Every time I hear someone talk about the book Lean In, my inner self just does an eye roll. Yes there are norms that predominantly affect women and how they behave in a workplace (where the workplace for most people is by and large a construct of the patriarchy), and yes there's something to be said about changing your behaviour to be more assertive at work (although I wonder why no one's written a book yet about how men should back down, listen more and be more of a team player?), but one of biggest determinants of how far women progress in their career is the spillover effects of household labour.
How can a woman compete with a man at work if she is also expected to take care of all the children and do all the chores at home when all the men at work have wives who do that for them? Which is why my favourite gender equality policy is still dad leave with a 'use or lose it' clause.
I feel like I must sound like a broken-record.
Anyway, today was a bit of a gloomy day full of bad corona virus news (which so far I have been surprisingly good at not engaging with). Yes, my dad has been messaging me nonstop and I've been trying my best to not let the links that he's sending through alarm or stress me out. But it is very frustrating getting texts all the time telling me uni is probably going to close down soon. Of course, everyone on campus knows that uni will probably close if there's at least one identified case. The surprising thing is that there hasn't been one already. I'm just frustrated because I'd like to not have to attend class remotely, and it would be nice if I could continue my tutoring job, and it would be a bit of a bummer if I left work to go back to uni only to have uni shut down.
But I guess it's one of those things that you can disengage with, but it'll still end up affecting you in the end. Even if I never get the virus, I still have to contend with stupid toilet paper roll issues, not being able to buy pasta when I want and not being able to go to class. It's annoying when it's not actually the virus but the hysteria of peoples' response to it that is the problem. The spread of the virus is more out of our control than how we collectively decide to behave in response to it. When people decide that buying all the toilet paper is the best response, we all lose out.
Being out of the labour market is also a bit of a worry, because who knows whether things will have recovered by the time I want to get a job again? Until today I was pretty impervious to this - I naively felt that I was highly employable regardless. But recently I had to learn some pretty important lessons about letting go of things that are outside of my control - I didn't think corona virus would substantially affect my life that much but even if it does, what can I do about it?
No comments:
Post a Comment