There are women who are very good in high school,
then they go to college, they're very good in college.
They nail their damn grades, they do their studying,
they get their A's and they ace their LSATs, so they are smart too.
Then they go off to do their articling
and they're really really good at it
and then they get offered an Associate position
and they're really really good at it,
and then by the time they're 30
they make Partner and let's say they're
in high-pressure, high-paying jobs.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year,
three hundred thousand dollars a year,
five hundred dollars an hour, okay.
What's your life like? You work all the time. Period.
70 hours a week, 75 hours a week,
flat out, and you don't get to make any mistakes.
And if your client calls you at 3:00 in the morning on Sunday
you say I'm really glad to hear you,
hear from you, because if you don't there's some hot law firm in New York
that will take your client from you at a
moment's notice and the client is paying you
whatever the firm... 750 dollars an hour
of which maybe you get $350 and what they want
is an answer about something
really complicated right bloody now.
And you can say all you want about the fact
that women have a difficult time with that,
because it's a male-dominant patriarchy
any who... any female lawyer
who's hit 30 and is a Partner that has any sense at all,
knows that's complete bloody rubbish.
It's market-determined right to the core.
What happens to the women when they're in their 30s.
They all leave the high-end law firms. Why?
'cause who in their right mind would want to live like that?
That's the issue, right.
Once you make about $60,000 a year
for your family, but let's say for you personally,
additional income makes zero
has zero impact on your quality of life.
Zero. So, why work 80 hours a week?
Well men will do it, some men. Very few.
A handful of hyper-competitive men,
who are obsessed with hitting the pinnacle of the given dominance hierarchy they're in,
will happily work 80 hours a week and
they'll forego everything else:
relationships, family, children...
way in the second category.
And so those men are often very difficult to live with, too,
because they're so obsessed with their career.
It's hard to have a relationship with them
and maybe they don't have much of a
relationship with their kids, but they're
damn good at what they do.
And part of that is, is they're smart and
disciplined and they'll work non-stop, all the time.
It's like an obsession.
And that's the sort of people who run things.
Those are the people who run things.
Well, they're often also disagreeable too,
because you ought to manage people? Really?
They're not going to like you.
You know, it's not an easy thing to not be liked.
And actually if you're an agreeable person, and women are more agreeable than men,
it's quite painful to be disliked.
But if you're in a managerial or in an executive position
the probability that people are going to like you is quite low.
Now, if you're a real son of a bitch, then they're going to dislike you more.
But it's those positions are very stressful
partly because of the interpersonal dynamics,
and they're also incredibly, incredibly competitive.
So the women hit that at 30 and they're completely
qualified, and the law firms are bloody desperate to keep them.
Because it's really hard to find highly qualified people.
Especially once you put all that time into training,
especially if they're also good at bringing in business.
The law firms trip over themselves to try to keep them
They can't. The women think: "Why in the world am I doing this?"
"Why in the world would anyone in their right mind do this?"
Especially because they're often
married by that point too, and generally
they've married a husband who makes as
much money or more than them, so they don't
need the damn money. And so they think:
"Well there's more to life than this."
which is exactly the right thing to think.
And so then they go and find a job
that's 9:00 to 5:00 and controllable.
So that they can hire a nanny and have some kids
and have a life, and it's like
"Yes, that's the intelligent thing to do."
So, we've got things backwards in our culture.
We're thinking, at least in part,
why aren't there more women in positions of power?
Wrong question.
the right question is: why are there any men at all who want those positions of power?
Because it's not just positions of power.
You have to be such a nut-head to think that 'Oh, it's a position of power!"
It's like, sure, but it's a position of overwhelming responsibility.
And if you make mistakes. You're done. Right?
It's not like you occupy that position of
power and everyone does what they're
told all the time and your life is easy.
It's like, forget about that.
People are on your case to do exactly the right
thing all the time. 100% of the time.
And maybe you want that, maybe you don't.
So, what I don't know what...
people think, it's these people are all
sitting in their offices with their,
like, feet up on the desk smoking cigars and oppressing the world.
It's like that isn't how it works. Those people they
work flat out, all the time. So, and it's
fine if that's what you want, and some people are like that.
They're hyper-industrious people, right, from a trade perspective.
No matter where you put them.
If you put them in a forest with an axe
they just wander around chopping down trees non-stop, right.
'cause they're, it's built into them.
But if you want to have a balanced life, and you
should want that. You know, because the other thing you'll find,
this is God's gospel truth.
Is that, the older you get if you have any sense,
at all, the more important your family is to you.
Like the utility of your career, maybe that peaks around 35 or 40,
and it starts to decline pretty rapidly after that.
And what happens, if you're fortunate, you have someone in your life
that you love that you've woven yourself together with, and you have some kids
So that you have something to do from the time
you're 50 till the time you're 80.
And so, it's a real mistake. It's a barren future without children. Man, I can tell you that.
