Lubinski and Benbow believe that women have innate low interest to work, which gives them disadvantage in career. They make an assumption that work time is positively related with success. Because women have less passion for long time work than men, they are underrepresented in the work place. The theory makes me think. Do women have less enthusiasm in long time work? Is longer work time related to larger success possibility? My answers to both questions are No.

How do we define women’s work interest? In the article, two authors simplify it as how many hours people plan to spend on work. It makes sense at the first time. Yet is it a suitable measurement? If we only compare one variable, we need to make sure that other variables have been controlled. But in this experiment many variables exist. Women’s extra labor in family life explains their lower passion for long time work (Mattingly & Blanchi, 2003). Women’s family role inhibits their free time, as they spend more time than men taking care of children. According to research, women’s free time is less than men. So it is convincing that women need less work time to balance their extra work load. The difference is influenced by environment; it is not innate. Moreover, I notice that the mean age of the sample in the article is 33, which makes the result biased. Because their children are at preschool age, women have larger family burden.

Besides women’s heavier family burden, their free time has lower quality. Research shows that women is under more pressure than men during free time (Mattingly & Blanchi, 2003). Because women’s activities are usually around their family, the family role still binds them. We can easily find examples in daily life. In activities such as hiking and family movie night, women still need to take care of the family. Some people call the self-report data into question, arguing that the measurement is biased by different ways individuals report their feelings. But the sample size is big enough (more than 500 people) to eliminate influential bias. So women’s low interest in work is related to low quality of free time.

An economic model explains how child-care program decreases women’s work effort (Heckman, 1974). The assumption is that wage has a positive relation with work passion. Because of child-care program, women’s labor supply is divided. And this task has no money feedback. So child-care task decreases women’s wage ratio relative to the same supply. The financial cut back will decrease women’s work passion. As another evidence, the research also shows that women with low productivity in family tend to be more active in work field. We can conclude that nurturing children hinders women’s interest in work. Again, women’s lower passion in long time work is not innate; it is impacted by external world.

As for our second question, the authors give a simplified assumption without proof: long time work is related to success. Long work time never equals to success. In contrary, it brings low effectiveness (Golden, 2012). The longer you work, the more productivity you have. But be careful, the productivity growth-rate diminishes. The longer one works, the lower effectiveness he or she has. Long-term overwork also increases risk of health problem and depression. Though in certain situations, the hard work method is beneficial to someone, we adopt the opposite theory because it has universality. We should not simply link work time with success potential. So the logic behind the article is not stable.

In short, women’s lower interest for long time work fails to reflect women’s innate lower interest in career. Women’s vigor is dispersed by family life and the link between work time and success is vague. However, my statement has limitation itself. A perfect experiment about women’s interest may never be done, because extraneous variable always exists. So I am on a safe position to point out unstable statement of the article. A more practical action is to change women’s situation in family. Today, men’s participation rate in house working increases, but equality in nurturing children and house working is still idealistic. New research should focus on how to equally distribute family burden to both genders.

Reference

Lubinski, D. S., & Benbow, C. P. (2007). Sex Differences in Personal Attributes for the    Development of        Scientific Expertise. American Psychological Association.

Mattingly, M. J., & Blanchi, S. M. (2003). Gender differences in the quantity and quality of free time: The     US experience. Social Forces, 81(3), 999-1030.

Golden, L. (2012). The Effects of Working Time on Productivity and Firm Performance, Research        Synthesis Paper. International Labor Organization (ILO) Conditions of Work and Employment Series, (33).

Heckman, J. J. (1974). Effects of child-care programs on women’s work effort. In Marriage, Family, Human Capital, and Fertility (pp. 136-169). Journal of Political Economy 82 (2), Part II.