Women in Media

[firstfrost]

This article is really bugging me:

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/06/02/the_write_time/

It's about women getting their PhDs while having children. Which is a fine thign to write about, and there are some interesting points in the article. The thing that is bugging me is that as far as I can tell, the article assumes that having children is *entirely* a woman thing.

I'm sure that women are still the ones doing the majority of the child-rearing. But I think that's a different statement than something like "Doctoral candidates are more likely to have babies these days for the simple reason that women make up a greater percentage of doctorate recipients than they did 30 years ago" which seems to take as a logical given the fact that having babies is something that women have to deal with and men do not.

In addition, I honestly cannot tell if the article is about three single mothers pursuing PhDs. There is absolutely no mention of a father, or any other partner, anywhere in the article, but neither is there a mention of a lack of one. I don't want to suggest that the idea of raising a child on one's own is what I object to, but I can't tell whether that's what they're doing, or if that's just what the article assumes that they're doing because the fathers couldn't possibly be relevant to the subject.

Comments

[dpolicar]

I didn't read the article, but...

"Doctoral candidates are more likely to have babies these days for the simple reason that women make up a greater percentage of doctorate recipients than they did 30 years ago" which seems to take as a logical given the fact that having babies is something that women have to deal with and men do not.

Hm.

So, I definitely agree that this statement depends on the premise that women are more likely to "have babies" -- which I assume here expands to something like being primarily responsible for raising a child, not merely gestating and delivering one -- than men, at least among the sorts of people who are in PhD programs.

But it seems like this is a statistical premise, not a logical one.

That is, it's one thing to say "by their nature, women have and raise babies while men don't." It's a different thing to say "When we've observed samples, we've found a higher percentage of educated women than of similarly educated men are primary caregivers to children."

Do you find those equally objectionable?
Or is the problem that they're not citing their source?

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

But it seems like this is a statistical premise, not a logical one.

Yes. The fact that it's not cited makes it seem to me like it is an underlying axiom being taken for granted, and not a data point being used in constructing the logical argument.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

(and, to be clear, I don't find the statistical statement of "When we've observed samples..." or even a more general observation of something like "By and large, women are the caregivers for children...", at all objectionable.)

[dpolicar]

(nods) I see. Yeah, that makes sense.