Graduate, Then Baby-Make!

I teach a class of 40 girls three times a week. The class is comprised of the "international" track students of the sophomore class: the 40 best English speakers out of a class of 350. These girls are hyperintelligent, witty, energetic, and motivated when it comes to learning.

Last week I asked them to cover their eyes and gave them the following prompt:

"Raise your hand if you think that in the future, if you have children, you will have both children and a career. Raise your hand if you plan on working after your children are born."

Out of a class of 40 students, 15 hands went up. Only 15.

To me, this seemed frighteningly low. But I must admit, I expected some similar response. After all, in Japan, marriage and childbirth are seen as hurdles that must be jumped if one ever expects to be taken seriously by family and peers, if one ever hopes to find contentment.

Now more than ever, having children is important for the Japanese because the nation is facing a declining birthrate, one dropping so quickly that an atrophied economy in the next century is now an expectation rather than a possibility. The government is turning the act of having children into a gesture of nationalism: The country needs your children if we ever hope to survive well into the future!

Most of the girls in my school will go on to good universities. Many of them will work after college...but only for a short time. In Japan, when a woman gets a job, she often will work only until she gets married and/or pregnant. At that point, she'll quit. Employers expect this marriage-induced attrition and treat woman accordingly--it's harder for women to rise to positions of power in companies and it's harder for women to earn the wages of their male counterparts. The irony of all this is that these departures from the workforce, departures arranged so that women may have children, are the exact things that will end up hurting Japan in the future as the overall population declines--the women will be sorely missed in an economny that needs every able-bodied worker punching in each and every day.

I can't help but feel frustrated by the fact that students I try to educate are openly admitting they won't work for society in the future. There are serious (but fix-able) problems in Japan and the rest of the world, problems that require the minds of intelligent people. When intelligent people say that they want to sacrifice careers for the sake of family, is it wrong to feel as though they are being selfish? Sure, some of them (as do some members of my own family) feel as though raising a good, intelligent child is their way of giving back to the world. But where does the buck stop? This mentality helps populate the planet sure enough, but how much of our potential can we realistically hope to achieve if large portions of our species are focusing only on child rearing?

I don't know--maybe humankind needs half of the parental unit to stay at home and raise a child in order to achieve anything at all. Maybe we've found an equillibrium over the centuries and are currently running smoothly at high gear, creating at the speed at which we can most effectively create. As tempting to believe and as calming as this idea is, I find it hard to believe.

Male-dominated, religion-fueled, oppression-hungry governmental structures have been ruling the planet for too long with no reprieve for me to believe that anything we've done in the past and continue to do is tapping into the full power of the human race. If the roles we fill have any resemblance to those assigned during times of opression and blatant discrimination in centuries past, we're not there yet.

My female students have no qualms about fulfilling such antiquated roles at a point in history when humans have known more than ever before. Something about this scenario seems strange.