Claire Cain Miller

When the first undergraduate women to be admitted to Yale arrived on campus 50 years ago this fall, they were outnumbered 7 to 1. To prepare, Yale installed full-length mirrors in the women’s dorm rooms and, to the dismay of many men, banned nudity in the gym. But there were no women’s studies classes, no women’s competitive sports and few ideas about how to support women at a place that was, in 1969, the oldest all-male college in the country.

Sixty-five percent of them had a class in which they were the only woman, according to an unpublished survey, conducted this year, of nearly half the 575 female freshmen and transfers who entered in ’69. About half never had a female instructor. Sixteen percent said they were sexually harassed by Yale professors or authorities, and the university had no system for reporting it.

Women weren’t allowed to have lunch at Mory’s, a private dining club where important meetings took place. They were barred from most extracurricular activities. And Yale severely limited the number of women who could be admitted, as described in a book about the class, “Yale Needs Women,” published last month by Anne Gardiner Perkins, a historian.

The experiences of the first women at Yale tell a bigger story about what happens when institutions that have been dominated by white men try to diversify. Yale, like many places of power, allowed women to enter. But it didn’t treat them as equals.

“For places like Yale or Congress or the White House, the battle for equity only begins when you open the door and let women in for the first time,” Perkins said. “It requires the institution to change.”

By 1969, most public universities and those in the Midwest and West were already coed. Elite, private and Roman Catholic institutions in the Northeast were lagging (but by 1973, most of them were coed, too).

Yale set out to educate “1,000 male leaders,” and male applicants needed to demonstrate academic achievement and leadership potential. But women weren’t assumed to be leaders, Perkins wrote. So in addition to academics, they were evaluated on grit — “a certain toughness, a pioneer quality,” Henry Chauncey Jr., an administrator at the time, told The New York Times in 1969. (The article ran alongside an ad for children’s clothing: “Girls’ styles are colorful and pretty; boys’ styles are fun-loving and rugged.”)

One way to find gritty women, according to Yale? Admit those who were raised with brothers — the more the better. Of the survey respondents, 93% had at least one brother.

Besides being sexist, the different admissions criteria were an acknowledgment that assimilating at Yale would largely be the responsibility of the individual women.

Other places of power that have diversified in the last half century have presented similar challenges, including Congress, said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, a member of Yale’s first coed class. At both institutions, she said, it was common to enter a room and see no other women, let alone another African American woman like her. But she became a campus leader, in the civil rights movement and as a church deacon.

“They were leaders in a man’s world,” she said of the first women, “and, yes, they had grit, and because they had grit, their leadership was not going to be snuffed out.”

“That doesn’t mean it wasn’t challenging,” she added, “because they weren’t entirely prepared for us.”

Sally Birdsall, who runs a land-use planning firm in Greenwich, New Jersey, studied architecture as a member of the first female class. She remembers that a professor told her she would be unable to do a building project because she had never played with an Erector Set (she had). Another warned the women attending his lecture that he did not want to hear knitting needles.

“I was upset, not because I had a knitting needle, but I was more scared,” she said. “It just gave you a very unwelcome feeling.”

The administration had done little to incorporate women. It appointed Elga Wasserman to oversee coeducation, but she had the budget for only a secretary and an intern, Perkins said. There were no formal meet-ups for women, who were divided among 12 dorms. Female graduate students acted as advisers, but there were no trained counselors. There were three tenured female professors that year.

The students were at the forefront of the women’s movement of the 1970s, which demanded that women be full participants in society. Many were also involved in other causes, including abortion rights, the Black Power movement and Vietnam War protests.

“In the late 1960s, as the women’s movement takes off, there are these super smart women who have been mobilized — not all wealthy, not all white — and they’re frustrated by the way the intellectual world is telling them what they’re thinking or saying is not important and shutting their doors on them,” said Kirsten Swinth, a historian at Fordham and author of “Feminism’s Forgotten Fight,” a history of the period.

Ninety percent of the survey respondents said they were Democrats. Entering an all-male institution probably shaped those views, several said.

Their experiences illustrate how much has changed in 50 years — and how much has not. The birth control pill was illegal for unmarried women in many states, including Connecticut (so was abortion). Yet 83% said they took it, according to the survey, which was privately presented at a reunion this fall of the first women and provided by an attendee. Most got a prescription from Yale’s new gynecologist, who had an agreement with the police to look the other way, Perkins wrote.

In their post-college achievements, they were unusual among American women their age and faced challenges that have become familiar to highly educated women today: how to achieve educational, career and family goals when they’re all running on the same clock.

Eighty-nine percent received advanced degrees. A third became the primary household breadwinners, and a third described themselves as homemakers. Fifty-nine percent said they faced gender discrimination that stunted their careers.

Eighty-two percent of respondents had children, and their average age of first birth was 33. The national average at the time was 21. (Today it is 26, and 30 for those with a college degree.) More than a third said they delayed having children for career reasons, and nearly a third said they struggled with infertility.

Sixty percent said both they and their partner worked full time. But half that share said their partners shared in responsibilities like housework and cleaning.

“I certainly felt that with opportunity came obligation, and I needed to use my degree,” said Catherine Ross, a member of the first class, who also received a law degree and doctorate from Yale and is a law professor at George Washington.

