So I'm late to the party. What else is new? I want to comment on New York Times columnist David Brooks' strange, heart-is-in-the-right-place piece from Saturday. In a nutshell, Brooks noticed that women are getting screwed because they leave the workplace right in the middle of their earning years. Wouldn't it be better, he mused, if women could get the marriage and kid-raising thing over with by, say, age 35 and then work uninterrupted until 70?

I was alerted to the bit by Elizabeth over at Half Changed World, who put together a nice piece poking holes in some of Brooks' logic. I'm with Elizabeth: I think that Brooks understands the challenge (he even proposes tax credits or tuition credits for at-home parenthood), but his prescription is a bit wacky. I won't go into all the ways that better "sequencing" is a squirrelly way to achieve workpalce equality; Elizabeth hit the big ones.

No, the bit of this that drained my good humor was the utter lack of any suggestion, any hint that fathers should consider living their lives differently to help ameliorate this unfairness. Look, I don't expect that at-home fatherhood will ever become as common as at-home motherhood (if it does, though, you can be damn sure there will be tax credits), but work opportunities for women expand when care is shared more equally. Brooks:

It's possible that women should sequence their lives differently from men, and that women may need a broader diversity of sequence options.

This is the bit that really gets me. I would never agree that more work/family options are worse, but this ought not be a battle that concerns women only. Men need a broader diversity, too, just in the other way. By fixing this as a "woman's problem" and then suggesting that the solution is more young brides, Brooks misses a great opportunity.