What is it with suggesting work meetings for evenings and weekends? It’s particularly annoying that it’s an association of feminist scholars that’s doing it. We are supposed to be aware of the existence of motherhood. What am I supposed to do with my kid on a weekend or in the evening? Put her in my pocket? Even if I could find a way to get rid of her, I don’t want to. My time outside of work hours belongs to her, and that’s the way I want it.
I am yet to meet a male colleague who’d try to get me to meet on a Saturday evening. It simply never occurs. Also, Zoom is teaching people bad behaviors. They think that if you can meet on Zoom, then everybody should be available outside of work hours. Why am I supposed to work outside of M-F 8 to 4? How is this normal and why are we doing this to ourselves?
Clarissa's Blog 
Oh. I thought feminism was all about proving you’re just as good as a male employee by acting like you have no priorities and no life outside your career.
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Not any feminism I want to participate in.
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Well, it is why men make more money than women, on average. A lot of women are butthurt about that, and think the solution is to be more like men.
I say screw the job. Even if I didn’t have kids to raise, I wouldn’t be giving up my evenings and weekends. Like most people, I’ve never had a job so fulfilling I wanted to volunteer unpaid time for it. Having a life is better than reaching the top of the career ladder.
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Sometimes it is but not always. When I was hired for my current job, a male colleague with significantly lower qualifications was hired at a higher salary for this same job. It took a grievance process to correct it.
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Yikes!
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I am afraid you hit a sore spot there. I am currently involved in a work thing with multiple people and they just LOVE to schedule meetings for nights and weekends. These people actually prefer it to regular work hours as they have more time then (talk about poorly drawn boundaries…). Not entirely sure what I am supposed to do with my kid either. On top of it, my husband works nights and weekends due to a nature of his job. Am I supposed to pay for a babysitter to come in the evenings and weekends so that I can sit at work Zoom meetings? I actually like my kid and want to spend some time with them (at this point, when my kid sees me sitting at a computer, there is a lot of waving and yelling “bye bye”).
P.S. What passes for feminism today and motherhood are mutually exclusive.
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Right? With a small kid, it’s all about a routine. Dinner, board games, bath time, story, bedtime. I like the routine and don’t feel like disrupting it. Why should I? The assumption that I should be always available is annoying.
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Shoot, we don’t even go to evening church services these days, because the drive is long enough that it totally disrupts our bedtime routine. Not cool. If we won’t do it for church, we sure as heck aren’t doing it for the job.
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Many of the people I work with are either childless, or have a wife who takes care of things. Many women have babysitters on a speed dial, have a live-in au-pair or family nearby. Once, a very successful woman explained to me how she managed her childcare, which left me wondering about why have children at all if you are not actually the one spending time with them. I like my work, but it is not the end all be all of my existence.
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My sister was an ambitious business-person. I was her live-in nanny for some years. She rarely got home from work before 7pm. Her son, who was five when she died, has no memory of her.
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That’s so sad.
My sister was very ambitious too (the polar opposite of me), and was always bored out of her mind whenever she had to stay home for any reason. She always had a good (i.e. high-prestige and high-paying) job, but a huge chunk of her income went to pay the nanny and the cleaning lady. And she always looked down on me, presumably because I raised my own kids and cleaned my own house.
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Yeah, I’ve never had her ambitions, but that… has informed a lot of my life decisions since. Raising your own kids is not something you can defer until you have the time, and no amount of prestige or career advancement is more valuable. The money, prestige, nice house, etc.– none of it means anything in the end. Doing right by the people in your life, though… it’s one of the only things that does matter.
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It’s interesting that it is the women doing this and I agree – they should know better. At my old research institution, the female faculty were extremely aware of this issue and would never arrange meetings outside of regular work hours. The male faculty were a mixed bag – mine was excellent in this regard but several others were awful. One even had regular lab meetings scheduled for Saturday mornings. Bleeurgh. At least I knew not to go to that lab.
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