“We talk a lot about how shocked we are,” she said. “We never imagined that 50 years later, women would still be struggling to be treated fairly in the workplace, to be compensated fairly and to balance work, love and family.”

Another facet of this soldier-on attitude, for many women, was keeping quiet about the sexual transgressions they endured. In 1969, “sexual harassment” was not yet a legal term, and discrimination against women at universities was not outlawed. One in six survey respondents said they were harassed by faculty or staff. The survey did not ask about assaults by fellow students, but anecdotes suggest it was not uncommon.

“I think most of us buried it at the time,” Ross said. “It wasn’t something people talked about in public. For me it was, I really wanted this to work.”

Yale women would end up playing a crucial role in making sexual discrimination on campuses illegal and putting in place grievance procedures for harassment nationwide, including in two groundbreaking Title IX complaints, Alexander vs. Yale in 1980 and another in 2011. Yet new research finds that sexual assault on college campuses continues to be prevalent and underreported.

Alexandra Brodsky, one of those who filed the 2011 complaint, said things had improved since she graduated in 2012. “I think that Yale now has staff and programming to address issues of gender equality that they did not have when I entered,” said Brodsky, a civil rights attorney. “There’s a common vocabulary that students now have to talk about a culture of violence, a culture of misogyny.”

“I guess that’s how history and change work,” she said. “Coeducation is so recent. In the history of Yale, women are a blip.”

This article originally appeared in

'A Very Unwelcome Feeling': The First Women at Yale Look Back

(The Upshot)

Most Americans say it’s not ideal for a child to be raised by two working parents. Yet in two-thirds of American families, both parents work.

This disconnect between ideals and reality helps explain why the United States has been so resistant to universal public child care. Even as child care is setting up to be an issue in the presidential campaign, a more basic question has recently resurfaced: whether mothers should work in the first place.

In many ways, it has already been settled: 93% of fathers and 72% of mothers with children at home are in the labor force. It helps the economy when women work, research shows, and it’s often economically beneficial for their families, too — 40% of women are their families’ breadwinners. Significant evidence demonstrates that when there’s high-quality, affordable, easy-to-find child care, more women work.

Some form of early childhood care and learning is part of the campaign platform of most of the Democratic presidential candidates. President Donald Trump has not supported universal child care but has bolstered existing child care policies, including approving a record increase to the Child Care and Development Fund for low-income families and a child tax credit increase.

Yet there has also been a revived discussion over whether mothers should outsource child care at all. Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, earlier this year decried what he called the belief that “it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids.”

One-third of Democrats surveyed by Pew Research Center said it was ideal for one parent to stay home. (Half said it didn’t matter if it was the mother or the father, but in most opposite-sex couples, it’s the mother).

The debate persists because in the United States, the resistance to public child care has never been mainly about economics. It has been rooted in a moral argument — that the proper place for mothers (at least certain ones) is at home with their children.

“In the United States, child care is still at the political level viewed symbolically and not economically,” said Leah Ruppanner, a sociologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “All of the discussions are around the sanctity of motherhood, preserving the traditional family. Women and families are living very different lives from that.”

She is an author of a study published this month in the journal Socius that found that in states where child care is more affordable and school days are longer, more mothers work than in states where it’s expensive and school days are short. It used American Time Use Survey data from 30,000 working-age mothers with school-aged children at home, from 2005 to 2014, and state data on the average school day length and the cost of full-time child care.

California, Oregon and Washington, for instance, have among the lowest shares of women working, and some of the most expensive child care and shortest school days. North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska have higher shares of women in the workforce, more affordable child care and longer school days.

Research has shown that in industrialized countries, subsidized child care and education had the single biggest effect on women’s employment. In Washington, D.C., public pre-K increased the labor force participation of women with young children by 10 percentage points. The lack of subsidized child care was a major reason the share of women working in the United States unexpectedly stalled in the 1990s. The economic benefits of good, affordable child care for low-income children extend for generations, research has shown, and some studies indicate spending on it more than pays for itself.

“As child care costs increase over the decade, what happens is we see mothers are spending more time in child care,” said Ruppanner, who conducted the study with Stephanie Moller at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Liana Sayer at the University of Maryland. “You’re boxing women out of the labor market.”

But in the United States, people have long had conflicted feelings about whether society and government should make it easier for mothers to work outside the home, and these are complicated by attitudes about race and poverty.

In the 19th century, people thought it was fitting for women to use child care and to work for pay only if their husbands were unable to support them because of death, disability, divorce or drunkenness, said Sonya Michel, professor emerita of history at the University of Maryland. A network of day nurseries started, mostly financed by philanthropy. By the turn of the century, though, they’d been replaced by so-called widows’ or mothers’ pensions. The idea was that if a woman didn’t have a husband to support her, it was still best that she stay home.

The expectation was different for black mothers, beginning with enslaved Africans. Later, poor and black mothers were often denied the pensions that rich and white mothers got. Today, most families receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families are required to work — and receive some government help with child care to do so.

“The country has been so traditional in the persistence of the idea that women did not belong in the workforce,” Michel said, “but the idea that poor women, especially black women, should work has persisted.”

