People who willingly stay outside of the workplace for years lose touch with reality to a scary extent. Sometimes, they end up thinking that when submitting letters of recommendation for a professorial position, it is a good idea to send in letters from a childhood friend and a next-door neighbor with absolutely no academic affiliation whatsoever.
Unhireable Housewives
Clarissa's Blog 
Almost anyone who has been out of the academic market for a number of years is unhireable. Without publications she has no realistic chance. So it really does not matter who she uses as referee. She does what she can, and no academic would support her application. The saddest thing almost of all is ‘what might have been’ and now never can be. Once one takes the wrong fork in the road there is usually no way back.
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” The saddest thing almost of all is ‘what might have been’ and now never can be.”
– Very true. Many women bank all they have on a husband and then, when the husband evaporates, realize that they buried their chances for a career a long time ago for the sake of a husband who is off having a great life and career on his own.
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What about people, who change careers in mid-life or get their degree at age of 30? Are they unhireable too?
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Where did I say anything like that? I’m talking very specifically about housewives who are notoriously unhireable.
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I wanted to ask this question on people getting education late because, like housewives, they have little if any work experience at relatively advanced age. Are they in a *very* disadvantaged position compared to younger workers?
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“I wanted to ask this question on people getting education late because, like housewives, they have little if any work experience at relatively advanced age. Are they in a *very* disadvantaged position compared to younger workers?”
– We are not allowed by law to ask about people’s age or discuss their age in absolutely any way during the review process.
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I know a couple of mathematicians who have done that. It is difficult, but they have both been successful and have tenured academic jobs.
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I have a colleague who got a Ph. D. in my field around 1974. She got married and went to a Central American country where her husband was working and spent two (maybe three, I am not sure) years unable to work except at home. She wrote and published several math research papers and came back to the U. S. in an excellent position to get a good academic job.
So, I am skeptical.
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What you are describing is a research scholar. What I am describing is an actual housewife. 🙂
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She was a housewife who also worked on mathematics. It is possible that this is easier in mathematics than in some other fields, since it is possible to find some problems that one can work on alone with little or no library access, etc. Most problems are not of this type, but some are.
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It isn’t really about library access. It’s about losing contact with reality as evidenced by the anecdote I shared in this post. It is definitely not normal to submit a letter of the “we shared our toys and played in the same backyard since the age of 2” variety, is it?
(Obviously, I changed the details, but the actual text was even weirder than that.)
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Well, last week I read an application from a student for a special academic opportunity, and one of the letters of recommendations ze produced was from a fellow waitress in the bar ze works every summer. It is not just out of touch middle age housewives.
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This is the best. 🙂
People are hilarious. Most have extreme trouble remembering which institution they are applying for, what the name of the position is and who it is they are addressing. 🙂
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I have seen such grad student applications too. A recent one I saw had a letter from his father’s friend who is a professor somewhere, but does not at all know the applicant (the letter was of the “he played on my knee when he was a kid” variety). Another one had a letter from his cycle-coach, and one from his swimming coach. At least those letters said he has discipline. 🙂
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I’ve seen quite a few of these, working in HR, although admittedly not usually from people applying for senior positions. At the lower levels it’s a bit of a vicious circle: if you’ve never had a job, you’ve no referees and if you’ve no referees, you can’t get a job. I just don’t quite understand how someone who is applying for a professorial position can think that’s appropriate though; I mean surely, anyone who’s applying for a job at that level has previous employment to cite, regardless of how long they’ve been out of the workplace?
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In those cases you need to bootstrap yourself up. Take a rapid sequence of temp jobs each with increasing responsibilities until you are at your desired level. It might take uo to three years to (re)build your track record and references to the level of the job you desired.
Alternatively, you can do an Erin Brokovich and take the job at a ridiculously low salary with the understanding that as you prove yourself salary increases would be more or less continuous and automatic.
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Maybe the ‘housewives’ wouldn’t have become ‘unhireable’ if they’d been able to combine work with child-rearing (as presumably their husbands have done by leaving it to them).
How common is it for anyone to keep a career on track whilst raising children without a wife? It isn’t easy – and I know of no women with wives, only men! We educate our women as equals and then let them down big-time when they become mothers by leaving them the bulk of child-rearing responsibilities; it is impossible for anyone to do a really good job of simultaneously raising a family and maintaining a typical career.
Something has to give. At the moment too often what gives is the women’s career hopes, as her own needs are pushed down the priority list. I’d like to see that change.
I’d like to see a fundamental shift in work-life balance, so that all humans, regardless of age or gender, are able to reach their full potential in society. And the sooner the professional world recognises that any job is secondary to the continuation of the human species the better for all humanity!
Let us reorder the priorities, share out the workloads, and cut the women some slack!