It's a real mistake.
And so we do a terrible job of... Say putting that
image forward and saying, "well yeah."
Now, you know, because women have access to the birth control pill now
and can compete in the same domains as men,
roughly speaking, there is a real practical problem here.
It's partly an economic problem now,
because when I was roughly your age it was still possible
for a one income family to exist.
Well, you know that wages have been flat except in the upper 1%, since 1973. Why?
Well, it's easy. What happens when you double the labour force?
What happens? You halve the value of labour.
So, now we're in a situation where it takes two people to make as much as one did before.
So we went from a situation where women's career opportunities were relatively limited,
to where they were relatively unlimited and there were two incomes,
to where, and so women could work, to a situation where women have to work
and they only make half as much as they would have otherwise and now we're going
to go into a situation this is the next step
whereas women will work because men won't.
and that's what's coming now. So we there
is an Economist article showing that 50% now of boys in school are having trouble with their basic subjects
and you look around you in universities you can see this happening.
I've watched it over decades.
I would say 90% of the people in my personality class are now women.
There won't be a damn man left in university in ten years, except in the STEM fields,
And it's a complete bloody catastrophe. And it's a catastrophe for women,
because I don't know where the Hell are you going to find someone to
to have a... You know, to marry and have a family with, if this keeps happening.
So, and you think when you're 19 because you're so clueless when you're 19.
You don't know a bloody thing.
You think: "Well I'm not really sure I want children anyways."
It's like, oh yeah, you tell how well you've been educated.
Jesus. Dismal, dismal.
Without fail I got to tell you. Without fail, I've watched
women go through their professional careers.
Many, many of them. It's a very rare woman who at the age of 30 doesn't
consider having a child her primary desire, and the ones that don't consider
that generally in my observation there's
something that isn't quite right in the
way that they're constituted or looking at the world.
Sometimes you get women who are truly non-maternal.
You know, by temperament. They did..
they have a masculine temper, disagreeable, they're not particularly compassionate,
they're not maternal, they're really not that interested in kids.
Fair enough, man. But there aren't that many of them
and there's plenty who will not admit to themselves, that that's what they most desperately want.
Audience member: Do you think women will be better off if they had kids earlier, focus on their career say in their 30s?
*sigh* Who knows, like, it's like... It really is a problem.
Now, it's a really tough one. I don't think anybody knows
the answer to that because...
Yeah.
Well...
Yeah.
Yeah, I can't answer that, because I've seen
women do a good job of it both ways.
And you did get the odd woman who
manages a high-powered career and kids,
but Jesus those women, man.
like, they buy more powerful microwaves
because it'll take 45 seconds to cook
the food instead of a minute.
And I'm not kidding it's like they're up at five,
they exercise for half an hour,
they make breakfast, they get their kids ready to work.
They go to work, they work 14-hour days flat bloody out,
they come home and work for another two hours to get their kids organized.
They have a nanny to help them out, then they
work for two more hours before they go to bed at like 1:00
and then they're up at 5:00 and they do that again.
And I'll tell you you better be tough if you're
going to do that, physically too, because
you'll just burn yourself to a crisp.
I've seen some women manage it, you know.
But they're like, they're tough and they're rare.
Because that's a hell of a regimen.
And then if anything goes wrong, you know.
You have a sick kid or something like that.
Or there's any sort of crisis in your family.
It's just, you know, then it becomes too much.
And I don't know the answer to that, you know. I mean, the advantage women have is
they live about eight years longer than men.
Because testosterone kills men, so...
Well, that's right. They pay upfront and gain on the, in the long run. But how... it isn't clear how our
society should sort this out. We don't know and it's partly we don't know what
to do now that women have control of the
reproductive function, it's a big mystery.
Yep.
*Audience member starts to speak.. part of is inaudible*
"Even if women were to enter the workforce later on, they .... competition with people who are younger
"..and that's always a conflict in the workforce that people are always"
"hiring younger talent, because..."
Yeah. Yes. Well, and the thing is: young stupid people
have the advantage of being young.
Middle-aged stupid people have the disadvantage of
being middle-aged. And so if you're going to
hire a young stupid person or a middle-aged
stupid person you'll go for the young stupid person.
And by stupid I mean, you know.
I'm being sarcastic obviously.
But I mean, without experience and just getting started in the world.
You're much more likely to favor someone young because there's an
instant explanation for their relative cluelessness.
And it's a problem, you know.
So, so I don't know what the answer is,
but one answer certainly is, at least in part, is to start letting young women
know what being thirty and being female is like, because, and also to
disabuse them of the notion that there's something magical about a career.
First of all, most people don't have careers, man.
They have jobs. And the reason you
get paid for a job is because you're being asked to do
things you wouldn't do unless you were being paid.
And so, it's not some utopia of cigar smoking with your boots up on your desk.
That's for sure. Not that would be such a utopia to begin with.