Maybe this should serve as a reminder to me that an interview is not the same as a personal essay.
The other day I griped a little about the mundane discussion of gender in professional kitchens in Salon’s interview with Top Chef head judge Tom Colicchio. After last week’s finale, as after almost every episode, Tom published his blog about the episode. After reading what he as to say on the topic over there, I have to conclude that he Gets It – much more so than the interview led me to believe. Bad interviewer (and/or editor)!
So, mea culpa: Tom Colicchio is a feminist ally and I thank him for using his blog platform to be so publicly articulate about it. I think it would go beyond “fair use” for me to quote as much as I’d like to, so I’ll pick and choose and bold some of my favorite bits.
The bottom line is our society does not yet provide women in the workplace with the type of social supports, like high-quality subsidized child care or extended parental leave, that allows them to fully go for it, and the impact this has on the scope and depth of a career is profound.
I suppose it’s almost sad how excited I am to see Feminism 101-level suggestions being offered as part of serious discussion. My one nitpick would be to reword the first phrase to say “parents” instead of “women” because these benefits would apply to single parents of either gender, to working parents whether same- or opposite-sex, etc.
It gets even better though (more after the jump):
Right or wrong, men plunge into their careers without much thought about how they’ll navigate the work/family balance. They assume someone — spouse, parent, paid caregiver — will materialize to take care of it (and usually someone does.) This one assumption opens up an entire world of possibility to a young person in a way that can’t be overstated.
Abso-frickin-lutely. I can’t recall if I’ve ever heard anyone ask a man how he plans to “balance” career and family. Or seen a men’s magazine cover advertising an article about how to do so. It’s easy to be blind to how deeply these attitudes are ingrained. Kudos to Tom for seeing past that.
That’s why I’m glad that Top Chef is offering young people a vision of women working in their chef’s whites right alongside the men. Maybe the next generation of girls will internalize the assertion “you can be anything you want” in a whole new way, given the visual proof of seeing themselves competing — and winning — on screen.
OMG – the importance of role models – YES. Just last week on the plane there was a little girl sitting in the seat behind me asking her mom whether the captain of the plane was “a girl” this time, and she sounded so hopeful about it. My friend’s son has a laminated placemat that shows portraits of all the U.S. presidents, and he asked, “Why is it only daddies, no mommies?” This shit matters.
Just as the world won’t change for women until men (and companies and governments) change their thinking about how to create a truly equitable playing field, nor will the field change until women with families start to recognize that being a great mother and having great ambition for oneself are not mutually exclusive.
Wow – calls to action all around – individual and collective. I practically got chills! Read the whole thing: http://www.bravotv.com/Top_Chef/season/4/blogs/index.php?blog=tom_colicchio&article=2008/06/a_womans_place
June 17, 2008 at 6:07 pm
So, OK, I’m dense, I’m not fully getting it.
First, I agree that Tom Colicchio has the kinds of attitudes we’d like to see in more people, especially people in the media and in role model positions.
But I don’t really understand how this shifts anything from your earlier post. What it comes down to, still, is that Colicchio is saying “men have a more careless attitude about work-life balance than women do”. How is this not saying, implicitly, that women just need to adopt the same attitude? It still begs the question of why women don’t do this, or far that matter how the playing field is not level as he goes on to say in your later quotes.
The amount of leave may be a factor, but I’ll bet you that you’re going to still see the same pattern among women who do have months of newborn leave.
Among the small sample of couples our age I’m friends with who’ve recently had kids, I’d say the primary factors in whether women go back to work after having a child are whether they were enjoying their career to begin with, and whether they can afford not to work.
June 18, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Thanks Maarten, good stuff. You’re right, Colicchio is not questioning the attitude toward work/life balance itself but is advocating that women should be free to excercise the options and hold the attitudes and have the support that currently allows more men than women to reach the upper reaches of professions like chef. And he’s enlightened enough to see that men, women, workplaces and government need to change to make that happen.
He’s not a politician, so I’m not looking for a detailed action plan to make it happen but I’m excited to see how much more deeply he understands the issue than the previous interview let on. And by discussing it publicly, not just holding these views in private, he is adding his voice in the chorus and is using his platform for positive change. The fact that he specifically called out MEN among the groups to change their thinking is also (sadly) brave. I could be wrong but I feel like these conversations, similar to conversations about rape prevention, focus exclusively on what WOMEN can do differently and ignore the social context, blah blah blah. His blog post has nearly 400 comments. Going by the 10% participation rule, maybe as many as 4000 people read those words.
And I agree with you though, or I agree with what I think you’re saying: that even better is for us all to begin questioning the premise that professional success has to come at such a high price that people need “solutions” like greater availability of high-quality day care or a spousal figure who shoulders the bulk of an unpaid caretaker role. I have no idea what his family life is like but maybe he’d have preferred to have more family time than he had when his son was younger.
But regarding this: “I’d say the primary factors in whether women go back to work after having a child are whether they were enjoying their career to begin with, and whether they can afford not to work.” — I think that is worth questioning too. WHY is it that couples seem better able to afford losing the woman’s salary? Pay gap, anyone?
June 18, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that the woman’s salary was the lower one and therefore easier to forego; some of the women I’m thinking of have post-graduate degrees and could as easily be the bread winner as their spouse can.
Even among people like our friends, where there’s no pressure to give up the career, paid child care is an option, where husbands are generally supportive of their partner going back to work and willing to share in the burdens, women seem to be more likely than men to chose full time parenting over working.
To explain that, I think you have to look at all sides of that equation.
Women may find their job less satisfying, independent of the kid issue, even in equivalent positions–perhaps because of work place culture, or macho management style. (Yelling at people in meetings, anyone?)
Conversely, and despite being an un-PC suggestion, women may find parenting more rewarding than men do. In couples where one wants kids and the other less so, I tend to see the women wanting kids more than the men–making it more likely that the women are going to accept an uneven child-rearing burden.
And then don’t forget that the parenting balance is way off simply because men are not likely to consider being a stay-at-home parent. It’s not just because of salary imbalance–there’s plenty of stigma there, few fellow dads to hang out with, and not a lot of role models.
So when I was pointing to the issue of why men seem to have a different attitude about the whole thing than women do, I was also thinking that there’s a lot more going on than simply hurdles for women who do want to continue to work. And none of that excuses us from addressing the hurdles that do exist.