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“We educate our women as equals and then let them down big-time when they become mothers by leaving them the bulk of child-rearing responsibilities”
– I’m sorry but who is the “we” here? I have not left “the bulk of child-rearing responsibilities” to anybody, so it feels weird to be accused of something like this.
” it is impossible for anyone to do a really good job of simultaneously raising a family and maintaining a typical career.”
– Erm, this is extremely insulting to. . . pretty much every parent who isn’t a self-infantilizing, self-castrating housewife.
“At the moment too often what gives is the women’s career hopes, as her own needs are pushed down the priority list.”
– Pushed down by whom? Have you met a single housewife who has not made the choice to castrate her life consciously and gleefully? Nobody gets chained to the stove against their will nowadays. People who choose to be housewives set this as a goal very early in life and mow down everybody who tries to get between them and that goal.
“Maybe the ‘housewives’ wouldn’t have become ‘unhireable’ if they’d been able to combine work with child-rearing (as presumably their husbands have done by leaving it to them).”
– Are we talking about women who’d been married off against their will or women who consciously chose their own husbands?
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“We” = academia, which does a great job of giving women and men equal opportunities in education – and the stats show that women do better than men!
“We” also = society and a large proportion of the world of work – and the stats still show that men do better than women…
So what happens in between?
CHILDBIRTH AND CHILDREN!
Modern society, like it or not, does not rear children as a communal activity. Bringing up children well (yes, well!) requires significant adult time and attention.
The world of work for the most part remains lamentably inflexible: long hours, short holidays, and a general aversion to more flexible working arrangements (less-than-full-time work, job-sharing, career breaks/sabbaticals) not to mention a strong preference that there be no ‘gaps’ in a CV!
So who still does the bulk of the child-rearing? In practice (often for purely practical and economic reasons) this turns out to be the woman – again, look at the statistics!
“every parent who isn’t a self-infantilizing, self-castrating housewife”???
Really? So how do you manage it? Another adult to step in, or latch-key kids? I’m not saying parents don’t try to juggle it all; I just say something has to give… and in my experience it’s still all too often the woman’s career that nosedives! Either that, or the children pay the price…
You choose your priority – career or children – or you do your best to juggle both – but either way, there is a price, I can guarantee it! And when it’s a career dive, then it’s still usually the woman’s that goes! Look at the statistics!!
And then they wonder why there are so few women in top jobs!!!!!
“Have you met a single housewife who has not made the choice to castrate her life consciously and gleefully?”
Maybe we move in different circles, but yes, I know lots! They make the choice to put their children before their career gracefully, but no, not gleefully!
“People who choose to be housewives set this as a goal very early in life and mow down everybody who tries to get between them and that goal.”
Rubbish – maybe you know some women like that, but I don’t! I only know well-educated, once-professional women, who are struggling to find a way to keep old dreams alive, whilst recognizing that their children come first. So many of them try to reinvent themselves within the new dynamic of family life, with mixed success!
For true equality we need to reorient the world of work and remove the barriers that still block educated, intelligent, highly capable women from contributing to society through the mental stimulation of their chosen careers. For that to happen we need to make it easier to share the important role of child-rearing more fairly between men and women. We would have a better society for it!
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“Modern society, like it or not, does not rear children as a communal activity.
– I like it. 🙂
“So who still does the bulk of the child-rearing? In practice (often for purely practical and economic reasons) this turns out to be the woman – again, look at the statistics!”
– Whose choice is that and why?
“Maybe we move in different circles, but yes, I know lots! They make the choice to put their children before their career gracefully”
– Oh, the self-sacrificial mommies who hide the sad reality of their incapacity to achieve anything under the fake concern for their miserable children whom then they guilt-trip forever.
“You choose your priority – career or children – or you do your best to juggle both – but either way, there is a price, I can guarantee it!”
– “Juggle”? Successful people with great career raise happy children. Hysterical, permanently depressed self-sacrificial housewives raise miserable children.
“Rubbish – maybe you know some women like that, but I don’t! I only know well-educated, once-professional women, who are struggling to find a way to keep old dreams alive, whilst recognizing that their children come first. ”
– The best thing anybody can do for their children is have a life, profession, career of their own. If their children came first, they would not foist a housewife on them.
“And when it’s a career dive, then it’s still usually the woman’s that goes! Look at the statistics!!”
– Because it’s an easy and a lazy choice that women can make without being vilified for it by their peer group.
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You are the one vilifying with your crass generalisations.
You haven’t even attempted to answer my questions or understand why women make these choices.
There is a serious issue here about the structure of work and making it easier for all of us to have a better work-life balance!
Perhaps that’s too scary a prospect for some? It requires giving up a little power and superiority!
