Sunday, July 1, 2012

On Break: Sturm und Drang and Joy It Up

You may have noticed that I haven't blogged all week.

I've decided to take a blogging break for a bit - a few weeks maybe - to figure some stuff out. Don't worry, nothing to get worried over, just that between work, my insomnia, dealing with feelings related to this family illness thing, more work, permanent residency paperwork etc. I just need a break.                               

I may pop back in during this time to do some easy blogging - reviews, quick notes on interesting links to articles, photos, nothing that requires any thought beyond "the nachos were tasty". 

In my daily life I don't actually feel so stormcloudy, negative or emotional, I feel basically OK, but clearly I've got to sort some things out. I especially want to spend less time blogging (and a few other things) and spend more time taking care of my insomnia problem, my feelings about this family illness, and definitely more time with good people who raise my spirits (as an extrovert I do find that that really helps). All of this means less time in front of a computer. I want to take care of the sturm und drang while I can still manage it.

One other thing that really lifts my spirits is happy people finding love. One friend of mine, someone who was really there for me when I needed someone to talk to the most, who has struggled with finding contentment, has found love (or rather, it seems he's recognized the love he's had all along) and will get married in the near future, and I am really happy for him and excited for them. 

So, I made them this card.  It gave me joy to make it, and will - I assume anyway - give them joy to receive it (with a fat red envelope inside, ha ha) - and I hope it gives you all joy to see it.

So, joy it up:



And another card, made for friends who have already gotten married:


And, uh, what? I'll catch you on the flip side? See you on the other side? Dunno. I'll be back, and I'll be (basically) fine. As fine as I can be.


                                                                                        

Friday, June 22, 2012

Here are some hot guys for you

I figure since we're back on Computer Xiaojies (or "booth babes"), that if we can't have a fair world in which women
never fear the fine line of admiration vs. objectification, then I'll give a little somethin' to the other team. I'd prefer that we objectify nobody, but as long as the playing field is not fair, I don't see why I would need to play fair.

My friend Steven and I are fighting over bottom row, second guy from the right. I guess it depends on which side of the Strait he's on.

Har har. See what I did there?

From here - no, I don't subscribe. Blame Steven.

In the spirit of my continued interest (and hopefully yours) on the topic of women in tech, here are two more things worth reading:

Klaus on "Booth Babes" (thanks for the quote shout-out, Klaus - glad someone cares about this issue and is approaching it honestly without calling women who are concerned about it bitter harridans or whatever)

And Slate talking to Genevieve Bell on women in tech.

Success and Having Children in Taiwan

Go read this now.

Why Women Still Can't Have It All

This is really a USA-based article, but still worth a read, very thorough and very articulate. A lot of it holds for Taiwan, too, but then I also think a lot of women in Taiwan choosing not to have children are doing so not for work related reasons (most jobs, let's face it, are not really worth the sacrifice, and those include a lot of low-to-mid-level Office Lady positions - although I fully recognize that a job that may not be "worth it" to me might well be very much worth it to another woman, so take my words with a Himalayan salt lamp-sized grain of salt).

I touched on this a bit the last time I wrote about the low birth rate in Taiwan - on how the main reasons are a feeling that they can't afford to have children, that they want to enjoy now-possible freedoms and comforts their parents didn't have, and gender-based expectations of who is going to take on more work raising kids is still a huge issue. It's huge in the USA, too, but, err, huger here. If that's a word. I also mentioned that the working world, if you work for a larger or international company, is actually friendlier to women, with guaranteed maternity leave and a culture where grandparents are more likely to provide free childcare (the same does not hold for smaller companies, where women are routinely kept back because of a fear they'll have kids and stop being useful to the company).

I didn't touch on what this article covers - women at the absolute top and their decisions on choosing to have kids...or not to.

In the course of my daily work I'm exposed to a lot of women at the top of their careers. CFOs, heads of departments, Taiwan CEOs, legal counsel, physicians and researchers, general managers. While I'd say it's 50-50 regarding whether those women have children, it's also far more likely that you'll find unmarried women and married women without children in those positions.

I'd say that of these - speaking only from my experience - about half don't have children, and of those about a quarter are unmarried. The unmarried women at the top that I know of seem to have no desire to tie the knot (good for them - marriage is not the be-all and end-all of a woman's life or the most important of her accomplishments): I can't come up with any examples of very successful Taiwanese women who are unmarried but have a desire to be. Far more common is marrying and not having children. One woman, who was at the top but has recently resigned from a very high-level job in finance (it even made the United Daily News), is unmarried with a child. Not notable in and of itself, but worth noting in a reflection on high-ranking women in Taiwan and the family decisions they make, especially as her departure was big enough to be reported on (I've met her - she is a very decisive woman).

