Math skills and finances (s/o feminism)

tigerwife

Tue, Jun 18 2019, 8:06 am

This thread is enlightening to me. I never realized that so many people assume men are better than women at math, or are more likely to choose certain fields because of their gender. If anything, the frum women around me choose specific careers depending on their flexibility towards raising their children. Please do not confuse this with women choosing certain careers because they are “gender-inclined” or “leaving other careers to men who are better at it”. I have friends who are actuaries and accountants; the ones who are out 10 hours a day (when you include travel) need to hire nannies. Not every mother would be so happy to do that.

I didn’t know men were supposed to be better than math (I thought the myth was about science) and I also fail to see math as the most important component in taking charge of finances. In my home, DH takes care of the bills because he is more organized and responsible, but in my parents’ home, my mother took care of it (apparently I got my father’s organizational genes Wink

). Don’t worry, all of the banking apps are on my phone only lol.

amother

Natural

Tue, Jun 18 2019, 8:20 am

amother [ Aqua ] wrote:

My mother always took care of the bills, and my dad is a CPA.
My DH sucks at math and I'm really good at it, and I do all the bills, but that's mainly because (like others) I'm more organized and I'm also home more than he is. We budget and discuss the finances together, but I do all the record-keeping, bill-paying, banking, and other finance-related stuff. People think it's funny when they hear about it, but I've never really thought twice about it (probably because that's how I grew up).

Right. Same here (less the CPA dad). Mother was home more. She managed the home - falling under 'home management' is dealing with paying home and family bills.

I think there is some aspect of taught helplessness around some of this stuff. (or the desire to feel like a Queen)

amother

Jade

Tue, Jun 18 2019, 8:29 am

tigerwife wrote:

Often it's a combination of both.

Last edited by amother on Fri, Jul 05 2019, 8:31 am; edited 1 time in total

amother

Ivory

Tue, Jun 18 2019, 8:45 am

amother [ OP ] wrote:

I didn't want to hijack the feminism discussion since this particular has little to do with gender, but I wanted to share my perspective on math skills and finances.

A lot of women here say they don't have much to do with their family finances because they're bad at math (and on the other thread, there's a discussion of men with poor math skills and what their role should be in finances). I believe that math skills is a poor excuse. You don't need to be Good Will Hunting or one of the Hidden Figures ladies to be an active participant or even in charge of household finances. I know this because I'm in charge of the finances even though dh is WAY better at math than I am. Dh is an engineer, it doesn't get much more math-y than that. I have always struggled with math, and I am that person who jokes all the time about how useless the trigonometry I slogged through in high school has been in my adult life.

But here's the thing. I don't need to remember what the purpose of a cosine is to figure out that if $10,000 is coming into to bank every month, and $11,000 is being spent every month, that's a problem and something needs to be done about it. It's not rocket science. I also don't need to be that good at math to know if my investments are going up, that's good, and if my investments are going down, that's bad. Unlike school exams, in real life, you're allowed to use a calculator. Larger questions, such as what are our financial goals, how much should we be saving, how risky or conservative should our investments be, these are not math questions. These are philosophical questions that we discuss together.

The reason I'm in charge of the finances is because I have the less demanding career and therefore more time to do it. Dh is involved to the extent of being consulted on one of the larger questions listed above, and being told how much we have in checking if he asks. Anyway, that's my soapbox, you don't need to be that good at math to be on top of your household finances. If you would still prefer the secondary role (as my dh does) that's fine, I just think it's important to be aware that if you do want to be more involved but numbers scare you, there are lots of ways to take an active role without doing much with numbers beyond greater than/less than.

I totally agree.
Math is so not my thing, yet I do the finances.

amother

Tue, Jun 18 2019, 9:00 am

tigerwife wrote:

If anything, the frum women around me choose specific careers depending on their flexibility towards raising their children. Please do not confuse this with women choosing certain careers because they are “gender-inclined” or “leaving other careers to men who are better at it”.