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“You haven’t even attempted to answer my questions or understand why women make these choices”
– I know extremely well why they make such choices: because it’s easier to cannibalize a child’s life than to create your own.
“There is a serious issue here about the structure of work and making it easier for all of us to have a better work-life balance”
– Work is a part of life.
“Perhaps that’s too scary a prospect for some? It requires giving up a little power and superiority!”
– Exactly. The power to consume one’s children under the excuse of caring for them and the superiority of a person who lords it over the working women as “bad mothers” are very hard to give up.
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Now you’re starting to sound self-righteous. I never said anything about good or bad mothers – you are the one making snap judgments here!
Maybe life is great in your little bubble world, but many out there are not so lucky, and it’s not simply because they are lazy and stupid. Get over yourself!
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“I never said anything about good or bad mothers”
– No, I did.
“Maybe life is great in your little bubble world, but many out there are not so lucky, and it’s not simply because they are lazy and stupid.”
– I never said anybody was stupid. I said that housewifery is a decision that people make out of laziness and fear of life. And what’s especially nasty is that they use children to justify it.
“Get over yourself!”
– I can’t. Housewifery has traumatized me too much. But I’m working hard, so any day now I will probably manage to deal with the trauma.
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Careful not to fall off your high horse – I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself!
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There’s worse than this: a student who fails his doctoral exams is unhireable automatically.
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Foucault.
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At Yale, the people who failed were given another opportunity and nobody ever found out that they had failed the first attempt.
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btw, look what I just stumbled upon on International Women’s Day:
“What is really striking is there are now more women who graduate, and statistics show that women who start their working careers are better paid than young men in the UK. The gap appears for the first time when women return to the labour market after their first maternal leave. I have a feeling that the demographic crisis and its consequences will affect us in the future as much as the economic crisis does now. It’s time to change the approach to motherhood and evaluate parenthood in society.”
Slovakian Christian Democrat Edit Bauer
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/content/20120302FCS39885/2
High Five, Edit!
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” It’s time to change the approach to motherhood and evaluate parenthood in society.”
– What does this mean?
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See above 😉
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The sentence “” It’s time to change the approach to motherhood and evaluate parenthood in society” is not explained in the article you linked to, so I thought maybe you know.
The article’s suggestions that there should be a greater vigilance for the cases of wage discrimination are, of course, great. I’m all for that.
What will really help is state-mandated maternity and paternity leaves that follow the Scandinavian model. That is what every civilized country should aim for. Plus state-sponsored cheap daycare facilities. It would also be a great idea to create an environment where companies that provide daycare facilities on site are lauded and celebrated and companies that don’t are vilified. That’s the future we should all fight for.
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At last we agree on something 🙂
Workplace creches could really help in many cases, but not as a substitute for shorter working hours, nor in cases where commuting distances are great – babies and young children do not need 12-hour days! And what happens when the kids start school?
My view is that we should recognise the importance of parenthood and endeavour to make work more flexible, so that more women and men can combine career and home life in a better balance, to the benefit of all.
That would have knock-on effects for equal pay and women’s career progression, and at the same time take pressure off a “primary breadwinner”. Both parents would contribute more to both housework and income generation as equals. Yes, look at Denmark!
This requires substantial structural changes in the way we work, so that more women remain in decent jobs after their children are born, and more men can play a more active role in bringing up their children.
And to that end it would help if bloggers and others start by acknowledging the hard choices that many women make and stop denigrating the work that they do!
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I’ve seen many situations where a professional, highly successful couple has a child and the father – who really wanted the kid and loves her or him – just steps aside and does not even begin to get as involved as his female partner in child-rearing. And this doesn’t happen because anybody is an evildoer or a bad person but because the model where a father is as active in child care as the mother is not there. The baby cries and the father looks at the mother, instinctually because she is somehow magically supposed to know what to do. And that places a huge strain on the woman and immediately distances the father from his own kid. As a result, the father begins to play a role of an outsider, to a certain extent, to the unit of the mother/child. This is tragic for everybody involved.
Culturally, the only thing we can do here is to start changing these patterns on a slow, daily basis. Mothers need to let go of control and allow the fathers to get equally involved. Fathers should start working on their parenting strategies. It’s a slow and painful process but it’s the only way.
And, of course, it is extremely shameful that this is the only developed country with no maternity leave.
I knew we would agree eventually. 🙂
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Well, I agree with all you say 🙂 , although fortunately I don’t recognise your description of parenthood. (My husband was highly involved with my babies, as at that time he worked largely from home – when he wasn’t travelling, that is.) And it still shocks me to see this pattern emerge in hitherto seemingly egalitarian couples.
Yes, social roles may take time to change, but beyond that much of the world of work is still in the Stone Age, and that’s when the trouble begins even for couples who do want to share the parenting.