The striking thing is that you'd expect, if you were so minded, to hear these women say "I would have liked to have had children, but I put my career first", or "I had always intended to have children, but then when I was finally ready it was too late" (something you do hear in the USA - at least in online comments: women who had always thought they'd have kids and then woke up one day and realized they'd never actually done so and it was either too late or almost to that point).

But they don't - most of them will very matter-of-factly tell you, if they are so inclined to tell you anything, that they had never really wanted children, or had decided early on not to have them.

I can't speak for the husbands of these high-powered women I know who do have children; I don't know them. I've been told that they're not that different from the sort of (stereo)typical "allows gendered expectations of child-rearing to continue" man you'd expect, but I don't have that on first-hand knowledge.

That's something - and seems to me to be a strong difference in attitude. A lot less ambivalence, and a lot more decisiveness. I guess if you live in a society where it's more expected that you'll have children (and a son at that! Gah!), you are more likely to be more decisive if you decide not to have them. This may have influenced a decisiveness in my own tone regarding not having children - had I stayed in the USA I might have continued to be a bit more ambivalent, because I would have had the social room to do so.

This leads me to believe that women in Taiwan who reach the top of their fields who don't have children are choosing not to not because being at the top of your field requires so much sacrifice that they forgo this kind of family life, but because they're the sorts of women who wouldn't have wanted children regardless. It's just who they are. I can relate to that - I don't want children, but it's not because of my career. I could realistically have both. It's just who I am (I might write more about that in a future post, or not).

In that way, they may be more like Peggy on Mad Men (bear with me - I've barely seen the show - please do correct me if I'm wrong and Peggy's wanted children all along) than the all-too-common-on-Internet-comment-threads American women who wanted children but wanted a career more, or who had intended to had children but ran out of time while chasing a career. My experience has shown that Taiwanese office culture is not nearly as much like America in the '60s (ie, Mad Men) as a lot of people assume it is, but still, this says something. It says something about the pressures and expectations women face in Taiwan and, as a result, who gets to the top and who doesn't.

In the end, this is true for women in Taiwan, the USA and elsewhere:

We currently live in a world where men make more money for equal work. This means that it's all too common that the parent who stays home or takes a hit to their career is the wife - because, hey, you've gotta earn a good wage for the family.

We also live in a world where, in order to get to the top (at least in the corporate world), you have to basically sacrifice yourself to your company. This is true everywhere. In Taiwan, I feel that many people have to do that anyway, even if they don't get to the top - in the USA you have more of a choice to work reasonable hours (but if you want to be "successful" in the typically expected sense, you'd better make the sacrifice). This means that the parent or parents who take that path will be giving up something - you can't have a real commitment to family and work those hours.

The difference? Women might be more likely to cut back as a result. It's not true that the working men of yore could have a career and a family - he could, but unless he was truly 9-to-5, he probably didn't get to spend as much time with that family as he would have liked. They couldn't have it then, and they certainly can't have it now, with working hours what they are.

So "making it" in the traditional sense, where you have to give up time with your family, isn't going to work if we want a truly equal world.

And we can't change things until we admit that and create a working culture where you can succeed and still have enough control over your schedule to spend real time with your family, and get rid of gender-based expectations of who will do the brunt of the child-rearing and who will take the hit to their career to make that happen.

Then, we need to create a world where a woman who wants children can discuss how it will work with her husband without the lingering expectation that she'll make the sacrifices. She'll be able to enter that discussion knowing that they'll work something out together and he's just as likely to take the hit as she is, and that the hit, importantly, won't be that bad, or that career-damaging.

Then, and only then, will we have equality, or something like it.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

A Rocketship Through The Glass Ceiling? Methinks not.

I'm over the moon (pun intended!) that China is sending its first female astronaut into space - although not over the moon that China, a country I do not believe should be the world's leading power seeing as it can't even do basic human rights, is leading the way in space exploration now that NASA has been more or less taken out of the picture.

That said, I'm not sure I'm ready to shout, as Jezebel did, that China is sending a "rocket ship through the glass ceiling".

Liu Yang's trip is clearly a great step forward for Chinese women being more visible in varied career paths, and does provide another strong role model for not just girls in China, or Asia, but around the world, but saying that China has now shattered the glass ceiling is like saying that electing Obama "cured racism" in America.

Because, nuh-uh, no it didn't.

This worries me because if the comments I occasionally get on this blog (some of which I publish, some of which I don't, depending on how coherent and worthy of a response they are) and see on other sites is any indication, people brainwashed by CCP propaganda are now going to go around saying things like "there's no sexism in China! We have a female astronaut!" in the same tone that the racism-deniers use in their "Obama" defense above. I mean, they already say things like "that hurts the feelings of the Chinese people", "Tiananmen never happened" and "most Taiwanese people know that they are Chinese and want to re-join their brothers on the Mainland, it's the evil DPP that keeps them away" and "everyone in China speaks Chinese*" and "Foreigners caused SARS" and "there aren't any gay people in China**".

