That is not a quote from me, though is it? It is extropolated by housewives who feel inadequate so they take my comments about careers and decide I am saying they are inadequate.
I try not to personlalise things but on the question of my chidlren's father we both have the same work ethic and we both worked full time.
On questions to those caring for my children the youngest are too old to need anyone. We hired our first daily nanny when I was 22. I can't imagine I had a particularly good interview technique as I would only have had 2 or 3 interviews myself by that stage. She stayed 10 years.
By the way I did not write these words suggested above as a quote from me:
"by definition the type of people who are happy to look after someone else's children for money must be inadequate, ignorant, and underachieving because otherwise they wouldn't take such a boring job"
I don't mind argument but let us keep it accurate.
I think it may in part come down to an issue which is not really a gender issue. 15% or something of people are pretty good at their work. The Times has a reasonable article about it today which I will put below as it's interesting and mumsnetters may want to buy Alison Wolf's book:
I do not however agree with some of the quotes about if you are a successful man or woman at work that is all. Those at home like to suggest workers may be good at work but not at much else. In fact if you are good at work you often are better at childcare too and excel at your hobbies and charitable work.
"Prefer work to childcare? Driven? Loathe domestic life? Janice Turner talks to the alpha females who do not think motherhood is a full-time job
When I was pregnant with my first child I was late booking childbirth classes. Thus the only available course, held in someone?s front room in South London, comprised two strands: evenings in which we?d show up with our husbands and afternoons when we expectant ladies would go alone.
The daytime classes infuriated me. I was a magazine editor with a hectic day and I already had to fit in scans, midwife appointments, etc, so haring across the city every Tuesday lunchtime was playing havoc with my schedule. I thought my classmates would find it a similar inconvenience, but to my surprise they loved leaving work early to discuss birthing pools and massaging your perineum with olive oil.
I also found these things fascinating, but couldn?t we discuss them more briskly? Must we really spend 30 minutes assembling an operating theatre for a Caesarean section using Playmobil figures? Just give me the bullet points! These ponderous lectures ended with a ten-minute ?relaxing? meditation during which I?d twitch and sneak glances at my watch.
In these women-only sessions we were supposed to bond over the universal female experience of childbirth. But I preferred the mixed classes, leavened by the men?s jokes. Among the women I felt completely alone. Although my classmates had good jobs ? there was a teacher, an IT consultant, a ward sister ? they all started maternity leave six weeks before their due date, while I was still wobbling onto the Tube with a week to go. They couldn?t wait to be at home nesting, cooking, preparing for their babies. I was ambivalent. Wouldn?t I be lonely and bored?
Months later, after we?d all given birth, my class regrouped for a catch-up ?coffee morning?. There was a pleasant cooing over each other?s babies, a swapping of labour-room war stories, but then a conversation began about nappies, the relative merits of Huggies v Pampers. As it continued, at considerable length, I looked around at these nice, calm, happy women and knew I would never come to a coffee morning again. It wasn?t them; it was me. I was the weirdo, the one who, however much I adored my baby son, still hoped the office would ring. Why were these women so milkily content while I was as restless as ever?
I wish back then I?d read the new book by Professor Alison Wolf, The XX Factor: How Working Women Are Creating a New Society. I might have understood that I wasn?t a workaholic freak. In it, she argues that there are a new group of women ? around 15-20 per cent ? for whom work is a major source of their identity, self-esteem and even (speak it softly) pleasure. The other 85 per cent, she says, may find camaraderie and satisfaction in work but principally it is a means to pay the bills: family remains the centre of their lives.
But this XX supergroup, in high-earning, high-profile jobs, has not only changed society ? creating a new servant class to do its domestic work, marrying alpha men to create elite families ? it also dominates government priorities. The Budget?s recent £1,200 tax break on childcare, Wolf believes, is a case in point: a policy created by men with alpha wives to please alpha women commentators, ignoring the less driven majority, many of whom would prefer to stay at home.
I meet Wolf in her family house in Dulwich, South London. Her two children are long grown up, but her husband, Martin Wolf, the distinguished Financial Times chief economics commentator, is in the kitchen putting on a load of washing. (He does all the laundry.) She grew up in a family ?where, if you had any time to yourself, it was assumed that meant you needed to take on another commitment of some sort?. Her mother gave up work when she married ?and was driven completely mad with boredom?, directing her energy into charitable deeds until her children were older, when she resumed full-time work until well into her seventies.
