Shared inequalities: at work and at home

Job swapping: his for hers. Gaye Dell

 

Author: Stephen S Holden, Associate professor at Bond University

Just as women face challenges in participating in the work domain, so men face challenges participating in the home domain.

Emma Watson in her much-discussed UN speech observed that inequalities faced by women are everyone’s problem, and importantly, they are only a part of the problem.

Just as inequalities are overlooked, so too are the solutions. Annabel Crabb recently observed that career women are frequently asked about how they manage their family lives while men never are.

Her solution is deceptively simple: “I don’t think the answer is to stop asking women. The answer is to start asking men.”

How are you managing your home life?

This question offers more than a promise of equal treatment of working women and men. It also draws attention to the need for work at home.

Unpaid household work is estimated to be equivalent to 50% of GDP. Who does this work? Women do. At a rate almost two times that of men and even greater if they have children.

However, while women do about two-thirds of the unpaid household work, men do about two-thirds of the paid work. These ratios have changed little in the last decade, suggestive of a norm.

What little change has been observed is women entering the workforce rather than men leaving. Work at home still needs to be done leading to what Crabb dubs The Wife Drought.

Hazards of paid work

Paid work offers attractive benefits, but it also has costs. Work is harmful to health and safety.
Men have higher rates of the work-related injuries, partly due to their job choices and higher participation.

And whether related to their greater engagement with the public sphere or not, men also experience higher rates of victimisation by crime, suicide and earlier death.

So why are men not leaving the work place simultaneously easing his own burden at work and a woman’s burden at home? Well, fathers who might most qualify for this job-swap face mixed signals.

No exit from work, no entry to home

While data show there has been a marked increase in stay-at-home fathers in the US over two decades, this growth is from a small base having little impact on male participation at work.

Fathers are given little encouragement as people place less value on fathers-at-home than mothers. Various sources suggest that men are even discouraged from engaging in activities related to children.

Charles Areni and I in our book The Other Glass Ceiling provide other instances: a dad shopping for his daughter’s undies is deemed a security risk; a single father searching for an au pair is suspicious.

Invisible barriers

Social norms are powerful and continue to operate against both men and women. Consider the following two scenarios we presented to people in some research:

“Chris is a single parent of two, a seven-year-old boy and a three-year old girl, and also the director of marketing for a medium-sized electronics firm. Today, Chris is scheduled to present key results from the quarterly sales report to the Board of Trustees but arrives for the meeting 15 minutes late due to having to drop the older boy at school, and the younger girl at day care. In addition to dishevelled hair, there is a noticeable stain down the left side of Chris’ suit, the result of the young girl vomiting at the end of her car trip after a hurried breakfast.”

“Terry is a single parent to a four year old, James. James spends some of his time with Terry and some with his other parent. Today, three police-officers and two child-safety officers have just arrived unannounced at Terry’s home. The child-safety officers indicate that specific allegations have been made that Terry has been abusing James. They insist on entering the house to interview first Terry, and then James. While the accusations have been made anonymously, it is perhaps significant to note that the separation of James’ parents was acrimonious.”

Our research shows that 95% of people presume that Chris in the first scenario is a woman, and 82% presume that Terry in the second is a man.

However, the gender was not stated in either scenario. It appears that we associate the failures with gender-role reversals, even if unconsciously.

Family as a social support system

For better or worse, our social systems are highly specialised with roles in the home and family remaining relatively unchanged.

Gender role specialisation is changing, but slowly. The participation by women at work and men at home are increasing as roles are apparently more negotiated than presumed.

Perhaps a limiting factor is that complete equality may be unattainable. While greater male-involvement at home could reduce the child-rearing burden faced by women, he cannot reduce a woman’s burden - and privilege - of being able to bear a child (as attested to by Monty Python).
In the working domain, progress is made as we see men letting go and women stepping up. This effort can be complemented in the home domain with fathers stepping up and mothers letting go.

Read the other pieces in our Gender equality at work series here.

