Rating: 
Summary: We need to overthrow patriarchy: change job schedules
Review: This is a good survey that show us the problems we are facing because of patriarchy. The problems we, professional women, face is how to manage work and family, which as a consequence also affect men. And Why is this? well in part because under patriarchy these job schedules were designed for men to work outside home and women to stay at home taking care of the family, and since women earned participation in men's world, society allowed them this under the male rule. This means that this survey invites us to see that we need reforms in our workplace, and need as some authors suggest to work to overthrow patirarchy, the ancient system where everything was made to serve males. So the problem is that women have gained participation in men's world but under male rule. We need to change this, and one thing to start is by changing job schedules, so both men and women can enjoy work and family. Recent statistics show the trend of women going to work outside home, and an increasing number of stay-at home dads. Why is this? Because of patriarchy, and because someone has to take care of our family. That is a reality of life, we grow and want to have a husband/wife and children, and this requires to take care of them which requires to have time to do it.
Rating:
Summary: An eye-opener
Review: Yes, some things are best pursued during young adulthood - college education, career building, baby-making. Hewlett's research makes that point, and it alone is worth two stars. But from this, she makes at least two faulty conclusions: (1) Her high-achieving childless female subjects were too stupid to figure this out until they hit 40. (2) Since men can "have it all", women are entitled to the same. Obviously, our options will diminish over time. And it follows that no one - male or female - can have everything, regardless of how someone's life might look on the surface. Life involves trade-offs. In this book, Hewlett responds to her interviewees as objects of pity rather than recipients of immense blessing. To have health, freedom, and success is far more than most people have in this world - especially women - and is certainly nothing to snivel about. Hewlett's own story in the Preface about her obessession with bearing a FOURTH child after age 45 along with other stories of the huge self-indulgent waste of time and money on ineffective infertility treatments was enough to make me want to close this book many times while reading it. Can't these women find more important things to worry about? The adage "Count your blessings before you count your troubles" apparently never occurred to anyone in the small, yet largely biased sample of workaholic women. Also she makes a rather naive - if not irritating - criticism about people being single because they are "unprepared to make the sacrifices necessary to share a life with someone else." Hewlett has been married for over two decades, through life in the '80s and '90s. How current is her knowledge of what those "sacrifices" might be? For example, is she aware that heterosexual women are the fastest growing HIV/AIDS population, yet most those women are/were married?
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