What a Lot of Women Confided to Me Behind Closed Doors in HR, Especially the successful ones
Many women would be tradwives if they could
One particular VP visited me often because she had ongoing issues with two employees who were constantly at war with each other. But one day I could tell she wasn’t there to talk about her usual troublemakers.
At 35, she was the highest performing VP in her division and the highest compensated by far. She had worked hard and it had paid off handsomely for her. An inspiration for women and young girls everywhere.
But that day, I could tell something was wrong.
She wouldn’t look me in the eye as she said her next words. She turned her body to the wall and dropped her voice down low as if what she was saying was a profoundly shameful confession.
She did not want to be the powerful executive they were grooming her to be.
In fact, she did not want to be a VP at all. She secretly wished she was the department admin where all she had to do were expense reports, schedule meetings, and organize holiday parties. She wanted a job she could walk away from at 5 pm and forget about when she got home.
And if she were being really honest, she didn’t even want to work. She wanted to stay home and take care of the house and garden.
And yes, make dinner for her husband.
Like a Boiled Frog
Things started out well for her.
Early in her career, she got hired into an entry-level job that she excelled in, and she was promoted repeatedly. She was quickly rewarded for her hard work and business sense.
Her first job as a manager was fun at first. She dove into leadership training and learning how to be a good manager. She enjoyed taking the lead in the department operations, running team meetings and managing a group of people.
That changed quickly as she got settled into her role.
When 5 pm came, she kept working, and when she did finally go home for the night, work came home with her. The more she advanced in her career, the more she hated the politics, the pressure, the constant demands from senior leadership.
She couldn’t turn it off in her mind, and she found herself spending more time on PowerPoint presentations and prepping for meetings than she spent relaxing with her husband or friends. Her personal projects and passions, including redecorating the house and putting together a greenhouse, were neglected.
The job had grown into something that didn’t feel good to her.
She loved to cook but had little energy to do it. She loved hosting gatherings at their house — now she didn’t have it in her to do that either. She had dreams of redoing the entire garden — but never had the time or energy.
There were parts of her job that she enjoyed. She felt valued at work. She knew how to do the job well. And she liked how admired she felt.
But she was secretly miserable. And she couldn’t see an exit.
She wasn’t the only one
I have lost track of how many women have confided that they just wanted to be stay-at-home moms or work part-time.
This doesn’t mean these women want to stay in entry-level jobs. I’ve known many who would have loved to stay in a high-level job — if they could do it for 20 hours a week.
Priorities change for women as they age and their lives evolve. Some women want to have their afternoons at home with the family. Or they have personal pursuits they want to focus on such as writing or a side business.
While some women thrive in leadership roles and feel great personal fulfillment, it’s worth noting that it isn’t for everyone. And that’s okay.
Some women are most fulfilled by taking a more traditional role of being a stay-at-home wife or mother. Some women prefer to have a part-time job that allows them to care for the home and their family so they can be with their kids when they get home from school.
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Young Men Searching for Purpose on Valentine’s Day
For all the single ladies, it is Galentine’s Day. But what is it for the bachelors? To my knowledge, men do not band together en masse on February 14th to mix up fruity pink cocktails, watch chick flicks, and build solidarity in their singleness. In fact, bromances appear to be in decline, as 15% of men say they have zero close friends.
The male friendship recession is just one manifestation of the boy crisis, a crisis worth reflecting on especially today, the day of big romance. The boy crisis is widespread, impacting boys and men academically, economically, physically, and spiritually. On average, the IQs of boys are declining. The second leading cause of death for American men under 45 is suicide. Largely due to drug abuse and physical and mental problems, only 25% of men ages 17-24 qualified for military service in 2020. As the wages of those with a high school degree decline, some men are willingly checking out of the workforce altogether, so much so that male workforce engagement now matches the level it was during the Great Depression.All this adds up to millions of young men who have been left without purpose.
While our education system and the shift from a manufacturing to a global knowledge economy have done their fair share of damage, according to The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, (Farrell & Gray, 2018) the ultimate driver behind the boy crisis is dad deprivation. Approximately 40% of children are born out of wedlock; because of this and high divorce rates, as Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, states, “only about half of children will spend the duration of their childhood with both of their biological parents.” Moms and dads contribute in unique and essential ways to the raising of children, but boys especially need the modeled manifestation of what it means to be a good man, and their first model is their fathers.
