Doctor Who, Jill Biden?

Update: I wrote the below in May 2013 in response to a National Review article. The issue is ripe again with a December 11, 2020 op-ed in the WSJ, making mostly the same argument, complete with calling Dr. Biden kiddo. Sexist tropes are very slow to die.

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Doctor Who? No, not Dr. Who.

“Doctor Who?” is what the National Review Online asks about Dr. Jill Biden, wife of the Vice President.

Apparently, that well-regarded think-tank takes issue with such insistence upon a professional distinction. In the article entitled, “Diagnosing Dr. Biden: The second lady exemplifies a bloated class of people with irrelevant, unimpressive titles,” we’re told that, “Dr. Biden isn’t a physician, of course. She has a doctorate – in ‘educational leadership,’ whatever the hell that is.”

Biting wit, to be sure. Continue reading Doctor Who, Jill Biden?

Is Cleaning Up Women’s Work?

This post appeared in Role Reboot.

The second woman to occupy 10 Downing Street offered to step down if Parliament passed her latest Brexit plan. Though lawmakers rejected it, Theresa May’s apparent “sweetener” marks the latest instance of female executives rising to power in times of crisis only to shoulder the blame for that crisis itself. The pattern is all too clear.

Continue reading Is Cleaning Up Women’s Work?

Abigail and Her Sisters

We all tend to read our own lives through the biographies of others.  We judge their challenges, successes and failures through the prism of our own.  So when I came to Diane Jacobs  “Dear Abigail: The Intimate Lives and Revolutionary Ideas of Abigail Adams and Her Two Remarkable Sisters,” published this spring, I took a very personal approach. Continue reading Abigail and Her Sisters

Ted Cruz Comes to New York

New York GOP loves Senator Ted Cruz.  The Texas firebrand is scheduled to headline a big-bucks fundraiser in Manhattan later this month as a featured guest.  Special guests include State Senator Dean Skelos, the Republican Conference Leader.  Regular guests are expected to pay $1000 for dinner, with proceeds benefiting the state party organization (which, considering its successes these past several election cycles makes you wonder what exactly the money gets spent on).  By ponying up $5000 per person, however, you can get a picture taken with the senator.  This should be fun to watch.

Senator Cruz is a rising star of the national party.  He burst into office just a few months ago and has lost little time in irking just about everyone on both sides of the aisle.  And while his Tea Party fervor and Lone Star swagger may not sit so well with some, the consequences are more than just personal. Continue reading Ted Cruz Comes to New York

The Redshirting Debate Continues

[Guest post on NYT Motherlode blog, Sep. 26, 2011]

When I read “Delay Kindergarten at Your Child’s Peril” by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt, I felt vindicated — almost the way I felt when I read the recent article that chocolate has some impressive health benefits.  (Phew.)

Having digested Malcolm Gladwell’s strident arguments in his book “Outliers” that being the youngest in the class was a huge disadvantage, and the 2007 article in the New York Times Magazine that touted the benefits of delaying kindergarten, I was very hesitant to put my twins, born in November 2004, 10 weeks premature, into kindergarten when they were still 4.  Granted, this week’s Sunday Review article is not the first to argue that putting young kids in kindergarten may actually benefit them. Around the time my twins were entering kindergarten (though too late to change their start date), I read articles arguing just that, but the weight of authority seemed to be that younger children would be educationally damaged for years.

My own children were still in the NICU the January after they were born, unable to breathe on their own. It seemed as if their actual birth date should not even count, but they were set to go to New York City public schools, and the cutoff for the New York City Department of Education is Dec. 31.  I was told that if I put them in nursery school another year, I may risk their being placed in first grade anyway because, thankfully, they were not showing any delays.  And there was the escalating cost of the nursery school tuition to consider.

So I counted my fortunes that my kids were healthy, and into kindergarten they went, at 4 years 9 months old, with kids born in January 2004 and even a few born the December before who had received a waiver.  I  was not even pregnant with the twins until May 2004.  My kids were a cluster of cells; these kids were four months old.

My father told me I was crazy to worry. He said that the twins were fine, and echoing the arguments Wang and Aamodt made this week, he said they would do better being the youngest.  He  skipped a grade in his Canadian elementary school, so was always the youngest, yet he was valedictorian of his high school class, and earned merit scholarships to college and law school.  I told him that anecdotes were just that, and that studies trumped his singular experience, impressive as it may be.

For us, it turns out (at least so far) that my father was right.  It may not be right for everyone, but my children are indeed fine and I am confident that for them, going to kindergarten at 4 years old was the right decision for a lot of the reasons that the Sunday Review article points out.  They benefited from being around older kids.  I caught myself last year, when my twins were in first grade, worrying that they were not being challenged enough.  Type A as I may be, even I realized the irony of that.

My youngest daughter was born this February, so she will among the oldest in her class. Do I have to worry about her being disadvantaged by being the oldest?  Maybe I can listen to Mr. Gladwell for her case.

Copyright New York Times 2011

 

Working More, Earning Less

This great collection of charts on Mother Jones shows how the United States stacks up to the rest of the world in terms of productivity, wages, income, and vacation, and how it stacks up against itself historically.  The charts show again the ever widening rift between the top 1% and the rest of us, and the impact our service and information based economy has on the number of jobs available.

And yes, the charts remind us that the U.S. is one of only tiny number of nations that offer no paid maternity leave (our company includes Swaziland and Papua New Guinea).   Not the kind of American exceptionalism we should be striving for.