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Submitted by reeses on Thu, 2002-10-31 04:09.

Wow.

Sometimes, I'm really amazed how I just can't understand someone's point of view on something. That is, I can understand the motivating factors, but they just seem somehow...ignorant, misinformed, or just confused. Especially for things that appear eminently obvious to the most casual observer.

Kat went to a seminar, presentation, or somesuch on "The New Glass Ceiling". Basically, female attorneys who choose to have children are somewhat penalised by their inability to spend much more than 50 hours at work per week. Because of this, they don't get the best cases, they don't get the best salaries, and they don't get on the partner track.

I think I made some comment along the lines of,"That makes sense. If a person's quality of work remains the same, but their capacity for work is diminished, they shouldn't receive the same compensation."

Boom! Just as I couldn't understand (at an internal level) a viewpoint contrary to the one just stated, she could not accept mine. She ranted about how it wasn't right, that our country has misprioritised family and work, etc. etc.

So, I tried to reframe my perspective. "OK, let me say this another way -- if I work 100 hours per week, all else being equal, I should receive greater compensation than someone working 50 hours per week." You have a function of three parameters: quality of work, quantity of work, and value of work, resulting in compensation. C = f(q, Q, v). If q and v are constant, C will vary with Q. For my function, you increase Q, you increase C. It should hold true for any commodity -- quality times quantity times value equals price. (factoring a discount for bulk purchases) Who can disagree with that?

Boom! Guess who??? :-)

Anyway, at this point, she told me not to talk to her about it because she had very strong opinions on the matter. But that didn't keep her from making...one...last...point. I told her to stop talking about it, and tried to talk about the weather. Also apparently the wrong thing to say.

"I have work to do. Bye."

Sheesh. Of course, I just realised it's PMS week. Not that it's the only reason for the outburst, but it puts us at a disadvantage anyway, because she gets particularly quarrelsome around that time.

I'll just leave it at this -- communism is evil and stupid, even if it's your sweetie espousing it. It actually greatly concerns me that she's nearing 30 and coming back to that way of thinking. It must be frightening for a woman who wants a family, looking forward to a legal career where she has to make certain hard choices. Again, I think it's necessary for her to reframe her perspective and her expectations. There's no way she's going to excel in a major law firm if she has children and chooses not to work more than 40 hours per week, especially if she does it early in her career. But there are so many assumptions inherent in that sentence: excel, major, law firm, 40 hours per week. All of them are subject to redefinition or substitution.

Heck, she doesn't want to work in a big law firm anyway!

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