Source: http://theconversation.com/shared-inequalities-at-work-and-at-home-32811

Love, wisdom and wonder: three reasons to celebrate philosophy

It’s World Philosophy Day today, a good time to consider
the tougher questions about our lives. Jef Safi/Flickr, CC BY-ND  

Author: Matthew Beard, Research Associate, Centre for Faith, Ethics and Society at University of Notre Dame Australia

Today (Wednesday, 19 November 2014) is UNESCO World Philosophy Day, a day aimed to “underline the enduring value of philosophy for the development of human thought, for each culture and for each individual”.

However, it was not so long ago that philosophy was the target of university funding cutbacks. Philosophy is commonly painted as a discipline defined by ivory tower musing and abstraction. We don’t often celebrate philosophy and many question its value. What makes philosophy so special?
We might start by saying a little about what philosophy actually is.

As every student who has ever enrolled in a philosophy subject knows, philosophy’s etymological roots lie in two Ancient Greek words: philo – loving, and sophia – wisdom. Thus, literally translated, philosophy is a love of wisdom.

This romantic notion is one that still resonates with philosophers today, but it doesn’t say much about what philosophy does, or what it offers to humanity. To answer that, we need to consider philosophy as an intellectual discipline.

Aristotle argued that philosophy begins with wonder. In this he is right, but more precisely, philosophy begins when we wonder about something. It is – like every intellectual discipline – a way of asking questions about the nature of things. In this way, philosophy is born of the very basic human disposition toward asking questions.

More than that though, philosophy asks questions of a particular type. British philosopher Isaiah Berlin argued that all disciplines are defined by the types of questions that they have been designed to answer. Again, the study begins with questions.

Most questions that human beings tend to ask can be divided into two categories: formal and empirical. Formal questions as those that can be answered by deduction from our knowledge of axiomatic truths: for instance, the answer to “are healthy behaviours ones that prolong our lives?” is discoverable merely by thinking logically about the concepts of health and life.

Empirical questions, by contrast, cannot be answered without observation of the material world. “Which behaviours are healthy?” cannot be answered without observing some large number of behaviours and tracking their effects on health.

However, there are another set of questions whose answers cannot be discovered either by formal or empirical inquiry. For instance, the question: “why should I be healthy?” or “should I fear losing my life?” cannot be deduced from the very concepts of life and health, nor discovered through observation of healthy, living beings.

These questions demand an entirely different method of analysis. This, Berlin argues, is what defines philosophical questions: ones that “cannot be answered either by observation or calculation.“ This describes our questions about life and health. To answer these questions requires a kind of knowledge that neither formal nor empirical inquiry can attain. In this case, we need an understanding of the value of human life.

Values cannot be observed: nor are they (with apologies to Immanuel Kant) mere matters of deduction from self-evident truths. Rather, they imply entirely new kinds of questions about value, right and wrong, and the relevant context. Today, determining whether, and under what conditions, life is valuable is as pertinent a question as ever - despite all our advances in scientific analysis and a deepening understanding of what life – as a concept – actually is.

Answering a question like this requires more than clinical facts regarding levels of pain, likelihood of recovery, or quality of life. They require serious thinking about questions such as whether existence is always preferable to non-existence, the relationship between death and non-existence, the moral significance of suffering, and the importance of individual autonomy.

Philosophy matters, simply, because the answers to philosophical questions matter. Not only is it a matter of life and death, but a matter of, to name a few examples, the nature of law, the role of language, where morality comes from, whether there is a God, whether there is a self and what constitutes our identity, and what beauty is. What makes these questions important is not only that they help societies to function (although they certainly do), but that they reflect something deeply fundamental about human beings: that we are physical creatures, but our consciousness is not restricted to physical matters. Indeed, philosophy is both reflective and perfective of human nature.

As author and philosopher C.S. Lewis explained, although we are physically embodied, most of the things that give our lives value are less tangible than material reality, and philosophy is among them:

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Aristotle thought that philosophical reflection was the perfection of human living. He might have been overreaching a little bit, but there can be no question of the value that reflection adds to our lives.

There is only so much that talking about philosophy can persuade of its value though.

Today, on World Philosophy Day, I encourage you to give it a try yourself. Find a philosopher – there are plenty on Twitter and every university faculty member has an email address – get in touch and see what it’s like first hand. All you need is curiosity, and the right question.

Source: http://theconversation.com/love-wisdom-and-wonder-three-reasons-to-celebrate-philosophy-34477

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