> It's wonderful that your mother was able to balance both, but that doesn't counter the apparent correlation with women's increasing career aspirations and the breakdown of traditional families. This isn't being sexist, it's being honest.

I don't think you're being sexist. I do think that your line of thought is completely wrong. The breakdown of traditional families is correlated with the breakdown of traditional gender roles, but this is not not NOT because working makes it hard for a woman to raise children. Rather, it's because women, given the choice to defy their traditional roles, have also decided frequently that they don't like the traditional family model and have chosen other lifestyles.

Carly Fiorina, for all I loathe her politically, was a powerful woman in the businessplace for two decades. And she's been married to the same man since 1985, and raised two stepdaughters. Meg Whitman too has been married for a long time and raised two children. The point is not that the traditional family model hasn't suffered. It's that the root of its suffering isn't that women are finding it hard to be emotionally available because all of a sudden they have jobs.

> This is the problem with discussions like these. Any non-PC point of view gets immediately shot down and accusations of sexism fly. If we truly want to get at the root cause of the imbalance, we must be able to ask the tough questions that might have uncomfortable answers.

I agree with you that there are uncomfortable answers! But I think that the uncomfortable answer is uncomfortable in the exact opposite of the direction you're going.

I don't think that the biggest problem in this discussion is that women are somehow genetically incapable of keeping up, because I know many women who can keep up and even surpass men at this. I think the biggest, most uncomfortable problem here is that vast swatches of our society are so wretchedly sexist that men have a hard time seeing just how difficult it is for women. We assume that we are in fact living in a post-sexism world, and that everybody is equal, when in fact we have decades and decades to go before women are truly seen as equals in society. And I'm not somehow exempt from this, by the way; it's been a process of literally years of talking to women and slowly realizing just how shitty they've got it.

Jean Hsu here is just one of hundreds of women whose stories have forced me to accept that while we might have a more equal society than history has ever seen before, that does not mean we are as equal as we ought to be. The status quo is still unfortunately sexist, and while one day perhaps we will get to the point where we can honestly assess the differences between men and woman, the conclusion we draw will not be that women simply can't do these things that we claim they can't do. The fact that we're arguing that right now is proof that we still have grossly distorted views of what an entire sex is capable of.

It's not that I'm calling you specifically sexist, hackinthebochs. And I apologize if I ever made it seem like that. But the society we both live in is profoundly sexist, in ways we don't even recognize, and so a lot of the arguments to be made about how it's okay that women have experiences like this are rooted in logic that's as sexist as it is commonly accepted. Does that make sense?