As for maternity leave, I cannot imagine trying to keep a career alive while still giving my children the best start in life that I could. How anyone can possibly hold down a full-time job/career and breastfeed her baby beats me – the mind boggles!
But maternity leave is just the start of it – the parenting needs to be shared more equally for the best part of the next 20 years. And wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could reorganise our work so that could happen?
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@Sarah Le Breton
They pump, and then supply the provider with the milk. Isn’t it that simple?
>best start in life that I could
I have to be honest, this scares me because I believe a great start in life is having two parents as role models who are engaged in things other than parenting, and no, a hobby a couple of hours a day isn’t enough. Perhaps you mean just at infant-hood.
>Either that, or the children pay the price…
In my personal experience, both I and my mother paid a dear price for her choice to stay home and hover over me. She wasted 19 years of her life just caring for me long after I needed very little care. So, in practice she ended up doing nothing. Those years are never coming back. Through my childhood I struggled for my own privacy, and rebelled heavily against her, and avoided her as much as possible. Every once in a while when she chided me too much, I would fire back with ‘what exactly is it that you do all day? How can someone who does a couple of hours of cooking and cleaning all day then, sits on their ass tell me how I should be living my life?” And I never did chores because in my mind, that was her job. It took me a long time to grow out of being such a brat! I was a budding feminist and wanted my own powerful career so badly. Seeing her do nothing but be my maid was deeply traumatizing.
I can understand a parent wanting to stay home for a year or two, but how do you decide who does it? I feel like the person who stays home becomes the servant of the other parent and that is a dangerous dynamic. How do you decide the allowance of the servant parent?
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“I have to be honest, this scares me because I believe a great start in life is having two parents as role models who are engaged in things other than parenting”
– Hear, hear!
“So, in practice she ended up doing nothing. Those years are never coming back. Through my childhood I struggled for my own privacy, and rebelled heavily against her, and avoided her as much as possible. Every once in a while when she chided me too much, I would fire back with ‘what exactly is it that you do all day? How can someone who does a couple of hours of cooking and cleaning all day then, sits on their ass tell me how I should be living my life?” And I never did chores because in my mind, that was her job. ”
– This is my life story.
“How do you decide the allowance of the servant parent?”
– A friend stopped by my office once (back in Montreal) and asked me for a tampon because her husband forgot to give her allowance that week. She used to be a bank trader, a powerful professional woman. After she left my office with $20 I gave her, I cried. They had no children then either.
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My mom recently went back to work, and she was only able to get a job after all her years as a housewife because she had done some part time legal work here and there. Otherwise, no one would’ve hired her! She also had to research the current relevant case law for weeks, and even when she got on the job she was very behind. And for what?
I hated that she devoted her life to me. Absolutely hated it. I could write a book about how traumatizing it is having a succubus attending to your every action and whim, and pursuing no interests of her own, all while carrying the cross of ‘single motherhood’. My situation was much more severe than average, but still. We had an extremely strained relationship until I moved out, and she was finally forced to come to terms with the reality that I am a separate person than her.
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“I hated that she devoted her life to me. Absolutely hated it. I could write a book about how traumatizing it is having a succubus attending to your every action and whim, and pursuing no interests of her own, all while carrying the cross of ‘single motherhood’. My situation was much more severe than average, but still. We had an extremely strained relationship until I moved out, and she was finally forced to come to terms with the reality that I am a separate person than her.”
– Except for the single motherhood bit, yes, that’s my experience exactly. The burden of having to provide the meaning for a person’s life is very heavy. You grow up and want a life of your own without the constant, “But what were all my sacrifices for if you are not doing what I always hoped you would?” This is why I get so enraged when people start singing the praises of the amazing sacrificial housewifery to me on my own blog.
Thank you for the support, Liz.
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I can understand all that – a more egalitarian and flexible workplace might have made it easier for your mother to not give up work for all those years while you were growing up.
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My mother had a brilliant career and loved her job. She gave it up because in our culture it suddenly became socially rpestigious to be a housewife. I’m lucky in that I, at least, was 17 when that happened, so it could have been worse. But it was and still is her personal choice every single day.
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Ugh, my friend wants to be a housewife because she thinks it’s prestigious.
Worse, she refuses to believe that I don’t secretly want to be a housewife as well.
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“Ugh, my friend wants to be a housewife because she thinks it’s prestigious.
Worse, she refuses to believe that I don’t secretly want to be a housewife as well.”
– OK, scary now. Are you me? 🙂 I have this friend, too. She always says, “But in your heart of hearts, if your husband agreed to it, wouldn’t you love to quit your job?”
This is a person who has known me for years and has heard my endless praises of the joy of teaching. It’s a mystery.
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