I hear this mostly w/r/t nonwhite scholars these days. (If colleagues or peers think that white women are all lucky duckies, no one shares that opinion any more with *me*, at least.) Most white people don’t think that standards have been lowered, but they persist in the belief that nonwhite scholars have all kinds of options that they’ll never have.

Of course, many white scholars don’t think about what it might cost nonwhite scholars who move to small towns and rural areas that are overwhelmingly white. If they’re single/unpartnered, dating can be a challenge, and if they have a partner and/or children, they have to think about their children’s safety and well-being as very visible minorities in ways that white people don’t have to. As a Latino friend of mine from back in Winesburg, Ohio used to say: “I hope they don’t take [the controversial, some said demeaning Indian stereotype] Cheif Redskin’s face off of the football stadium. That would be one less brown face in this town!”

I remember when the original MIT study was published, the good writers at the NYT were stunned that any employer would admit to sex discrimination, no matter how strong the evidence. That article then finished with what amounted to general instructions on how any employer could easily avoid liability on the issue.

I’m damned tired of hearing that woman are, by definition, less accomplished or deserving than any man. Those boys, bitching with the chips on their shoulder, about how undergraduate women have to justify their place in the classroom? They illustrate how little progress we’ve made in western society over the last hundred years in our essential attitudes toward gender equality.

One thing that faculty at Ph.D.-granting institutions could do to (begin to) address this issue is to model for their graduate students– from day 1 of classes– how to speak professionally about one’s responsibilities to frail family members. We may occasionally snark about undergrads using their dying relatives as excuses for late assignments, but that snark doesn’t prepare grad students well for how (and when) to professionally take time off for equivalent situations.

(More concretely: If you’re unlikely to get anything done anyway because of worrying about and/or caring for your terminally ill family member, when should you cancel class/find a substitute for the rest of the semester/tell your advisor/cancel that conference paper? How do you phrase the email?)

Later today, I have to schedule a work-life-balance discussion for my school and I just dread it. Students show up expecting the speaker to dole out the magical secret to making it all wonderful and easy. And instead the speaker describes how they managed – hard work, little sleep, trying to make the best of what is almost always a totally sucky unfair situation. Students then leave a little more disillusioned. Yuck, yuck, yuck and yuck.

In some of the more civilized societies on the planet, the benefits afforded people and (yes) families are staggering by American standards, which come off as entirely Hobbesian in comparison. Generous leave time, wholly-funded day care for years, etc. (Yes, pro-natalist for sure, but in part this is a factor of the robust evidence showing that early development and intervention is absolutely critical for health over the lifespan, so in some sense there is justification in public health policy for “Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children”).

The upshot is that the occupational climate of the U.S., including that of universities is deleterious to our health, and of course, the health consequences of these social pathologies are distributed highly unequally across the social gradient, disproportionately affecting the already marginalized and disadvantaged.

The U.S. missed the boat on basic social welfare programs like socialized medicine and guaranteed paid parental leave, back when medical care was cheaper and more primitive than it is now. Now these are just accepted parts of the European and Canadian welfare states. Now I think it’s too late for anything like this to happen in the U.S. If it ever could have happened, that is (and I’m doubtful about that.)

Americans are a hard and mean people. They prefer to praise the already rich and powerful and kick the poor and obscure. “It’s your misfortune, and none of my own,” we like to believe.