The Career Trap That Makes Women Miserable - Suzanne Venker - #1113

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
You dedicated your book with an apology to a generation of women who've been misled.

**Suzanne Venker** (0:06)
I did.

**Chris Williamson** (0:06)
How have they been misled?

**Suzanne Venker** (0:07)
Yeah. I was essentially apologizing for the oversight that I believe both my generation, which is Gen X, by the way, I was born in 68, and the generation one up from me, which is the Boomers, which I think is more really what I'm talking about, but definitely some Gen X.
The oversight that they did not share with their children, their daughters in particular, because I really write mostly for young women.
How to go about building a life that essentially includes marriage and motherhood. That the messaging has been for decades now.
You can do anything you want to do without any caveats there with no explanation or nuance. You need to sort of prove yourself in the world in the way men do because equality is the goal. Men and women are the same. This kind of messaging. And then taught them pretty much to put career at the center of their lives. And what they didn't do was talk about how marriage and motherhood was going to fit into their lives and into that equation if they're just singularly focused on education and career. So what ends up happening is that they get somewhere around 30, the age of 30 And it is well known that women start to think very differently about their future because they want to start having a family and they hear that clock ticking. And their priorities are shifting. And they feel stuck. They feel like all these decisions that they've made up to this point were made with a different plan in mind. Because nobody wanted to talk about the fact that men and women are different. And so it's okay to construct a different kind of life.

**Chris Williamson** (2:12)
Why do you think it's unpopular to warn women of that?

**Suzanne Venker** (2:18)
Because the goal is a political one. It is about men and women being equal, which doesn't mean equal in value, the way I define it, but sameness basically, interchangeability, that what one can do, the other can do, which by the way is often true.
But it doesn't take human desire into account. So male and female desire is very, very different. And we don't talk about that because that would highlight how men and women are different. And the goal is for men and women to be the same and to have these trajectories that are the same. So that everything can be equal in 50-50 in this sort of utopian version of what life should look like for men and women. And it's just not working. It's been several decades now with this messaging.

**Chris Williamson** (3:02)
Yeah.
I had this idea a little while ago, the bigotry of male expectations. So there's an idea called the bigotry of small expectations or of low expectations, which kind of explains some of the white savior complex that college-educated white people have around minorities, that we will give you a helping hand, allow us poor people from a minority background, we will help you along. And there's kind of a similar situation, I think, that's happening with the way that women are being spoken to, specifically by other women, which is you are only as valuable as you are able to play the role that typically men have done. And that in some ways sounds very liberating. You go, wow, this is independent. It's pushing women to be able to do what they want to do without the constraints that would have held them back previously. And I think that that's true.
But what it forgets is that implicitly that denigrates what women have typically done. It makes them second-class citizens for doing the things that they used to do. There's a famous study that happened where hunter-gatherers from ancestral times were analyzed using modern hunter-gatherer societies and women did a slightly, how do you say, motivated research team analyzed the data and said, women did just as much big game hunting as men and maybe even more. And what they were trying to put across was women were able to do the thing that men did. Now, they fucked with the data. It turned out that that wasn't really the truth at all. But what it implicitly said was that hunting was important, but gathering wasn't.

**Suzanne Venker** (4:36)
Exactly.

**Chris Williamson** (4:37)
And how is that not misogynistic? Like that's the most misogynistic thing that I can think of from someone that's supposed to be pro-women. You're saying the thing that you do or did, or your ancestors do or did naturally is not as important. And only if you're able to contort yourself into the shape of a man, are you worth something.