Single parents, who have sometimes been unwillingly left behind by divorce, make valorous sacrifices for their children, and nonresidential fathers are doing a better job of staying involved. But the practical realities of fatherhood apart from marriage are often challenging. For example, according toThe Boy Crisis, “when unmarried couples live together when their child is born, by the child’s third birthday, 40 percent of those children will have no regular contact with their dad for the next two years—between ages three and five.” For this reason, if we want to get serious about addressing the boy crisis, we need to get serious about marriage. Understanding the purpose of marriage will help us fortify it.
Many now believe that romance is the cornerstone of marriage. Once it dissipates, the couple should part ways so that each individual can find that lovin’ feeling again. More frequently than in the past, couples are divorcing for less serious reasons. The dissolution of “low conflict” relationships is particularly detrimental for children, as they can experience more stress and more of a feeling of loss following separation.
Much of our culture reinforces such attitudes towards relationships. The radical autonomy of expressive individualism permeates our moral imagination. Expressive individualism, “involves growing and changing as a person, paying attention to your feelings, and expressing your needs.” As Andrew Cherlin, a sociology and public policy professor at Johns Hopkins University, explains in The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, under such conditions, “marriages are harder to keep together, because what matters is not merely the things they jointly produce—well-adjusted children, nice homes—but also each person’s own happiness.” And by happiness we mean pleasure and psychological self-actualization, not human flourishing grounded in virtue and obligation.
In truth, admirable marriages are replete with work and adventure. Their purpose is to provide a stable and loving environment for the rearing and education of children and to form the character of each spouse. Marriage is often not easy or comfortable. As human beings, we grow attached to our favorite vices, and letting them go can be painful. But it is also freeing. Ideally in marriage, rather than prioritizing his or her own emotional satisfaction, through choice and circumstance, each spouse sacrifices for the sake of that mysterious third entity: the marriage.
Our culture largely no longer promotes this understanding. Those Galentine’s Day favorites (excluding the incomparable work of ethicist Jane Austen) often don’t depict what it is that really matters when looking for a spouse. Indeed, it is no accident that many chick flicks end at the altar, perhaps because marriage occasionally falls short of being camera-ready. This is not to say that all romantic films are bad. Part of the reason they appeal to us is because they affirm how important relationships are for long-term happiness. The choice of a spouse is the decision of a lifetime.
Yet numerous singles today have been left confused about how to choose well. Many children of divorce grow up lacking a model of a solid marriage. As adults, such children can have a negative view of marriage, struggle to work through conflict in a healthy manner, and are unsure what characteristics to prioritize in a partner. Online dating makes this worse. After being bombarded with profiles, users end up thinking that they should be able to find someone who embodies all the features they dream they desire.
We need to shift our cultural conversation around marriage, to move away from pure romance toward the deep, abiding, and sacrificial love that husbands and wives offer each other and their children. Doing so will help end the dad deprivation that is the main driver of today’s boy crisis. And then, perhaps, our boys, too, will have valentines.
https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/young-men-searching-purpose-valentines-day
*****************************************************'All Hell Breaks Loose': Harvard Professor Recalls One Study That Caused the Left to Implode
Harvard professor Roland Fryer conducted a study that was timely and thought-provoking at a time when officer-involved shootings have become a media beat that’s not interested in the truth but a way for over-educated pseudo commentators to offer lectures about white supremacy and police overreach.
Remember, these shootings are part of a covert genocide against black men. More often than not, the police’s use of deadly force turns out to be justifiable. Fryer opted to do a study on whether there were racial biases in these shootings.
His study suggested race was not a factor, which caused everyone to lose their minds. Being a thorough scholar, he redid the study and hired a new team of researchers. The results were the same.
Fryer has come back into the news after he sat down with former New York Times editorial writer Bari Weiss, who also fled due to her former place of employment becoming an illiberal cesspool. Fryer said his study would ruin his career. He was forced to obtain armed security due to the backlash. You could say Fryer was canceled after sexual misconduct allegations were lobbed against him, which caused him to be suspended and close his research department. Then-President Claudine Gay said of these allegations, "The totality of these behaviors is a clear violation of institutional norms and a betrayal of the trust."
He remains at Harvard, but his access to teaching remains limited. Gay was busted for serial incidents of plagiarism, which is the cardinal sin in the academic world.
So, karma is a bitch, as they say. Or, in the words of Fryer, “I hear it’s a motherf**ker,” an appropriate message to his former boss, who one could argue was an academic fraud. Fryer’s persecution also exemplifies what happens when Harvard and other higher education institutions opt to move away from legitimate fields of study because it might anger progressives’ snowflake attitudes about life and politics
(via Fox News):
A Harvard professor said that "all hell broke loose" and he was forced to go out in public with armed security after he published a study that found no evidence of racial bias in police shootings.