Just 18% of Americans told Pew that it’s best if both parents work full time, and nearly half said one parent should stay home. Today, Americans are more likely to believe in gender equality in work and politics than in the home, a large study found. Certain scholars and far-right politicians around the world have also been using arguments about preserving traditional gender roles and family structure to frame issues like abortion rights and fertility declines.

The only time the United States had something close to universal public child care was during World War II, when in 1941 the Lanham Act directed federal funding to high-quality, government-run child care centers so women of all incomes could work as part of the war effort. But lawmakers were careful to say that it was an emergency measure and that the centers would not become permanent. (The children who went to these centers, particularly from low-income families, performed better educationally and economically throughout their lives, compared with children who were too young to be eligible for the care, research found.)

Universal child care had strong bipartisan support when it was proposed in the Comprehensive Childhood Development Act of 1972, but President Richard Nixon vetoed it over its “family-weakening implications.”

Since then, the government has provided some child care assistance to low-income families. There is also a child care tax credit for working parents. But half of Americans live in places where there is no licensed child care provider or where there are three times as many children as child care slots. Child care costs a typical family about a third of its income. Just 10% of providers are considered to be high quality.

The result is a divided system, in which good child care is accessible only to affluent families, and many mothers in the United States can’t afford to work, said Taryn Morrissey, who teaches public policy at American University and was an adviser to the Obama administration on its early learning initiative. “Instead of investing in a tool we know would help inequality,” she said, “we’re exacerbating it.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/upshot/why-americans-resist-child-care.html" id="48f57f69-8d56-3b3d-ac02-1e6af9112d35">The New York Times</a>.

Why the U.S. Has Long Resisted Universal Child Care

Parenthood in the United States has become much more demanding than it used to be.

Over just a couple of generations, parents have greatly increased the amount of time, attention and money they put into raising children. Mothers who work outside the home spend just as much time tending their children as stay-at-home mothers did in the 1970s.

The amount of money parents spend on children, which used to peak when they were in high school, is now highest when they are under 6 and over 18.

Renée Sentilles enrolled her son, Isaac, in lessons beginning when he was an infant. Even now that he’s 12, she rarely has him out of sight when he is home.

“I read all the child-care books,” said Sentilles, a professor in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. “I enrolled him in piano at 5. I took him to soccer practices at 4. We tried track; we did all the swimming lessons, martial arts. I did everything. Of course I did.”

While this kind of intensive parenting — constantly teaching and monitoring children — has been the norm for upper-middle-class parents since the 1990s, new research shows that people across class divides now consider it the best way to raise children, even if they don’t have the resources to enact it.

There are signs of a backlash, led by so-called free-range parents, but social scientists say the relentlessness of modern-day parenting has a powerful motivation: economic anxiety. For the first time, it’s as likely as not that American children will be less prosperous than their parents. For parents, giving children the best start in life has come to mean doing everything they can to ensure that their children can climb to a higher class, or at least not fall out of the one they were born into.

“As the gap between rich and poor increases, the cost of screwing up increases,” said Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who studies families and inequality. “The fear is they’ll end up on the other side of the divide.”

But it also stokes economic anxiety. “Intensive parenting is a way for especially affluent white mothers to make sure their children are maintaining their advantaged position in society,” said Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University.

Stacey Jones raised her two sons, now in their 20s, as a single mother in a working-class, mostly black neighborhood in Stone Mountain, Georgia. She said she and other parents tried hard to give their children opportunities by finding affordable options: municipal sports leagues instead of traveling club teams and school band instead of private music lessons.

“I think most people have this craving for their children to do better and know more than they do,” said Jones, who works in university communications. “But a lot of these opportunities were closed off because they do cost money.”

New Trappings

“Parent” as a verb gained widespread use in the 1970s, which is also when parenting books exploded. The 1980s brought helicopter parenting, a movement to keep children safe from physical harm, spurred by high-profile child assaults and abductions (despite the fact that they were, and are, exceedingly rare). Intensive parenting was first described in the 1990s and 2000s by social scientists including Sharon Hays and Annette Lareau. It grew from a major shift in how people saw children. They began to be considered vulnerable and moldable — shaped by their early childhood experiences — an idea bolstered by advances in child development research.

The result was a parenting style that was “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive and financially expensive,” Hays wrote in her 1998 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood.” And mothers were the ones expected to be doing the constant cultivation.

The time parents spend in the presence of their children has not changed much, but parents today spend more of it doing hands-on child care. Time spent on activities like reading to children, taking them to lessons and helping with homework has increased the most. Today, mothers spend nearly five hours a week on that, compared with 1 hour 45 minutes hours in 1975 — and they worry it’s not enough. Parents’ leisure time is much more likely to be spent with their children than it used to be. While fathers have recently increased their time spent with children, mothers still spend significantly more.

Sentilles’ mother, Claire Tassin, described a very different way of parenting when her two children were young, in the 1970s. “My job was not to entertain them,” said Tassin, who lives in Vacherie, Louisiana. “My job was to love them and discipline them.”

Of her grandchildren, Isaac and his three cousins, she said: “Their life is much more enriched than mine was, but it definitely has been directed. I’m not saying it doesn’t work. They’re amazing. But I know I felt free, so free as a child. I put on my jeans and my cowboy boots and I played outside all day long.”

