David Brooks Asks a Good Question

The New York Times' David Brooks is getting it good from some of my favorite folks for his very silly column titled "The Year of Domesticity,"[1] in which he takes Linda Hirshman to task. This is not, in itself, a bad thing; as I've said before, Hirshman's American Prospect piece was pretty silly in its own right.

Brooks goes on to make an unconvincing case that the home is the seat of influence in today's society and that men and women are wired differently. But then he makes an eyebrow-raising conclusion ...

Power is in the kitchen. The big problem is not the women who stay there but the men who leave.

Leaving aside the whole "power is in the kitchen" thing -- parenting is an damn important job, maybe the most important one, but let's face it, involved parents wield precious little "power" as defined by 21st century America -- he raises a good point: when it comes to the home, where are the men? Sadly, he doesn't bother to even attempt an answer.

I have an answer (you've heard this before). The reason that gender roles remain so persistant is that the work world (and Brooks and Hirshman) offers parents two options: stay home and sacrifice financial independence and professional advancement or work -- and work hard -- at the expense of family. If Hirshman wants more women in the workforce, and if Brooks really wants more guys in the kitchen, then we need to do three things. 1) Make sure that every business understands that employees should be "measured by results, not time spent in the office." 2) Ensure that part-time workers don't get shafted on pay, benefits and promotions and 3) Make sure that any business that violates the rights of parents gets sued. (We may be making a little progress on the last one.)

Until businesses are family-friendly, and until every mother *and* father gets to make an uncoerced decision about how much they want to work and how much they want to be at home, we'll still have those -- like Brooks -- who insist that parents make a black-or-white choice: work hard at the expense of family or stay home at your economic peril. But there are shades of gray out there. We just need to get employers (and columnists) to see that.

[1] The Times edit pages are behind a subscription wall, and I don't, as a policy, link to those probably violating copyright. But I bet you can find it if you look.

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