Wolf herself has always been passionate about her career: she is a professor of public sector management at King?s College London. The three months when the family returned from a posting in America and she found herself unemployed was the worst time of her life. ?I was grumpy,? she says. ?I was short-tempered? I was awful. I mostly felt as if I had no identity, but also I was just bored. Desperately bored.?
In her book, she argues that this new cadre of XX women fail to understand the lives of the other 85 per cent. ?Let me be blunt: what relationship do they have?? she says. ?Outside one?s family ? because families combine people from all sorts of parts of life ? how much time do you spend socially with people outside your own milieu??
But until just a few generations ago the experience of all women ? regardless of wealth or social class ? was intrinsically the same. ?You married well or badly. You bore living children to support you or did not. On those realities, as a female your whole life hinged.? Women?s work was largely domestic, either unpaid (childcare, nursing the sick) or paid (as household servants). Such careers as were available ended upon marriage: up until the Fifties, female teachers, civil servants and other professionals often had to resign on getting married, to give their jobs to male breadwinners.
But today women are divided. This new group, the XX women, ?share [men?s] work habits and job choices. They share their offices. They partner and marry men like themselves.? Overwhelmingly the ambitious, driven, goal-orientated XX, who stick at full-time careers through their childbearing years, have more in common with men than with the rest of womankind. They are an elite group rapidly pulling away from the pack, especially in financial terms. While a graduate man earns 45 per cent more than a non-graduate man, a graduate woman earns three times more than her less qualified sister.
Clearly, there is a mutual bafflement, even hostility, between XX women and the majority. We cannot understand why they abandon careers for children, ?wasting? their education: what is the point in girls taking the majority of places in law schools and medical colleges if they don?t use their qualifications to the full? Whereas they cannot understand why these elite XX women put themselves through crazy, sleepless schedules, missing out on a baby?s first steps just so they can give a keynote speech to a conference in Zurich.
When Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg launched her recent book, Lean In, advising women on strategies for success at work, critics questioned what Sandberg ? with her money, nannies, access to private jets ? knew about ordinary women?s lives. But what separated Sandberg from the majority was not wealth, but a key XX misunderstanding: it did not occur to her that many women aren?t ambitious or driven. Maybe the reason they decline to ?sit at the table? (her shorthand for being assertive in meetings) is not a lack of self-esteem. Some are just happier taking a back seat. When I interviewed Sandberg, I asked her to run through her daily routine, and she said with shiny-eyed glee, ?I try to stay in bed until 6am but don?t always succeed.? She woke bursting to answer e-mails and crack on with her spreadsheets. But the thing is, Sheryl, most women don?t love work as we do.
The great unspoken secret of XX women is our lip-smacking pleasure in work ? we actually enjoy it more than being at home. ?Work is more fun than fun,? says the author and former Lady Editor Rachel Johnson. ?Work is more fun than sex. That is what separates people with alpha personality types. Nothing puts me in a worse mood than a ladies? lunch where they are discussing charity work. Nothing about it interests me: I want to talk to powerful men. I fully regard that as misogyny on my part.?
But I confess to feeling much the same. As my sons grow older, I have decreasing interest in discussing them or their education. I regard children rather as I regard fashion or cooking, in that I like clothes and good food, new styles and recipes, but am not all-consumed by these things. Motherhood is a major facet of my life but it is not the only one. When a woman calls herself a ?full-time mother? I think: ?Really? Is looking after children once they are at school a proper full-time job??
Like most XX women, work is what excites me, what gets me up in the morning. If I don?t have enough to do I am antsy, restless, quickly bored. I can only relax when I have earned it with some activity. Even on holiday, my mornings are like fact-finding trips ? temples, hikes, even factory visits ? and only then can I justify an afternoon by the pool. Like Rachel Johnson, I question the old saw that no dying person wishes they?d spent more time at the office. ?I have a vision of my deathbed,? Johnson says, ?and thinking, ?Did I do enough?? No one ever asks, ?How much should a person do with their life?? ?
This low boredom threshold, this yearning for a meaningful outlet for their energy beyond the home, is what marks out the XX women Wolf discusses. However, she notes it is no coincidence that they do the most rewarding and well-paid jobs.
