Quickies

Quickies: Career-ruining husbands, church says federal laws don’t apply, and Barbie the feminist hacker

  • Children don’t ruin careers, husbands do – “A new study of Harvard Business School graduates…shows that high-achieving women are not meeting the career goals they set for themselves in their 20s. It’s not because they’re “opting out” of the workforce when they have kids, but because they’re allowing their partners’ careers to take precedence over their own.”
  • Catholic diocese claims to be outside the authority of federal courts – “This rather startling claim that courts don’t have any jurisdiction over a church grew out of a case brought by a former Catholic school teacher who was fired for trying in-vitro fertilization. In 2012, Emily Herx, then an English teacher at St. Vincent de Paul School in Fort Wayne, Ind., was terminated just two weeks after she requested time off for the procedure.” From Arturo.
  • Feminist hacker Barbie – How to fix the laughably awful book about Barbie the computer engineer (the hilarious review of which you can read here).
  • Kids really like Lammily, the realistically proportioned doll – There’s also stickers you can use to give her freckles, tattoos, stretch marks, and cellulite.
  • Cute Animal Friday! From Mary, a golden retriever having the time of his life failing an agility test. And for those of us who had snow this week, here’s a panda playing in the snow.

Amanda

Amanda works in healthcare, is a loudmouthed feminist, and proud supporter of the Oxford comma.

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4 Comments

  1. On the one hand, that Barbie book is ridiculous.

    On the other hand, we really needed another excuse for internet hipsters to take shots at the plebs using PCs. How refreshing.

  2. From the Alternate Barbieverse:

    “Programming is not a team sport”, Barbie says.

    Of course it is. No one person can understand all of it or even a small fraction. The small programming company (which has been fairly stable with between 15 and 20 people for about 40 years!) works because we have overlapping but complementary skill sets, and we work together to accomplish our projects.

    The incorrectness of the whole notion of the lone warrior inventor is one of the principle themes of the current Skepchick Book Club book, How We Got to Now”.

    The issue I have with Barbie as a programmer isn’t that she doesn’t know how to repair a virus-damaged PC. (I would seek help or advice on that, too.) It’s that she doesn’t seem to have any programming skills at all.

    The rest of that particular ABV (Alternate Barbieverse) is much better:

    “I already coded in the physics attributes. That’s one of the hardest parts, you know.”

    But she should have accepted their offer to help:

    “Steven, you can maintain the build and installation scripts, and Brian, you’re good with words, can you do the pop-up help? Oh, BTW, do either of you know anyone who’s good at debugging real-time event driven programs? I seem to be occasionally dropping commands, and the debugger’s no help. It makes it reeeeally slow, produces gigabytes of tracing information, and doesn’t break with the debugger enabled.”

    “Uh, good luck with that,” Brian replied. “I’ll get started on those pop-ups.”

  3. I knew I could rely on somebody to make this point. :) I have nothing to add other than that your alternate version of the ABV makes me happy.

  4. There’s not a single surprise in the story about women’s careers being lower priority. As has been noted, at best you’re looking at a wage gap of 5% (and higher if you look at, say, education required rather than specific job titles). Now, that’s not all that much–but it’s HUGE when the couple has a kid and they realize that outside care isn’t going to cut it. If one of the two has to either go part-time or outright take a couple years off, even in the most egalitarian households, it’s going to be whoever is bringing in less money.

    So, yeah, if a woman wants to be able to hold her career-track after marriage and kids, she’s better off marrying down slightly, on the economic side of things. The problem, of course, is that this is difficult if she also wants an educational peer, because any man with similar educational background will tend to be privileged into a better-paying field. A vicious cycle all the way ’round.

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