What L.S. Got Right

( Time magazine, 28/02/'05 )

Summary of text: " What Larry Summers got right "

The main question that this text asks, is: " Why do women resist the eighty-hour workweek? "

Larry Summers, president at Harvard University, has a lot of theories regarding women and work. He raises the question whether the cause for their apparent resistance to putting in eighty hours of work each week lies within their gender or their genetics. One of his implications is that women aren't all willing to do that much work, because of family responsibilities.

Summers pointed out the fact that mostly men want to take up high-powered, intense occupations. This is because men have created the modern-day work environment. If a normal woman would react by following that model, she wouldn't be helping other women down the line. What she and other women should be doing, is making a stand: they have the oppurtunity to fundamentally change the hourgrid for all working people, making the combination of family and work easier and more pleasant for both men and women. To make this work, men have to take up more responsibility in their own families as well.

The standard that was set concerning this combination of work and family, is very unfit for the majority of workers. This means that women or men with families couldn't possibly be happy with the way things are; doing a lot of hours each week being the only means of real success; the way it has been ever since the issue of women and work was raised, probably during World War II. Women in that era were vital to war-production. However, according to Fortune Magazine, the double duty that women had to do would eventually lead to bad things, socially and economically. A partial solution that Washington provided to this detrimental effect was childcare, providing relief for women. The American government recognised the necessity of childcare because women were very much needed in industry, and organised it.

The 'ideal worker' is not someone who can work a whole lot of hours a week, but someone who is precise, careful and intelligent. Joan Williams, who works at Harvard, sais that people are being evaluated by the number of hours they can put in, not by the quality of their work, which is not good. Flextime,