The new trappings of intensive parenting are largely fixtures of white, upper-middle-class American culture, but researchers say the expectations have permeated all corners of society, whether or not parents can achieve them. It starts in utero, when mothers are told to avoid cold cuts and coffee, lest they harm the baby. Then: video baby monitors. Homemade baby food. Sugar-free birthday cake. Toddler music classes. Breast-feeding exclusively.

The American Academy of Pediatrics promotes the idea that parents should constantly monitor and teach children, even when the science doesn’t give a clear answer about what’s best. It now recommends that babies sleep in parents’ rooms for a year. Children’s television — instead of giving parents the chance to cook dinner or have an adult conversation — is to be “co-viewed” for maximum learning.

Little Support

At the same time, there has been little increase in support for working parents, like paid parental leave, subsidized child care or flexible schedules, and there are fewer informal neighborhood networks of at-home parents because more mothers are working.

Sentilles felt the lack of support when it became clear that Isaac had anxiety and trouble sleeping. She and her ex-husband changed their work hours and coordinated tutors and therapists.

“Friends are constantly texting support, but no one has time,” she said. “It’s that we’re all doing this at the same time.”

Parenthood is more hands-off in many other countries. In Tokyo, children start riding the subway alone by first grade, and in Paris, they spend afternoons unaccompanied at playgrounds. Intensive parenting has gained popularity in England and Australia, but it has distinctly American roots — reflecting a view of child rearing as an individual, not societal, task.

It’s about “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” said Caitlyn Collins, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “It distracts from the real questions, like why don’t we have a safe place for all kids to go when they’re done with school before parents get home from work?”

In a new paper, Patrick Ishizuka surveyed a nationally representative group of 3,642 parents about parenting. Regardless of their education, income or race, they said the most hands-on and expensive choices were best. For example, they said children who were bored after school should be enrolled in extracurricular activities, and that parents who were busy should stop their task and draw with their children if asked.

“Intensive parenting has really become the dominant cultural model for how children should be raised,” said Ishizuka, a postdoctoral fellow studying gender and inequality at Cornell University.

Americans are having fewer children, so they have more time and money to invest in each one. But investment gaps between parents of differing incomes didn’t use to be so large. As a college degree became increasingly necessary to earn a middle-class wage and as admissions grew more competitive, parents began spending significantly more time on child care, found Valerie Ramey and Garey Ramey, economists at the University of California, San Diego.

Parents also began spending more money on their children for things like preschools and enrichment activities, Sabino Kornrich, a sociologist at Emory University, showed in two recent papers. Rich parents have more to spend, but the share of income that poor parents spend on their children has also grown.

In states with the largest gaps between the rich and the poor, rich parents spend an even larger share of their incomes on things like lessons and private school, found Danny Schneider, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues in a May paper. Parents in the middle 50 percent of incomes have also increased their spending. “Lower socioeconomic status parents haven’t been able to keep up,” he said.

Besides having less money, they have less access to the informal conversations in which parents exchange information with other parents like them. Jones recalled that one of her sons liked swimming, but it wasn’t until he was in high school that she learned about swim teams on which he could have competed.

“I didn’t know because I don’t live in a swim tennis community,” she said. “Unfortunately colleges and universities tend to look at these things as a marker of achievement, and I feel like a lot of kids who have working-class backgrounds don’t benefit from the knowledge.”

Race influences parents’ concerns, too. Jones said that as a parent of black boys, she decided to raise them in a mostly black neighborhood so they would face less racism, even though it meant driving farther to many activities. This is common for middle-class black mothers, found Dawn Dow, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. “They’re making decisions to protect their kids from early experiences of racism,” Dow said. “It’s a different host of concerns that are equally intensive.”

Growing Backlash

Experts agree that investing in children is a positive thing — they benefit from time with their parents, stimulating activities and supportive parenting styles. As low-income parents have increased the time they spend teaching and reading to their children, the readiness gap between kindergarten students from rich and poor families has shrunk. As parental supervision has increased, most serious crimes against children have declined significantly.

But it’s also unclear how much of children’s success is actually determined by parenting.

“It’s still an open question whether it’s the parenting practices themselves that are making the difference, or is it simply growing up with college-educated parents in an environment that’s richer in many dimensions?” said Liana Sayer, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. “I don’t think any of these studies so far have been able to answer whether these kids would be doing well as adults regardless, simply because of resources.”

There has been a growing movement against the relentlessness of modern-day parenting. Utah passed a free-range parenting law. Psychologists and others have raised alarms about children’s high levels of stress and dependence on their parents. Research has shown that children with hyper-involved parents have more anxiety and less satisfaction with life, and that when children play unsupervised, they build social skills, emotional maturity and executive function.

Parents, particularly mothers, feel stress, exhaustion and guilt at the demands of parenting this way, especially while holding a job. American time use diaries show that the time women spend parenting comes at the expense of sleep, time alone with their partners and friends, leisure time and housework. Some pause their careers or choose not to have children. Others, like Sentilles, live in a state of anxiety. She doesn’t want to hover, she said. But trying to oversee homework, limit screen time and attend to Isaac’s needs, she feels no choice.

“At any given moment, everything could just fall apart,” she said.

“On the one hand, I love my work,” she said. “But the way it’s structured in this country, where there’s not really child care and there’s this sense that something is wrong with you if you aren’t with your children every second when you’re not at work? It isn’t what I think feminists thought they were signing up for.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/25/upshot/the-relentlessness-of-modern-parenting.html" id="f3fb3dda-fe3e-37c0-a858-554733efa8b3">The New York Times</a>.

