Have we outgrown maternity leave?

The latest view of work/life balance for mothers is that maternity leave is an outmoded institution for high achievers with schedule flexibility. CEOs now boast of taking just two weeks off to recover from birth and to bond with the baby. Is maternity leave to be only for those with lowered career aspirations?

Some of these high flying mothers may be able work from home part of the work week, and thus have the baby close at hand for some bonding time. But others may not, and their children may be primarily in the care of a succession of nannies. I have a bias about this because I work directly with foster children, many of whom have attachment disorders caused by not having an available parental figure with whom they could bond during the critical period for this - 6 to 36 months of age. These emotionally crippling disorders often cannot be repaired.

Many working mothers in low wage jobs can't afford to take maternity leave. California has led efforts to remedy this with a family leave program financed by payroll deductions. But what will be the consequences of female role models creating the expectation that maternity leave - a right women fought so hard to attain - is passé?

The unavailability of part time work affects us all.

The Atlantic’s widely read July 2012 cover story, Why Women Still Can’t Have It All, observed that workplace structures make it almost impossible for mothers to have high pressure, long hours careers. Author Anne-Marie Slaughter wryly noted that, “In Washington, ‘leaving to spend time with your family,’ is a euphemism for being fired” for men, but is often the truth for women. Writer Anand Giridharadas responded that America may actually be worse off for being governed and managed by “single-minded, obsessive, fierce, hurried … self-serving [and] less-than-empathetic” alpha career types who largely “ignore their families.” He rightly wondered what biases affect policymakers who “have prioritized the making of social policy over their own families.”

Biden's mistake?

Much has been made of Vice-President Joe Biden's speaking out of turn – at length – in announcing his support of gay marriage, and how that "forced" President Obama to proclaim his support. In spite of Biden's reputation for uncontrolled discourse, that is almost never how things are done at that level. In fact, Biden was not alone among top administration officials making this position public. His and others' alleged errors were almost certainly trial balloons released to soften the President's inevitable statement on the subject, planned for sometime in the coming weeks. This both lessened the shock to voters still uncomfortable with gay marriage and gave the President some cover as he made this move to energize avid supporters of gay marriage and their substantial wealth to work for his re-election. The challenge was to make the gains from this shift outweigh any losses from more conservative potential supporters. He seems to have convinced two-thirds of voters that political gain was his main reason for announcing the switch.

Except for black voters, those strongly and steadfastly opposed to gay marriage are not likely to vote for Obama anyway. His problem in announcing his support was to avoid alienating those who view gay marriage as immoral, but possibly tolerable, because they feel compelled to accept – or at least not reject – the actions of gay friends or relatives. So the Biden scenario likely was calculated to help those with reservations about gay marriage see the President's predicament as similar to their own. In this view, Obama's thinking evolved because of the actions and prodding of friends, as he said in his statement. And, he spoke about it only because someone else forced his hand.

Make no mistake, Obama took a high road in finally coming out on this politically charged issue that some think cost John Kerry the Presidency in 2004. But few Presidential policy positions or their timing in a election year are an accident, despite Biden's apology and Obama's chastisement of his number two. The White House apparently decided that public sentiment has finally evolved to the requisite threshold. (But see this caution.) So any praise due also should go to the millions of Americans who contributed to that change.

[Note: why do I use NY Times' articles here and in the book? Two reasons: They are fact checked and corrections always posted if found later. Unlike most other news sources, the Times provides permanent links that will not expire.]

Making the truth believable

Author Tracy Kidder said “I think that the nonfiction writer’s fundamental job is to make what is true believable.” I agree. In nonfiction that relies on the anecdotal stories of composite characters, I immediately distrust the expansion of “facts” to a truth about a larger universe. I need to know that the author relied on verifiable data or peer reviewed studies, and sometimes I want to see the raw data myself so I can draw my own conclusions.

Questions or corrections only

Please note them in the comments section of this post, including any errors found in the manuscript. Corrections will be made and acknowledged in future editions of the book, so please include your name if you want an acknowledgement. In print editions of the book, please include a page number. In eReader editions, please included the phrase of at least ten words surrounding the error.
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No Constitutional protection for gender.

Says Justice Antonin Scalia. And most women probably don't realize this question is up for debate. With the current court, he might need only one more vote for that view to prevail. That could bring down several prior Court rulings barring gender discrimination. But at least he doesn't say the Constitution prohibits laws against gender discrimination.

Fantasy football?

Another in a series of paradoxes:
It's amazing that in 2009, a professional football league for women was born - in which the players wear only helmets, shoulder pads, shoes and bikinis. It's full contact, with blocking, tackling, passing and injuries. "True fantasy football," as the Lingerie Football League describes itself. Fantasy for men, of course. Game videos show what appear to be athletic swimsuit models mixing it up on the field, being cheered on by bleachers full of male fans. While this may have created professional opportunities for women in sports, depending how one defines sport, it also calls into question how far we've really progressed in the forty years of the modern women's movement. The fans willing to buy tickets to these games surely are more interested in the sight of nearly naked female bodies wrestling each other to the ground than in the athletic ability on display.

If I were a resident of a Middle Eastern nation defending local practices that seemed to Western sensibilities to be demeaning to women, I would cite Lingerie Football as an example of Western hypocrisy.

Are bonobos retarded chimpanzees?

A group of researchers led by Harvard’s Richard Wrangham has sought to prove a theory that because the unusual food sharing behavior of bonobos is found in juvenile but not adult chimpanzees, we can think of bonobos as developmentally delayed chimpanzees. “Developmental delayed” is the politically correct replacement for “retarded.” Human behaviors more closely resemble those of chimpanzees than bonobos, so some may infer that the researchers began with the presumption that chimpanzee behaviors are more advanced. After all, aren’t humans the most advanced species on the planet, and isn’t capitalism – based on selfishness, not sharing – the most advanced exchange system? Humans, except when they attend Burning Man, don’t rely on a gift economy.