During a sit-down conversation with Bari Weiss of The Free Press, Harvard Economics Professor Roland Fryer discussed the fallout from a 2016 study he published on racial bias in Houston policing.
[…]
When Fryer claimed the data showed "no racial differences in officer-involved shootings," he said, "all hell broke loose," and his life was upended.
[…]
Fryer said people quickly "lost their minds" and some of his colleagues refused to believe the results after months of asking him not to print the data.
"I had colleagues take me to the side and say, 'Don't publish this. You'll ruin your career,'" Fryer revealed.
The world-renowned economist knew from comments by faculty that he was likely to garner backlash. Fryer admitted that he anticipated the results of the study would be different and would confirm suspicions of racial bias against minorities. When the results found no racial bias, Fryer hired eight new assistants and redid the study. The data came back the same.
Fryer recalled how he was shopping for diapers for his newborn daughter with an armed bodyguard, noting how insane that whole situation was. He did a study on officer-involved shootings, and the data didn’t align with the Left’s worldview, so some threatened to kill him. But it’s conservatives and Donald Trump who are the real threats to societal norms, right? Receiving death threats for a research-based study is all too common with today’s progressives.
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The Housing Crunch Is Causing Americans To Delay Marriage and Children
Failed public policies are undermining the institution of marriage in America. Rates of both marriage and child births have been trending down for decades, but the current cost-of-living crisis is poised to accelerate these declines. If you can’t afford a place to live, chances are you won’t get married and have kids.
That’s precisely the calculus for millions of young Americans today who can’t make ends meet despite a record number of them holding second or even third jobs. Sixty percent are living paycheck to paycheck. Americans have accumulated a record high $1.1 trillion in credit-card debt as many can’t cover even necessities.
But Americans aren’t just falling into debt—they’re falling behind on payments too. Defaults and delinquencies are rising at the fastest pace since the Great Recession when there was a mortgage meltdown and a global financial crisis.
The financial strain on American families explains why people view current economic conditions so unfavorably in polling. Perhaps nothing illustrates this pessimism better than the housing market.
The monthly mortgage payment on a median price home has doubled in the last three years. Unless your income has also doubled, you’re falling behind when it comes to buying a house.
The median price of a new home has shot up to a stratospheric $435,000. Even the median price of an existing home, at about $387,000, would have been inconceivable three years ago.
The typical family buying a home today will have a monthly cost of homeownership around $3,000. That’s about half the median household income—before income taxes. It’s no wonder that the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s homeownership affordability index is at a record low today.
The index even shows that the cost to own a median price home in several major metropolitan areas requires more than 100 percent of the median household after-tax income. In only a single metropolitan area with at least 500,000 people is the median price home affordable in America.
While homeownership is normally a great tool for building wealth, it is also often a precursor to major milestones in life, like starting a family. But with the American dream of homeownership having turned into a nightmare, nearly an entire generation of young people can’t buy a home and are delaying family formation because of it.
And this isn’t simply theory—empirical research published by Federal Reserve economists has already demonstrated that higher mortgage interest rates has a negative impact on the birth rate. That’s because those higher mortgage interest rates increase the cost of homeownership.
What caused this sad state of affairs? It was a deadly combination of impolitic public policies.
Since 2020, the federal government has been spending trillions of dollars it didn’t have, running massive deficits. The Federal Reserve covered these deficits by simply creating money for Congress to spend. That devalued the dollar, which fueled inflation as prices soared—including prices for housing.
But home prices got an extra boost from the Fed’s artificially low interest rates. What a homebuyer is really concerned about is the monthly payment on a home, not so much the home’s price. Lower interest rates allowed people to take on much larger mortgages for the same monthly payment, creating frenzied bidding wars for homes.
When interest rates finally rose to fight inflation, they pushed monthly mortgage payments through the roof, completely out of the reach of most Americans. It also trapped millions of Americans in their homes.
When a home is sold with a mortgage, the homeowner loses the loan and must get a new one, at current market rates. If someone bought a home just a few years ago, they are likely going from a 2-3 percent mortgage to a 7-8 percent one. That would cause their monthly payment to explode.
The options are to drastically downsize or not move at all—and millions have chosen the latter. That’s helped cause a severe shortage of homes for sale, the lowest level in decades. Consequently, home prices are staying high despite today’s higher interest rates.
While the failures of public policy are often measured in dollars, the unaffordability of housing today demonstrates that there can be even more far-reaching consequences: families never formed, and lives never lived.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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