Stress, Exhaustion and Guilt: Modern Parenting

But researchers say children absorb stereotypes, including about gender roles, by age 3. To teach children to think in a more equal way takes effort, and children’s books are a way in. They have the power to teach values and to expand children’s sense of what’s possible. When children read books that break gender stereotypes, research has found, they reach for less stereotypical toys and broaden their future goals.

Based on the latest social science about gender, we made a list of 12 books published in the past three years that help teach children gender equality, in time for the holiday gift-giving season. There is an abundance to choose from — in recent years, publishers have broken with tradition and offered more children’s books about powerful girls and sensitive boys, as well as children of color and from diverse backgrounds. We asked for help from the people at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, and at Little Feminist, a subscription book club for children.

Here are 12 offerings, from board books to middle-grade novels, for the next generation of feminist boys and girls:

“My First Book of Feminism (for Boys)”

By Julie Merberg, illustrated by Michéle Brummer-Everett

Children learn society’s gender stereotypes by the time they start preschool. This board book challenges stereotypes early with rhymes and drawings that address grown-up issues like equal pay, consent and domestic labor with toddler-level directness. Despite the title, it’s not just for boys. And despite the fact that the word “feminism” can be controversial, this book uses the simplest definition: the equality of the genders. For example, boys do fewer chores than girls and are discouraged more than girls from doing gender-atypical activities. This book encourages boys to help around the house, and tells them, “If you learn to work hard, you can do something cool — fight fires, bake cakes, fly a spaceship, teach school.”

“Today I Feel ...: An Alphabet of Feelings”

By Madalena Moniz

In a recent Pew Research Center survey, the majority of adults said there was too little emphasis on encouraging boys to talk about their feelings when they were sad or upset (as opposed to showing anger instead), and too little emphasis on encouraging girls to stand up for themselves. Experts say everyone would benefit from a bigger emotional vocabulary. This book offers 26 feelings, one for each letter of the alphabet: “invisible,” “light,” “nervous,” “quiet,” “relaxed.”

“Julián Is a Mermaid”

By Jessica Love

Girls today feel increasing freedom to be whatever they want to be, but boys still feel like their options are limited to being tough, athletic and stoic, according to a recent survey of American children. This book is an ode to the creative boys who love beautiful things. When Julián is riding the subway with his abuela, he sees three women fabulously dressed as mermaids, and he tells her he is one, too. When they arrive home, he transforms himself, with lipstick, a tail made of curtains and a headdress made of fern fronds, and his grandmother models unconditional acceptance.

“From the Stars in the Sky to the Fish in the Sea”

By Kai Cheng Thom, illustrated by Wai-Yant Li and Kai Yun Ching

From a young age, children naturally favor people who look and act like them — experiments have found that they even prefer children wearing the same color T-shirt as they are. Accepting differences among us is a life skill in a diverse society, and this book, by a transgender woman, is a way to start those conversations. Miu Lan is a child who can change into any shape imaginable, but can’t decide which to be — a bird or a fish, a tree or a star, a boy or a girl.

“Mae Among the Stars”

By Roda Ahmed, illustrated by Stasia Burrington

The effect of female role models is strong in areas like science and math, where girls are less likely to see them. Research has shown that having just one female STEM teacher, for instance, can influence a girl to pursue a science degree and career. This book, based on the life of Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to travel to space, is about pushing back against sexism and racism and about the value of hard work. That’s an important message for boys, too — they have fallen behind girls in achievement in part because they often receive the message that working hard is uncool.

“Shark Lady: The True Story of How Eugenie Clark Became the Ocean’s Most Fearless Scientist”

By Jess Keating, illustrated by Marta Alvarez Miguens

Many parents try to avoid talking about stereotypes, hoping that if they show their children examples of equality between men and women, children will believe in it. But research has shown that instead, it’s essential to explicitly call out stereotypes and explain why they’re problematic. This book offers the chance to do so. Eugenie Clark was determined to become an ichthyologist — no matter the people who told her to be a secretary or a housewife. (And like the previous book about outer space, it takes a topic, sharks, that many children’s products aim at boys and instead tells a story for everyone.)

“Franny’s Father Is a Feminist”

By Rhonda Leet, illustrated by Megan Walker

One of the ways in which men and women remain most unequal is that women still do more child care and household chores. It holds them back professionally, and it models inequality for children. Books like this one that show involved fathers help combat that. While Franny’s mother goes to her “important job,” her father handles the home front, becoming an expert hair braider and breaking down boundaries for Franny too — teaching her to change a tire and cheering at her ballet recitals.

“Teddy’s Favorite Toy”

By Christian Trimmer, illustrated by Madeline Valentine

In the Pew survey, a majority of people said boys and girls should be steered toward activities and toys not typically associated with their gender. Yet children’s products are more segregated than they were 50 years ago. Everyone in this book is defying gender norms. Teddy’s favorite toy is Bren-Da, Warrior Queen of Pacifica, a pink-clad doll. Bren-Da has the “sickest fighting skills,” and when she ends up in a garbage truck, Teddy’s mother saves the day. But the story is told without making a big deal of gender — experts say that stories of children doing ordinary things, whom readers can relate to, are some of the most powerful in showing them what’s possible.