It's a great, visible step forward, but that doesn't mean the subtle and not-so-subtle sexism women in China (and elsewhere, but we're focusing in China here) have to wade through in their lives is now magically gone.

Women are still going to face job discrimination, discrimination by parents, traditional gender expectations in life, in work and in marriage, second-class treatment and the usual melange of earning less for the same work, snarky comments, incorrect beliefs and assumptions, and admonitions to kow-tow to the all-powerful men's sense of face. (Actual quote from someone I knew in China: "a woman can't be smarter than her boyfriend or husband, because if a woman is smarter than a man, it makes the man lose face, so a woman should marry a man more clever than she is". GAAAAHHHHHHH).

Of course, there are exceptions - I just have to say that before anyone gets all "that's not always true" - you're right, it's not always true, but it's true often enough that it's worth saying out out.

The person who said the above probably isn't going to change his mind because now there's a Chinese woman going to space. The judge who was going to give my boss's son to her abusive ex-husband until she threatened to kill herself in the courtroom is probably not going to be less of an asshole because there's a Chinese woman going into space. The guy who asked me "did your father approve of your trip to China?"*** is probably not going to be less of a douche. The entire town of people who shunned my coworker's now-ex wife because she divorced a man who beat and threatened to kill her probably aren't going to have a change of heart.

So...yay, it's great, but not totally yay. Not yet. Show me real, ground-level change in China and then I'll say "yay" for real.

While I applaud Liu Yang and want very much to see more women like her, just like racism in the US, sexism in China - and racism in China and sexism in the US, because we live in a pretty screwed-up world - is not going away anytime soon and this certainly did not erase it.



*Most (not all) people in China do speak Chinese, but the implication in this statement is that it is the native language of all Chinese citizens (I'm not even going to get into the "they call Cantonese and Mandarin dialects" part of this). If you ignore, say, the Tibetans, the Uighurs and several other ethnic minorities, then that is correct. But, hey, you can't ignore them. Except people do.

**These last two things were statements people actually made to my face in China.

***My answer was "I don't know. I never asked him."

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Yet Another Update: Indian Food in Taipei

From this post, which I keep updating.

First and foremost, Calcutta Indian Food in Ximen has moved. Go to the old place at #126 Kunming Street (follow Chengdu Rd. from MRT Ximen and turn right on Kunming),  then keep going to the first light. Turn right and across the street from Holiday KTV there is a building called "U2". The new location is in the basement food court, towards the back. The food is still the same great stuff. They have Kingfisher!

Secondly, we tried Mayur Indian and it's great, but dosa is no longer on the menu (not enough demand).

Finally, I found a new place -  south side of Ren'ai Road, beween Jianguo and Fuxing (near Howard Hotel). Haven't tried it yet - but will go soon and report back. I'm currently doing "research" by eating at every Mexican/Tex-Mex place I know of in Taipei to do a post on it, but I can sacrifice one evening out to get more Indian, ha ha.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

What To Expect When You're Expecting...in China

Fuck you, China.

You all know I'm pretty staunchly pro-choice. This, however, isn't choice.

Seriously, fuck you, China.

It truly amazes me what the Chinese government claims the moral authority to do, when they're clearly a bunch of deranged, power-drunk psychopaths.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Link-tacular Wednesday (updated)

Here, enjoy a few links. I intend to write a few posts exploring some of these issues further, but have had a very busy work week - and, as I mentioned in my last post, haven't been feeling on top of things mentally.

But, if you are interested at all in women's issues - especially my current strongest areas of interest: pay inequality, reproductive rights, women in technology and motherhood vs. working, you will find these links all interesting reads.

Motherhood Still A Cause of Pay Inequality - from the New York Times

On Choosing Not To Have Children - from Slate (reader contribution)

Dogs Rain Supreme for Childless Japanese - on Japanese women and couples choosing not to have children (from Jezebel)

Mothers Running Tech Startups - also from Jezebel (based on this NYT article)

BoingBoing's Awesomepants Xeni Jardin Takes on the Idea That Men Invented The Internet - from BoingBoing

Women facing online misogyny - it's  not exceptional, it's frighteningly normal - from Slate (also with links to Jezebel and the original story here from Kotaku)

Female doctor-scientists being paid less than male counterparts (from Jezebel - this story contradicts the one above: it shows a pay disparity even when  accounting for children and time off for family)
Enjoy!

A comprehensive list of ways in which fathers are treated - unfairly - differently from mothers and the assumptions behind it all. For instance -  try finding a changing table in a men's room.  

People keep saying that Roe v. Wade won't be overturned, so there's nothing to fear. Those people are wrong. Even if Roe v. Wade is kept in place, there's a lot to fear.