From Judith Shulevitz at The New Republic, some observations about everyone’s favorite subject: “To understand why female lawyers, doctors, bankers, academics, high-tech executives and other, often expensively pedigreed, professionals quit work to stay home, you need not search their souls for ambivalence or nostalgia. In fact, searching their souls guarantees that you won’t get the story, because it’s not to be found in individual decisions and personal stories, which are always complicated and hard to parse, but in the structural realities of the American workplace.”

And there aren’t that many of them, but there are some of them. Guesstimated reasons why in this Atlantic piece:

The way to “make it” as a magician involves being on the road a lot of time which some people choose not to do or are encouraged not to do, because of the kind of reproductive organs they have.

Also another reason is that young boys are encouraged to do magic while young girls are not, generally.

Here’s an anecdote about a magician in working in Vegas in the ’80s: “When I started out, I used to travel by myself–and if I was in Vegas, I’d go down to the bar to get a chili or something after my gig and the security guards would come over and check to see that I wasn’t a prostitute. So I started wearing pigtails and Keds downstairs to get my food!”

All the stress: “If you happen to be a working woman and below the age of 33, congratulations – you belong to the most stressed-out demographic in America.”

But as the fight for sales became fiercer, we needed to be bigger and bolder. The pictures became more outrageous (“First time topless!”), the volume higher (“100 Real Girls’ Breasts!”), the spin more novel (“Real girls in the bath!”). I once ran a brainstorm simply titled “New ways to do breasts”. A meeting in which I, and several educated, brilliant men, sat around, scratching our heads trying to “spin” boobs. I walked out of the room with “BUMS??” written in my notebook, believing we’d had an anatomy epiphany, only to be told that bums didn’t sell.

I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. We went right into the young man’s stomping ground – bars and nightclubs – to take pictures of girls flashing. One windy Monday night in Kingston, I approached a girl to ask if she’d like to be photographed for Nuts. She nodded, put her hands up her skirt and started to pull down her knickers. I stopped her, horrified, and tried to tactfully explain that she didn’t need to bare her vagina to get into the magazine.

Ever had a job where you were asked to do things that didn’t feel right to you, but you did them anyway because you had to earn some money, and thought if you stuck around long enough, you could turn things around? Four women who worked at “lad” magazines like Nuts, FHM, and Loaded tell the Guardian how they made their often “stomach-churning” jobs into positions that gave their careers a boost. Some have regrets about perpetuating a culture that objectified women, while others say it’s all part of doing business. As one lady editor puts it: “I was more organised than the men, more efficient. I’m not sure my career would have progressed so quickly from a women’s glossy.”

Here is a new survey from the Pew Research Center that shows that young women now value being successful in a high-paying career or profession more than men do. I am not a lady, but Lindsay Katai is, and when she read this, she said, “If we ladies are a mess, at least we’ve got some baller priorities deep down.” Yes! And I will say that I am also friends with plenty of ladies who are not messes at all—they have a totally firm grasp on their finances, have great jobs, and are people who I really admire. We’ll have tons more Sara Blakelys and Sheryl Sandbergs in this world in the very near future.

Also, when it comes to family vs. jobs, family is still the most important thing to all of us. We all want to be good parents, have successful marriages and have great jobs. We can have it all, you guys. (Rolling in the deep!) [via]