“Shaking Things Up: 14 Young Women Who Changed the World”

By Susan Hood

Researchers say the reason that girls are encouraged to play soccer but boys aren’t encouraged to take ballet, and women are encouraged to become doctors but men are stigmatized for becoming nurses, is that “feminine” equals lower status. This book celebrates women and girls who made an impact throughout history, famous and less so — including Malala Yousufzai, Maya Lin and Ruby Bridges (the first African-American child to integrate an all-white American school.) Each story is told in a poem, illustrated by a different female artist.

“Stories for Boys Who Dare to Be Different: True Tales of Amazing Boys Who Changed the World Without Killing Dragons”

By Ben Brooks, illustrated by Quinton Wintor

Boys are particularly sensitive to the effects of having strong male role models, research has shown. Yet many of the teachers and caregivers in their lives are women, and boys say they feel pressure to be a certain kind of man: physically strong and athletic. This collection of 76 short biographies and illustrations shows role models that expand the definition of masculinity. It includes men who were artistic, innovative or introverted, as varied as Bill Gates, Ai Weiwei and Frank Ocean.

“The Best Man”

By Richard Peck

Middle school is a time when messages about gender are strongest — and books for this age group also tend to be highly gendered. Girls say they feel pressure to be physically attractive. Boys feel pressure to be hypermasculine — and social scientists have found that boys who aren’t are called feminine or gay. This novel for children age 8 and up deals with several of these themes, including masculinity, adolescence and gay marriage. Archer Magill has been collecting male role models, and he finds a new one in the first male teacher in his school. Then he finds out that two of them are in love with one another. Plus, Archer has a female best friend — research has shown that children with opposite-sex friendships have fewer gender stereotypes and better problem-solving skills and communication.

“The Witch Boy”

By Molly Knox Ostertag

In a continuing international study of adolescents, scientists have found that worldwide, they’re discouraged from straying from traditional gender roles. Aster, the main character of this graphic novel for ages 8 and up, is one of those people. Where he lives, boys grow up to be shape-shifters and girls grow up to be witches. But he wants to learn witchery. So he practices in secret, with the help of a girl from outside the community, Charlie, who defies norms in her own way. It reaches children at an age when they are trying to figure out which box they fit in — and shows them that no one has to be confined to a single box.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/upshot/twelve-books-for-feminist-boys-and-girls.html" id="6eacfb99-0415-3e7e-a16b-427a26456b7e">The New York Times</a>.

Most Americans say that they believe in the full equality of men and women — the most straightforward definition of feminism — and that they want to raise children that way.

Twelve Books for Feminist Boys and Girls

Women with twin brothers do worse in school and make less money than those with twin sisters, a large new study has found. In their 30s, the women wound up earning 9 percent less. They were also less likely to graduate from school, marry and have children.

The researchers said the effects were because the women were naturally exposed to their brothers’ testosterone in the womb. The study, which was published Monday, included all births in Norway for 11 years.

The findings might also help explain a paradox — overall, girls are doing better than boys in school, but men are doing better than women in the workforce. Researchers have found many potential explanations. Girls seem to be encouraged to be competent, while boys are encouraged to be confident, and school today requires a lot of self-control, which most boys develop later. Once people start working, women face sexism and a host of other inequalities (many related to motherhood).

Testosterone, which all females are exposed to in utero, might be another contributor. The hormone is associated with certain behaviors — including aggression, competition and risk taking — that might contribute to boys’ underperformance in school, but that are often rewarded in the workplace. Females exposed to an elevated level oftestosterone might act more like boys when they’re young, but then face sexism at work when they’re older. Women are penalized, research shows, when they show many of the same behaviors that benefit men in the workplace.

The new study was focused on studying twins and did not analyze these other issues. Also, the findings are specific to people born in Norway several decades ago. But it suggests broader effects, said David Figlio, an economist and dean of the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern, who wrote the paper with colleagues at Northwestern and the Norwegian School of Economics.

“Women exposed to testosterone have some of the educational challenges more frequently associated with men,” Figlio said. “However, to the extent to which labor market discrimination exists in society, they don’t have the discriminatory benefits that men enjoy.”

The study, published in PNAS, was of 728,842 people, including 13,800 twins — everyone born in Norway from 1967 to 1978 — in addition to records about their family, education and work.

Women with a male twin were 15 percent less likely to graduate from high school than women with a female twin, and those who went to college were 4 percent less likely to finish it.They had a 12 percent lower probability of being married, and a 6 percent lower probability ofhaving children.

Notably, the research did not show an effect on the careers people pursued. Among those who graduated from college, women with male twins were no more likely to pursue degrees in traditionally male-dominated fields like science, engineering, math and economics. The study did not find that men had long-term effects from having a female twin.

Pranjal Mehta, an experimental psychologist at University College London who studies the effects of hormones on behavior, cautioned against drawing simplistic conclusions from the results. “Testosterone might not have direct effects on behaviors,” he said. “It depends on context, but it also depends on other characteristics of the person.”

