It’s About Making Babies!

Rachel at Liminal Librarian comments on how the participation of women in conferences, in librarianship, and in general, remains a problem.  Rachel details how her participation in home life has affected her capacity for contributing as a librarian.

Everyone is talking ‘web 2.0′ and ‘library 2.0′. I am waiting to see someone address how to employ men and women in a fashion that increases their contribution to society and community, better nurtures children, strengthens and preserves homes, and builds and enriches organizations and businesses.

Hiring individuals, and accounting for ‘men’ or ‘women’ by number or role seems to be absurd. It simplifies the employer’s tax reporting to blindly treat each employee as an individual, and leave family burdens (and opportunities for contributing) to their insurance provider.

What if we could design a marketplace where husband and wife both contribute to their employer, if jobs were designed to utilize contributions shared among households — why leave dependent children out of the loop, especially adolescent or older?

Or looked at another way, adaptive communal work groups that can interchange roles and responsibilities throughout the day.

Additionally, a company or workgroup blog might enable employees that only work one or two days a month or a week to stay informed of events, so they can contribute while there in addition to online contributions.

I consider the current ’style’ of employer / employee to be paternalistic and male oriented, even though organizations stop limiting the original role to be filled by men or women. Employment as practiced today in the US may or may not be a necessary byproduct of capitalism, democracy, or paternalistic religions. But it is sure slanted toward the men in dominant roles, and women as support for men.  And that seems to me to be wasting an awful lot of time and talent, as well as penalizing our children by restricting number of hours parents can spend parenting — for both men and women.

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Baggage Reclaim asks the question. "why is it that … making him the centre of the universe".  Grab onto your knickers, because I doubt the answer will please many.

Simple. We live in a ‘patriarchal’ society. Father rules the home, the marriage, and the religion. Both the responsibility, which we seem to be forgetting, and the authority, which we seem to be sharing a very little bit. Mostly we don’t think of this much, even as we pray, "Our Father, who art in Heaven…"

This is kind of the core of why gays and lesbians face so much opposition, and why a single woman often feels out of place.  This is why various groups fight rather than consider getting along — if you don’t follow my father, how can I trust you?   Remember that most churches compete for believers, Christians at least consider ‘if you are not for me, you are against me’. 

Religious belief plays a large part in perpetuating this gender game.  Fundamentalist Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths are pretty adamant about the roles of men and women in the home and outside the home.  More liberal faiths are less stringent, and there are faiths worshiping in other than strict ‘father’ forms.  Most major religions, though, seem to suppress the role of women in society.

In the US and UK we seem to be heading away from the strict patriarchal forms, but haven’t yet put together an egalitarian model. The best we seem to have done, in some isolated instances, is to think of ‘father’ as non-gender specific. For a little time. So we see women in roles defined for a ‘father’ — manager, executive, priest — rather than coming at things from a more robust direction where roles are based on other characteristics.  We don’t even redefine the role, just futz a bit with the name to be non-gender specific.

A woman in today’s world either has to hijack the patriarchal forms, or live apart from mainstream business and society, to ‘make her own way’.  Unfair as all get out, but many do succeed doing just that.  They create their own businesses, choose suppliers and contacts that enable them to reach their goals (instead of penalize for not being men), they look for opportunities to grow in their desired directions.  And they look for ’special’ men (and women) for life partners, that recognize and respect their chosen path.  Funny thing, the progress is tough to track, since some men also prefer portions of the non-traditional path.

An on-air personality on a local oldies station this morning commented about a celebrity, that she was ‘going out tonight for a good meal — since she doesn’t cook’.  What a load of assumptions there!  We have quite a ways yet to go.

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