Smith, the originator of what we now call economics, may have imagined a table set with self-interest-filled plates, but he didn’t cook his own meals, nor did he pay anyone to do it for him. He didn’t go from one devotee’s house to another like an ancient Greek, and he didn’t sit at a patron’s table like a court painter. Instead, he had his mommy do it.
.. Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner? is Marçal’s book-length attack on the idea of economic rationality as a whole, from Smith to the present day. For Marçal, the title story points to a fundamental error in economic ideology: “Somebody has to prepare that steak so Adam Smith can say their labor doesn’t matter.” Much of women’s domestic and reproductive labor quite literally does not factor within economic models. The old joke is that GDP declines when an economist marries his housekeeper, which is not so much a joke as a good explanation of Gross Domestic Product and what it does not account for.
.. The economic rationality that is supposed to guide human behavior isn’t designed to apply to the half of the population expected to work for free. Marçal doesn’t argue that economics is sexist so much as that it’s totally clueless.
.. Marçal rejects Lagarde and the “Lean In” brand of feminism that imagines women, economically, as heretofore repressed men.
.. Only a man, she suggests, would imagine independence rather than dependence as the basis for the human condition. Individualists make the mistake of economic thinking: They forget about their mothers.
.. But nothing could be further from the truth: The fetus is entirely enveloped within another human being, and the birth process is called labor.
.. She makes an excellent argument for the value of feminism as an analytical lens: It is not a way to show respect or fill out the historical record, but a critical means of differentiating truth from falsehood. Proceeding from the truths that women are people and many people are women reveals the ways in which other modes of thought begin with very different assumptions.
.. Not until the conclusion is it apparent how absent violence is from Marçal’s story. Reading the book, you might think capitalist patriarchy is propped up by reason. Marçal is fully convincing when she argues that centuries of individualist thinkers have worked from a limited understanding of human beings.
.. We have been taught, she writes, to identify with economic man: with “the depth of his feelings,” with his “fear of vulnerability, of nature, of emotion, of dependency, of the cyclical, and of everything we can’t understand.”
GQ’s Profile of Hope Hicks Tells Us a Lot About Trump’s View of Women
Like most of the women who’ve passed through Trump’s entourage, Hicks is a former model; Cosmopolitan has called her “a dead ringer for supermodel Hilary Rhoda.” She’s “a hugger and a people pleaser,” as Nuzzi puts it, and seems pliable to her boss’s immoderate will
.. The profile contains multiple anecdotes about former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski verbally abusing Hicks until she cried in front of colleagues (and, at least once, in public on a New York street). There’s nothing shameful about getting emotional at work, but there is probably something wrong with a workplace where the fact that an employee cries after a superior tells her, “You’re fucking dead to me,” is taken as a sign that she’s unusually “sensitive.” This toxic dynamic didn’t stop Hicks from defending Lewandowski against charges that he’d physically battered a female Breitbart reporter, whom she derisively called “an attention seeker.”
.. It’s not hard to imagine how a woman who comes off as agreeable, vulnerable, and always flawlessly turned-out—a trifecta of traditional femininity—has succeeded in the retrograde world that is Trump’s sphere of influence. But there’s something uncomfortable about saying so aloud.
.. Hicks exemplifies not only what Trump expects of women, but also what he demands from all his American subjects: that we keep our mouths shut, and smile, and don’t appear to think too hard about anything he’s saying.
A Family-Friendly Policy That’s Friendliest to Male Professors
To succeed at top universities, academics must finish graduate school, find a job as an assistant professor and then race to establish themselves as world-class researchers before being evaluated for tenure. Succeed within seven years and you have a job for life.
Why Women (Sometimes) Don’t Help Other Women
It’s not because they’re inherently harsher leaders than men, but because they often respond to sexism by trying to distance themselves from other women.
There are two dominant cultural ideas about the role women play in helping other women advance at work, and they are seemingly at odds: the Righteous Woman and the Queen Bee.
The Righteous Woman is an ideal, a belief that women have a distinct moral obligation to have one another’s backs. This kind of sentiment is best typified by Madeleine Albright’s now famous quote, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!”
.. The ultimate Queen Bee is the successful woman who instead of using her power to help other women advance, undermines her women colleagues.
.. they overlap in that they both further a double standard—that conflict between men is normal but between women it’s dysfunctional. When men battle it out, they are seen as engaging in healthy competition and vigorous debate. When women do the same things, they are Mean Girls locked in a heated catfight.
.. despite studies showing that men engage in indirect aggression like gossiping and social exclusion at similar or even higher rates than women, it is still widely believed that women are meaner to one another.
.. It turns out that it was the older generation of women professors, not the younger generation, who displayed this Queen Bee-like response.
.. Rather, to the degree they exist, Queen Bee dynamics are triggered by gender discrimination.
.. For women with low levels of gender identification—who think their gender should be irrelevant at work and for whom connecting with other women is not important—being on the receiving end of gender bias forces the realization that others see them first and foremost as women.
.. these women try to set themselves apart from other women. They do this by pursuing an individual strategy of advancement that centers on distancing themselves from other women.
.. It’s actually an approach used by many marginalized groups to overcome damaging views held about their group. For example, research has found that some gay men try to distance themselves from stereotypes about gays being effeminate by emphasizing hyper-masculine traits and holding negative beliefs about effeminate gays.
.. When a woman expresses a stereotypical view about another woman, it’s not see as a sexist statement but rather as an unbiased assessment, since there is a tendency to believe that individuals cannot be biased against members of their own group. But they often are.