Men and women have varying levels of testosterone, and it affects people in different ways; everyone sits somewhere along a spectrum, scientists say. Much depends on culture and environment, and on individual factors like stress levels and self-perception. Also, it’s a responsive hormone, meaning its levels change based on what happens to a person. Testosterone levels rise when men watch their sports team win, for instance, and decrease when they become fathers.

But the new study suggests that, on average, there are consequences when females are exposed before birth to higher-than-usual levels of testosterone.

“The evidence here is there likely are biological effects of prenatal testosterone, but how they actually manifest is a product of a particular society,” said Chris Kuzawa, a co-author of the paper and a professor of anthropology at Northwestern. “What behaviors are considered problematic or encouraged is a cultural phenomenon.”

Scientists do not measure prenatal levels of testosterone or manipulate the levels for the purpose of an experiment, so they cannot prove direct effects. But other research has suggested similar effects when females are exposed to male sex hormones in utero. Studies have found that the girls behaved more like typical boys. This has also been observed in mice and other animals born in litters that are predominantly male.

Other studies of opposite-sex twins have also found effects of testosterone on females, in behaviors like aggression and rule breaking. But it had been impossible to show that they were for biological reasons, as opposed to a result of being raised with a brother. By also studying females whose male twins died early in life, the Norway research was able to show that the differences were mainly because of testosterone exposure.

Socialization also plays a role. A new study published this month shows that in the United States, women with a younger brother earned around 7 percent less in adulthood, in part because their parents had lower academic expectations for them and they took on more traditional gender roles.

In the Norway study, the effects on girls’ educational achievement — perhaps because of more disruptive behavior in the classroom — probably drove the long-term economic effects, the researchers said. Roughly half of their decreased earnings could be explained by their lower rates of graduation from high school and college.

One potential explanation for the women’s lower rates of marriage is that testosterone could indirectly influence their behavior in relationships. Their decreased fertility was not because of marrying less often — it was true among women who married and those who didn’t. Exposure to excess testosterone in utero has been found to decrease fertility in the females of multiple species, including sheep and mice.

In the last four decades, the rate of twins has nearly doubled in many countries, largely because women are having babies later and using in vitro fertilization more often, both of which increase the chance of twins. In the United States, 1.1 percent of newborn girls have male twins, up from 0.6 percent in 1971, the researchers estimated.

The findings could inform parents, doctors and teachers about ways to support these children, the scientists said. They also noted that the findings were based on national averages, and do not predict the result of any individual fertility decision. Not all girls with twin brothers are affected, or affected in the same way, and the researchers did not study other parts of life in which females with male twins might excel.

Also, a person’s biology alone does not determine a life course. Family, environment and personality shape it, too.

“There are always interactions between biology and culture and the environment,” said Bernard Crespi, an evolutionary biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada who peer-reviewed the paper. “You can always change the cultural and social environment. Humans are plastic.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/upshot/women-with-male-twins-are-more-likely-to-face-penalties-at-school-and-work.html" id="c5bf2c2f-7783-3e74-a2bf-4b7c3e25ace4">The New York Times</a>.

Women With Male Twins Are More Likely to Face Penalties at School and Work

Britni Hebert was chief resident, on track for a career in the highly demanding field of oncology, when she found out she was having twins. “Everything kind of just tilted on its head,” she said.

She couldn’t imagine 80-hour workweeks with two newborns at home, while her husband was doing an equally intensive radiology fellowship. But she didn’t leave the profession. Instead, Hebert, 37, decided to practice internal medicine and geriatrics, with more control over her hours. She has been able to change her schedule three times as her family’s needs have changed (the twins are 6, and the couple has a baby) and now works about 85% of full-time hours.

Medicine has become something of a stealth family-friendly profession, at a time when other professions are growing more greedy about employees’ time. Jobs increasingly require long, inflexible hours and pay disproportionately more to people who work them. But if one parent is on call at work, someone else has to be on call at home. For most couples, that’s the woman — which is why educated women are being pushed out of work or into lower-paying jobs.

But medicine has changed in ways that offer doctors and other health care workers the option of more control over their hours, depending on the specialty and job they choose, while still practicing at the top of their training and being paid proportionately.

Women are now half of medical students. In some specialties, like pediatrics, geriatrics and child psychiatry, they are the majority. Female doctors are likelier than women with law degrees, business degrees or doctorates to have children. They’re also much less likely to stop working when they do.

Flexible, predictable hours are the key — across occupations — to shrinking gender gaps, according to the body of research by Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard. As American employers struggle to adapt to the realities of modern family life and as younger generations of workers demand more balance, medicine offers a road map.

Hebert, who lives in Lafayette, Louisiana, estimates that forgoing oncology halved her lifelong earnings. But she’s grateful that she had other options for practicing medicine — and can still meet her children at the school bus most afternoons.

“I don’t want to pretend there aren’t sacrifices that come with the path that I’ve chosen,” she said, “but I just don’t think I could be employed at this time if not for being able to decide my schedule.”

A Happy Consequence

Most of what changed in medicine had little to do with making it easier for parents, especially women, to work; family friendliness was a happy consequence.

A generation ago, the typical doctor owned a private practice and saw patients whenever they got sick. Today, doctors are much likelier to work for large group practices or hospitals and be on call at predictable times. Seventy percent of doctors under 40 are now employees, not owners, according to American Medical Association data. So are the majority of female doctors of all ages.

