The immensely clever Ruxandra Teslo has ideas which should not be thaty radical, but will be, about how to reduce the conflict between "greedy" careers and fertility windows. Why Skipping College Can Be Feminist. Palantir is offering internships for the highly talented, male and female, straight out of highschool. Teslo has previously suggested related options.
Anyway, why do one’s 30s matter so much? Some of it might be societal, or the way we set up our institutions. Indeed, Dr. Arpit Gupta made the clever observation that we should do the following things as a society:
early graduation from high school
3 rather than 4 year BA degrees
major in law or medicine up front; rather than in professional school
social shift to promote the young.
I would have loved it, myself.
Apart from a bunch of other negative social impacts, including on the science itself (which I discuss here), this also affects women in particular, because timelines to promotion clash even more starkly with their fertility windows! This is something almost nobody talks about, but as I also highlight in a previous post:
I wish I would have graduated much earlier from high school. I wish I would have started doing research instead of just going to uni courses much earlier. And so on. In fact, if I were to complain about how society “has wronged me as a woman”, it would be that it has treated my limited “fertility time” with extreme disregard. At each step of the way I was encouraged to “be patient”, do more training, told that “things will figure themselves out”, even when I wanted and could have speedrun through things.
It would affect only a few women or men and have little impact on overall fertility rates. I suppose making having children more accessible for elite women could lead to a rise in social desirability for all women. I haven't tried the idea on any of the childless couple of my age in my circle, whether this would have made a difference. It would seem accusing, which is not my intent. Yet I admit I am quite curious. And just because not everyone could use this option, it might be worth pursuing for its own sake, to increase options for people.
One thing that does not get mentioned in these discussions enough is that one of the primary things needed for raising small children is sheer physical energy, which parents have more of when they are younger. Toddlers don't know if they are poor or not, they only know if someone loves them and interacts with them.
3 comments:
I have had the same thought. Excessive education-based credentialism strikes simultaneously at the career-launch window and the fertility window. And in many cases, the credential doesn't really tell you all that much..in a few cases, it does. If I were hiring research people for a biotech startup, Ruxandra's PhD would be a significant point in her favor, if I were hiring a director of marketing & sales for that same company, I'd care a lot more about experience in building an organization from scratch and having contacts among whatever category of people (including distributors, etc) the product is sold to and through.
I went to school with women who chose to work their children (if any) around their careers instead of choosing a career that fit with having children. If men could do that, they reasoned, why shouldn't they?
I was the reverse, a man who chose his career, such as it was, around having children. I have some regrets, but only that I couldn't have it both ways, not that I made the wrong choices. Thus I only half-understand women like Ruxandra. For years I said that I made my choices because my fathers were not good and I wanted to have a family of my own. I still think that is the most likely explanation, yet I have become suspicious of all explanations about my reasons.
Working at a large research university, I am reminded that the university is an "IQ shredder" every day. Everywhere one looks, there are intelligent young women exiting the gene pool by writing ghastly dissertations no one will read. I am also very firmly of the opinion that most undergraduates would be better off somewhere else. Imagine of half the money spent on university "education" were redirected to apprenticeship programs! Normal young men and women are programmed by nature to desire the means to start families. They are not programed by nature to desire additional information about science, history and art.
I was myself a "late bloomer," which is a poetic way of saying retarded in the process of maturation. Not stunted, because I got there eventually, but slow. I was intellectually precocious, but emotionally and socially backwards, and my life was not really "synced" until I dropped out of education for a few years. Speeding things up might have solved the crushing boredom I suffered intellectually, but I needed things slowed down on the emotional and social fronts.
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