“Grumpiness is a sign of advanced civilisation” screamed one headline over a story about the research. Does Wrangham assume that selfish and conflict prone patriarchal chimpanzees are more advanced than matriarchal bonobos, peacemakers and sharers? If so, that offends both fans of peace and admirers of women. Putting aside the gender issue, Darwin himself recognized that cooperation is highly evolved way of helping one’s species survive. Before criticizing further, it’s worth examining how Wrangham’s gang came to their theory and their attempt to prove it.

They would argue they are simply trying to find a Darwinian mechanism to explain one of the key behavioral differences between the species, not to make a value judgment about them. The two species split from a common ancestor relatively recently, possibly less than a million years ago, but live in different habitats. Bonobos’ available food resources generally are far more abundant than chimpanzees’. The researchers presume that chimpanzee selfishness most likely was characteristic of the common ancestor of the two species in part because the species closest to them is us, and human children start out wired to behave selfishly and come to share only after considerable socialization. (Chimpanzee youngsters default to sharing, but then seem wired to learn by experience to be selfish to compete for scarce food.) Thus, in trying to explain the two species’ divergence, the scientists sought to explain the evolution of sharing in bonobos rather than selfishness in chimpanzees.

In formulating their developmental delay theory, the researchers observed that chimpanzees’ brain structures change more from childhood to adulthood than do bonobos’. For additional support, they looked to a famous long term experiment involving Siberian silver foxes bred for greater tameness. Those foxes retain more juvenile physical characteristics into adulthood that did wild foxes, leading to the conclusion that natural selection for peacefulness also tends to select for individuals with more juvenile characteristics. Also, sexual dimorphism – size differences between the genders – is less in these tame foxes, as it is in bonobos as compared to chimpanzees. Perhaps the researcher also were inspired by the fact that bonobos appear less muscular than chimpanzees and their calls are higher pitched.

All of these phenomena support the theory that a mechanism for making a species less aggressive is for natural selection to favor individuals with more juvenile characteristics. As the authors of the study say, “This idea does not imply that bonobos are juvenilized globally; instead, it suggests that juvenilization has occurred in a set of traits that are genetically linked.”

The thirty chimps and thirty bonobos in the study were in “semi-captivity” on Congo reserves for apes orphaned by the bushmeat trade. Assuming it would even be possible to replicate the experiments on wild animals, the same results might not be obtained in a wild population. In one part of the experiment , the researchers observed pairs of either chimpanzees or bonobos in an enclosure with food. Younger chimpanzees shared food with each other at about the as much as either young or adult bonobos. Adult chimpanzees shared much less than juveniles, while bonobos’ tendency did not change with age.

Testing young apes’ skills of social discrimination, three experimenters stood side-by-side, arms outstretched toward the each subject, who were either infants, age two to four, or adolescents, age five to seven. After a few trials is which all three experimenters held food and then just two adjacent ones did, in the experimental trial only the two on the outside reached into a food container in view of the subjects and only those two then had food concealed in their hands. The chimpanzees soon only begged from outsiders with food and not from the one without in the middle. There was no difference in skill between infant chimpanzees and adolescent chimpanzees. Infant bonobos performed much less well, but adolescents performed as well as the chimpanzees. The authors of the study saw this as evidence that bonobos are developmentally delayed compared to chimpanzees.

The second social experiment tested adolescent and adult apes, and for each trial employed two experimenters. One had food and the other did not. Halfway through the trial, their roles changed. Again, chimpanzees of both ages did well recognizing the switch in their begging, while adolescent bonobos did not and only adult bonobos eventually did as well as the chimpanzees.

The begging experiments using the experimenters as objects of begging are fraught with design biases and value judgments. The authors describe these trials as simulating what the apes would experience in feeding with intolerant individuals. But what evidence is there that adult apes switch their generosity on and off toward particular individuals in their group several times day? Even if one stretches things enormously regarding what chimpanzees experience in the wild, this most certainly is not what bonobos deal with. Thus, the experiment was designed to test skills that chimps have, but bonobos don’t, and as such is a self-fulfilling prophesy: chimpanzees are better at chimpanzee skills than bonobos are.

The authors argue that if characteristics don’t change with age, that is a sign of retention of juvenile characteristics. In the social discrimination experiments, the chimpanzees did not change as they got older, but the bonobos did. Which species most retains its juvenile characteristics? To be complete, they’d have to design some tests at which bonobos excel, and see if chimpanzees fall behind bonobos of the same age. If they did could we then say that chimps are retarded?

Maybe sharing, which has to be taught to human children, is the more advanced adult trait. Maybe it is chimpanzees that lack self-control, much as we often label a selfish adult human as immature. Perhaps the bonobos’ advanced brains, despite their relative lack of structural change in adulthood, can see forward in time and better recognize the concept of future reciprocity of reward for present sharing, which the chimps cannot do as well. Maybe bonobos, known for their greater communication skills, assume that begging to humans with food, as well as those without, maximizes their chances of success. By soliciting to the foodless humans, perhaps the bonobos believe they are encouraging those humans to beg from those with food, thereby increasing the odds that will get something in the exchange instead of nothing. This might make sense in the context of bonobo culture, even if in the context of their cultures human experimenters and chimpanzees don’t get it.

Putting aside any value judgments about the apes’ cultures and just talking about the mechanism of natural selection for peaceableness, one prominent behavioral biologist criticized the experiment saying, “Unfortunately, their results just don't support their conclusions” But he did concede, “There seems to be something there, and they're probably right about what it is.”