Large group practices are more profitable because they can share resources, like clinic space or physician assistants, and more easily negotiate with health insurance plans.

But the setup also gives doctors more work-life balance because there are more people who can serve as substitutes and divide night and weekend work.

“The old market expectation that your doctor will be available at all hours and is entirely flexible was beginning to fall apart as the workforce became more diverse,” said Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “New generations look at the work-life balance of older generations of physicians, and I think many of them say, ‘I don’t want that.’”

Wachter was responsible for naming one of the jobs that exemplifies this shift: hospitalist, the physician who sees patients who are hospitalized and coordinates with the specialists caring for them. They also make doctors’ schedules predictable because hospitalists work in shifts, and primary care physicians don’t have to go to the hospital when their patients do.

Other occupations have also come to rely on substitutes, like pharmacists and real estate agents (and in rare cases, some lawyers and management consultants).

Sara Gonzalez, 37, a pediatrician in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, works as a hospitalist and in the emergency department, another shift job. She usually works 10 eight-hour shifts a month, with a few 16-hour overnights. When she’s off, she’s responsible for anything that comes up with her 1-year-old daughter; when she’s at the hospital, her wife, who works in marketing, is the on-call parent.

“When my shift changes, I hand off my patients to the next provider, and that’s a really nice thing to not be on call when I walk out of the hospital,” Gonzalez said. “It gives me a great deal of control over my schedule, especially since I have these other interests, which were initially travel and have now shifted to family.”

The internet helps. Electronic medical records enable any doctor to see a patient’s history. Some use telemedicine to see patients who don’t require a physical exam. In the case of radiology, the entire job can be done remotely.

Julia Dry Knarreborg, 42, a radiologist in Edmond, Oklahoma, and a mother, works from home, reading scans from patients in several states. She is paid by the day and can add shifts when she wants. If she needs to leave midday, she can request that no emergency scans come through for that period and catch up on nonemergency scans when she returns.

“You have total freedom to do what needs to be done for your family,” she said, “without the stigma associated with a working mom — ‘Oh, she’s got to go again, her kid is sick, or she has another prenatal appointment.’”

The Power of Part-Time

There are other things that can make it easier to be a mother and a doctor, like earning enough to afford good child care and household help. But the rise in predictable hours is a major reason more women have entered medicine, and young women are opting for lower-hour specialties more than in the past, Goldin’s analysis of data from the Community Tracking Study Physician Survey and the American Medical Association shows. Specialties with shorter hours and fewer emergencies, like dermatology, attract more women; those with long, inflexible hours, like cardiology, have more men.

Women under 45 also work fewer hours than men in the same specialty — an average of 48.1 hours a week compared with men’s 58.5, she found.

Yee-Yie Fogarty, 45, is a radiation oncologist at a large health care system in Northern California and a mother of four. She works 80% of full time — and is paid 80% of what she would if she worked full time.

“When I’m here four days a week, I feel I can work at 100% of my abilities,” she said. “I do feel in my heart it is sacred work.”

Female doctors are paid 67% of what men are, but much of the gap is because they work less. After considering their hours, their specialty and the years they’ve been doctors, the gap shrinks to 82%, Goldin found. (Also adjusting for hours and age, full-time female financial analysts make 77% of what men do; lawyers make 82%, and computer engineers make 88%.)

While a part-time lawyer makes disproportionately less than a full-time one, doctors who work reduced schedules tend to be paid more proportionally. (The remaining pay gap, she said, is partly because women’s reduced hours earlier in their careers might have long-term consequences, like being passed over for grants or leadership positions).

Hours — and not other factors like women’s preferences for certain specialties or employers’ preferences for whom to hire — directly influenced female doctors’ career choices, found another economist, Melanie Wasserman at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2003, medical residencies capped the number of hours residents could work and mandated time off. In response, more women entered specialties that had been more time-intensive, like surgery and neurology. (Men did not make different choices because of the change in hours). She also found evidence that fertility rates increased for women in specialties with shortened hours.

The findings offer a broader lesson, Wasserman said: “If employers are serious about improving gender diversity in their workforce, they might want to think seriously about how they are structuring their jobs.”

The Cost of Flexibility

Female doctors face the same challenges that other female workers do — including sexual harassment, discrimination and inadequate parental leave — and some specific to medicine. Even doctors with predictable schedules may work nights and weekends, can’t easily leave midday and often feel a drive to be available anytime their patients need them.

Training is arduous, expensive and long, and usually overlaps with the prime childbearing years, so many female doctors struggle with fertility and carry onerous student debt. Some might choose a specialty before they have children, then have a hard time switching to a more flexible job if they want to. And some of the ways in which medicine has changed have made it harder to balance work and family — like the time consumed by electronic medical records — so doctors are experiencing increasing rates of burnout.

“There are so many sacrifices that women physicians make in order to remain in their careers, remain working — things that aren’t taken into consideration when looking at how wonderful and flexible it can be,” said Aisha Haynie Smart, 41, a hospital medical director near Houston.

For her training, she said, she moved far from her family and delayed marriage and pregnancy. In her current job, she misses directly caring for patients. But she can leave midday or work remotely if needed — and unlike when she worked as a hospitalist and emergency doctor, she never misses a family dinner or her son’s Saturday swim lesson.

Claire Cain Miller

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