possibilities (in part because different people consider different things reasonable or extreme).

Excerpt from the review of Sylvia Ann Hewlett's new book (in the Guardian):

Hewlett's latest research shows that 37% of professional women will drop out at some point in their careers, either to look after children or ailing parents, and another third will take what Hewlett calls "a scenic route", going part-time for a while, perhaps. And if these women try to "on-ramp" again, they "get lost on re-entry", paying enormous fines, in terms of both cash and their career arc, for taking trying to go outside what Hewlett calls the "male competitive model" built on a bedrock of unbroken service. "Two-thirds of women are sideswiped, side-lined, pretty much for the rest of their lives, by this model," she says.

Even more depressingly, Hewlett says, the situation has been getting worse over the past decade. Globalisation, modern communication technology, plus what she sees as the increasing polarisation of the really good jobs and all the rest, has led to a rise in "extreme working". "The workload has really gone through the roof," she says, "and the fact that increasing numbers of women are stepping back for a while, or stepping out for a while, is actually not because they got wimpier, but because the work model got worse. And not only did jobs get more extreme, but parenting also got more extreme. The pressure on parents to be massively engaged with their kids has really gone up." It's the "folk who can pony up the 73-hour week", she says, who win in the new world.

So that is the bad news: an enormous, largely ignored, female brain drain. But there is good news too: Hewlett says that things have begun to change, that soon employers everywhere are going to have to wake up to the repercussions of this
wholesale squandering of female training and talent.

Read the whole thing:
http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2094856,00.html