1. Some (forgive me, inchoate) thoughts, tl;dr of which: (a) Yes, this is happening, it's a little odd progressives are pretending it's not, when they were celebrating same about a decade ago; (b) Yes, civil rights law is reinforcing this, and while I am not ordinarily one...
https://twitter.com/herandrews/status/1978793394978603116
2. ... to understate the influence of civil rights law on culture, here civil rights law is imho reinforcing broader trends driven by technology and abundance. Though I hope disparate impact will be held unconstitutional within this decade by SCOTUS and am guardedly...
3. ... optimistic that it will be, reversal of disparate impact here will have a positive but only limited effect.
4. To (a): I am alas old enough to remember that about fifteen years ago, journalist Hanna Roisin of Slate published a book called The End of Men. It's been over a decade since I read it, but it is fairly summarized as celebrating the rise of an increasingly feminized...
5. ... culture from the left. Andrews is lambasting these cultural trends and Roisin was celebrating them, but it's striking to me that their descriptive analysis of feminization is similar. Thus also a few years later, Sen. Kristen Gillibrand tweeted the infamously cringe...
6. ... "The future is female, intersectional, powered by our belief in others" in the same spirit.
7. So why did 2012 progressives think the future was female? They focused much less on civil rights law and more on how technological changes and increasing abundance favored typical female strengths over male ones.
8. There are fewer factory, farming or artisanal jobs that require physical strength and more good jobs that require wordcel and interpersonal skills. To be sure, some of these are DEI bureaucrat or HR jobs roundly...
9. ... mocked by the right On Here that are subject to abolition by regulatory changes, but many of these are also in fields like marketing, PR, or health care that really do flow from market demand.
10. Over decades, the home front is also changing. Yes, caring for small children remains an emotionally and time intensive task. But modern dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines and so on make housework much easier than it was for my grandmother in 1935.
11. In other words, the cost/benefit of being at home vs. working has shifted significantly for women over the last 100, and even the last 50, years.
12. Not sure I've ever seen anyone write about this, but it used to be that middle and upper middle class moms of school age kids would fill their days with volunteer work once their children started to need care less. Increasingly, though, the old society lady volunteer..
13. ... jobs have been professionalized and pay money and benefits. My girlhood babysitter's mom ran a small local Native American history museum in her spare time once her daughter started school. Now that same institution has a paid executive director. I used to...
14. ... see my high school friends' moms hanging out in the conference room at school planning benefit galas together. Now in most places, there's a (paid, with a 401(k) Director of Institutional Advancement who does that instead.
15. Much of this comes less from feminism as an ideological force and more from educational, philanthropic, and artistic organizations having the additional wealth to bring on more full time employees.
16. I will put my bona fides as a critic of disparate impact law against anyone's (look up my SSRN page if you are inclined to disbelieve me.) As I said at the beginning of this thread, it's unconstitutional, and I hope and am guardedly optimistic that SCOTUS overturns it...
17. ... within the next decade. But while it reinforces the feminization of certain workplaces, technological changes and abundance are also driving these changes, and disparate impact is playing only a limited role here.
18. One more thought: feminism's critics tend to say little about not typically feminine women can lead decent lives. Some of us are weird and disagreeable. Some of us need an outlet for our weirdness and disagreeability different from domesticity...
19. ... and caring for children. I think the fear here is that allowing for exceptions will swallow the whole, and so critics of feminism shy away from it. But as a chronically disagreeable woman, I want a reservation somewhere...
20. ... where I can read and think and practice law, whether or not it's in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, and I would appreciate seeing feminism's critics build more space for one into their thinking. /end
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