But, as my friend Rebecca, a publisher, adds, there is an extra drive inside an alpha woman that keeps her striving ever higher, even at the expense of family life. ?We have big egos and we feel we have something to prove. There is a discontent inside you that work can fill.?
Recently, I had dinner with Jane, who is a high-ranking executive in a media corporation with three children. She is the most organised alpha among my friends. She says that while the majority of her peers went part-time or downsized their ambitions, ?I was always conscious of the disappointment and frustration my grandmother and my mother had in their careers. I was aware I had unique opportunities and I couldn?t give up.? She is scornful of those who leave ?proper? careers to set up girlie businesses: ?Someone I know set up a cupcake shop and I thought, ?For God?s sake, you have three bloody university degrees!? ?
Her tenacity is all the more striking given she has a special-needs child. Did she not feel a greater pull to be more in the home? Jane replies with her typical efficiency: ?I saw motherhood as three roles: 1) The project manager overseeing everything. 2) The day-to-day carer. 3) The cuddly, loving person. Well, I knew I?d always be the third one. But I thought since the ?project?, as it were, required extra resources, I needed to earn money to make sure they were available. And to be frank, day-to-day caring isn?t my forte.?
Other XX women say they lack the patience required to withstand drudgery. Sarah Sands, Editor of the London Evening Standard, says she is ?happy to do all the nice stuff, thinking up treats and outings and ways to cheer people up, rather than all the more humdrum administration that is also an important part of life and relationships. Domestic admin is for civilians.? She has moved at weekends to be nearer her elderly parents and her mother has accused her of forcibly reorganising her life: ?She felt I was treating her like ?a project?.?
Indeed every XX woman I interview, regardless of career, shares a common factor: they abhor housework and admit that avoiding it is a key reason they go to work. I am reminded of writer and film-maker Nora Ephron explaining her screenwriter mother?s views on cooking: ?If you worked hard and prospered, someone else would do it for you.?
Rachel Johnson describes domestic work as the ?source of most female fury? and that men ?are brilliant at telling women they are bossy and shrewish if you demand they do your share?. My friend Claire, a consultant at a London teaching hospital married to a surgeon, with two teenage children, employs a housekeeper so she never has to cook family meals in the week, or clean or do laundry. ?Come Monday morning, I?m so glad I don?t have to empty the dishwasher any more. I can go to work, do a job I love and I pay someone basically to be my wife.? Surrounded by less well-paid but equally hard-working nurses, who go home to tackle the ironing, she is well aware of her good fortune.
Wolf writes that the XX woman has reacted against domesticity for two reasons: ?For the feminist, unpaid home-based activity is labour performed under the lash of patriarchy. For the economist, unpaid work does not contribute to GNP and so does not exist.? Domesticity is thankless, repetitive and boring: XX careers are likely to be the opposite. Indeed, my view is if housekeeping and childcare are so fulfilling, why aren?t men fighting us to do a greater share?
You might think that it would be expedient for XX women to marry domestically inclined, less career-centred men. But, as Wolf?s book points out, women with the highest earnings are likely to marry men in the same bracket. ?Assortative mating? ? ie, with someone similar to yourself ? has increased with female education: a male doctor is less likely to marry a nurse now there are more women doctors.
But while these alpha couples have status and money, they may have fewer children to inherit their spoils. Graduate couples have a lower birth rate than non-graduate, and, most strikingly, the predicted number of graduate women born in the Seventies likely to enter their forties childless is 40 per cent. XX women are most likely to leave childbearing until later, when it may not happen at all.
But does it really matter that XX women are poor breeders? ?It?s good for social mobility,? says Wolf. ?Since the people at the top are not reproducing themselves, there will be space for everybody else to come up. But if a huge amount of skill transmission comes through the family, and those with the most education are not passing it on, it is a social waste.?
With not even enough time to reproduce, it?s little surprise that XX women have no room in their lives for the charitable deeds in which their predecessors once invested so much energy. Wolf points out a direct correlation between hours of paid employment and a decline in unpaid volunteering. Many roles once considered ?good works?, such as caring for the elderly, have been professionalised. Meanwhile the Girl Guides has a boundless queue of would-be members, but can?t recruit enough Brown Owls.
