I'LL OUTWORK YOU. I'LL ALSO OUTEARN YOU. Inside Higher Ed publishes another whinge about how difficult it is to keep house and establish your scholarly reputation.

We were teaching, working at administrative jobs, finishing up our dissertations, and also working hard on our marriages/partnerships. At that time, neither of us had children but we both knew that we wanted to find time to add a kid or two to the mix and we also knew that something was going to have to give.

Both of us were immersed in reading, research, and writing – in what Nicholas Carr calls “deep thinking.” We found that we had little time for taking care of our partners, cleaning our houses, and cooking fabulous dinners. We needed a “wife” to help us with the caretaking. We found that we could not do it all.

For many of us, this “wife” no longer exists. As a feminist, I am happy to see the demise of the subservient and self-sacrificing “wife.” Although I have made a wise decision in selecting a partner who does his fair share of the caretaking, he is not a wife and neither am I. Perhaps we are both demi-wives, doing the caretaking as a team.

On one level, the whinge is a confession of ignorance about the efficiency gains from specialization and division of labour. Within a household, however, division of labour is something to be negotiated prior to forming that household.

On another level, the whinge is a waste of pixels. There is no reason that success in the academy is any different from success in doing dot.com startups or competing at the highest levels of a sport or performing with the Chicago Symphony or for that matter keeping the Union Pacific Railroad fluid. David French offers some new lawyers a useful anti-whinge.

I told them that they should not be “that guy” or “that girl” who leaves their colleagues at a critical moment because their kid’s soccer game is just So. Darn. Important. “That guy” makes people like me miss OUR kids’ games to make up for their lost work. “You’re in a community,” I said, “A community made up of your fellow lawyers, paralegals, and the secretaries, and you have responsibilities to that community just as you do to your next-door neighbor, to your fellow church members, or to any other part of the world."

I didn’t stop there. “Lawyers work hard. They just do. There’s no magic bullet for the balanced lifestyle — whatever a balanced lifestyle means — instead, make sure your spouse and children are on the same page with you, that you’re united in your family’s collective and individual callings, and that you support each other as you confront the financial world, or any other part of the world you engage."

Read and understand. Note, especially, the passage that emphasizes the necessity of negotiating a division of labour.

I think every family has to ultimately ask itself: Are we rangers or hobbits? It really is a family decision, by the way. If a wife wants to live in Hobbiton and the husband heads out to the wild lands, resentment builds in both directions, children feel abandoned without higher purpose, and marriages dissolve in acrimony and bitterness. Stay in the shire until the parents are unified in heart and mind and willing to take on the wild.

And grasp the proposition that other people might be bearing some of the burden of your balance, by taking on the work you have shirked.