Broadcaster and businesswoman Kirstie Allsopp mourns the passing of a generation of women magistrates and community pillars who helped to keep society knitted together. ?You look at the wives of great leaders, women like Clementine Churchill, and they may not have worked but they did the most amazing things, set up charities and ran organisations,? she says. ?But now we have a me-culture. Even women who don?t work because they don?t need to, financially, tend to spend their time having their nails done.?
Wolf?s most controversial claim is that the pulling away of the XX group from the pack has led to a decline in sisterhood between them and the other 85 per cent. But Anne McElvoy, a broadcaster and editor on The Economist, disputes whether it ever existed: ?Would I have wanted Vita Sackville-West?s solidarity if I were a Thirties charlady? And what did it really signify??
XX superwomen live separate lives from their home-centred sisters, whom they only glimpse rushing from school assemblies checking e-mails on the phones. ?I always gravitate towards women in a room,? says Sarah Sands. ?The only division is sensitivity on time. If you are always having to run from school/social events, it looks unfriendly.? Besides, says Alexandra Shulman, Editor of Vogue, ?young women I meet and work with want to go on all-girls holidays or nights out far more than I ever did. I always preferred mixed company, but they like to bond.?
Instead, high-powered women concentrate their altruistic impulses on the workplace, mentoring younger female colleagues or setting up professional networks. Margaret Heffernan, an entrepreneur and author, says that XX women are less likely to isolate themselves than similarly successful men. ?Women always had to help each other and this is more true now than ever.? She cites the First Women Awards, which celebrate empowering, sisterly acts within business. And while some criticise Sheryl Sandberg for her lofty elitism, through Lean In she has set up a network in the US to nurture female leadership.
Maybe peace would reign between full-time working mothers and those who stay at home if we recognised we are different but equal beasts. Most XX women I interview say they envy the contentment of full-time mothers, their serene enjoyment of the nurturing years, unplagued by the niggling, restless feeling they should be elsewhere, striving, climbing, getting on.
And I think of my husband?s grandmother Elsie, whom I knew well, one of Manchester University?s first women graduates who became a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Labour in the Thirties. Despite being used as a test case in Parliament, she was forced to resign her post on getting married. And for ever afterwards she was miserable and nagging, hated domesticity, was a terrible cook and a less than enthusiastic mother. My mother-in-law ? her daughter ? now recognises Elsie was deeply frustrated, her first-class brain wasted on tennis lessons and ladies? lunches. And I thank my good fortune I was not like her, an XX woman born in the wrong age.
Alison Wolf: eight ways to spot an XX woman
Until now, all women?s lives, whether rich or poor, have been dominated by the same experiences and pressures. Today, elite and highly educated women have become a class apart. However, these professionals, businesswomen and holders of advanced degrees, the top 15 or 20 per cent of a developed country?s female workforce, have not moved further apart from men ? they are more like men than ever before. It is from other women that they have drawn away.
1 Highly educated women share their male counterparts? work habits and job choices. They partner and marry men like themselves.
2 They are more likely to work full-time and are less likely to drop out of employment for any significant length of time ? staying employed even when they are mothers with young children.
3 They have less sex. In the workaholic 2000s, American women with postgraduate degrees, the most career-oriented group, report substantially less sex than other groups, even among married women.
4 They don?t have children. Generations are entering middle age at levels of childlessness that are historically extraordinary. When educated women do have children, they have very few, and later.
5 They marry. Successful, educated women take major risks if they have a baby. Most successful women will only have a baby given the clear commitment and the financial insurance offered by marriage: marriage, to someone at or close to their own educational and income level, who can help raise a ?high quality? child. No marriage, no baby.
6 They go back to work fast after having children; and then they stay there. The more educated they are, the more mothers in Western societies behave, in work and career terms, exactly like men, and exactly like women without children.
7 They employ domestic staff. Nannies now populate upper-middle-class neighbourhoods in the way maids once did. Servants underpin elite women?s lifestyles.
8 They invest in their children?s education. If you?ve made it to the top, you?ll do (almost) anything to stop your children sliding. Formal education is becoming more important as a gateway to the sunny uplands of high-earning careers, and finely tuned CVs are passports to the right schools, the right colleges, the right shortlist. If activities, chauffeuring, tutoring come at the expense of leisure time, then that is the price that today?s parents are determined to pay."
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to read xenias response it seems long 
too mrsjay. 