This is true, but there is definitely a social conditioning component. When was the last time you heard about boys being told to consider their career options carefully, because they need to think about having time for their families? Every woman I know who has a career (whether frum or secular) had it hammered into them that it's important to consider how you're going to juggle career and family. And that's true! It is important! But it's mostly only women who are being advised to think along those lines. And given the number of threads that come up here about the challenges of husbands working extremely long hours, seeing the kids only on Shabbos, well, perhaps it's time people had these conversations with men as well.

amother

Firebrick

Tue, Jun 18 2019, 9:01 am

smileforamile wrote:

I think that having a neti'ah towards choosing a particular field is more gender-specific, though. Even if a woman is good at math, on the whole she is more likely to want to work in a social setting, whereas a man is more likely to go for the single-minded, less social field. I realize that I'm making very broad generalizations here.

I must be male by these standards and my husband is female 😄. I also need to solve problems and my husband needs sympathy.
Yeah I know, it's a broad generalization. Just emphasizing that point.

Chayalle

Tue, Jun 18 2019, 9:05 am

tigerwife wrote:

). Don’t worry, all of the banking apps are on my phone only lol.

In fact, that's why I didn't pursue an actuarial degree (though I was definitely encouraged in that direction.) And it's also why I stay in a position that does not pay as much as I'd earn if I worked out of the house.

I take care of the bills, and so did my mother - even though my father had advanced math degrees and DH is far from "not good at math."

tigerwife

Tue, Jun 18 2019, 9:19 am

amother [ OP ] wrote:

My controversial response is that I believe women are biologically, not socially, better at raising children than men. Men cannot get pregnant, give birth, or nurse infants (in most cases!). A man will never ever understand working with a painful period, or postpartum recovery, sharing a body in order to nurture, all the while continuing to provide stellar work in whatever field they work in, whether it be astrophysics or running a demanding household. Poor men! They are just simply not as strong as us Wink

. On the other hand, women can certainly be socially dissuaded from taking on manly pursuits, but I am not aware of any field in which a woman cannot perform equally to a man. Yes, biologically, most men are built stronger, so we while we can technically be shleppers, we might not necessarily be the best shleppers in town. A pity. Oh, I’m not anti- man. I just don’t believe we are equal. This has nothing to do with equal rights. All humans should be eligible for the same opportunities and pay.

Well, that was a random rant Compress

amother

Tue, Jun 18 2019, 9:49 am

tigerwife wrote:

I think it's more controversial to say that it's all social Smile

The only thing that is completely biological is the fact that only women can give birth and nurse babies. But that doesn't make them automatically better at caring for them, it doesn't make them automatically a more capable parent. It's all socialization and self-fulfilling prophecy. Girls are encouraged to play house. Girls are encouraged to babysit as a way of earning money as teenagers. And then girls are the ones who are encouraged to take the more family friendly career path or put career entirely on hold while the kids are little. If boys babysat or thought about career/family balance, or took time off or scaled back to take care of their kids, they'd do just as well at caregiving.

tigerwife

Tue, Jun 18 2019, 10:03 am

amother [ OP ] wrote:

I think it's more controversial to say that it's all social Smile

My husband was raised with those values and is a very capable and good father.
I still believe that mothers have a more intrinsic connection with their children. Obviously, there will be people who don’t fit either stereotype.

But either way, most of my friends were not restrained in their career choices yet many of them (not all) chose to pursue family friendly hours. I myself know I could get better pay by choosing different hours (I actually currently work in a field dominated by men) yet I prefer to spend more time with my kids. It is innate.

amother

Tue, Jun 18 2019, 10:37 am

tigerwife wrote:

You can't prove that it's innate though. When something is so pervasive in the culture, you can't separate it out so easily. You don't even realize it's there. It feels innate, because you've always felt that way, but you can't know for sure just how many things outside of yourself influenced you to think that way. And it's not obvious, like restricting options. I don't think anyone in the last 30 years, outside of very extreme religious sects (not just Jewish), has been in favor or restricting girls' career choices, but there is definitely subtle messaging that goes on. Both my brother and SIL are doctors. And SIL's parents are extremely proud of their daughter the doctor! But from the day she started talking about wanting to be a doctor (when she was a young teen), plenty of people warned her about how hard it would be as a mother, what she was going up against. Of course, she was also encouraged to go for it, and told she'd make everyone proud, but also that it's going to be really hard to balance with motherhood. Even now, she's always asked how she does it. Nobody ever asks my brother how he does it. And nobody ever told him, when he was a kid dreaming of becoming a doctor, that he needs to think about how hard it's going to be to balance that with fatherhood. Thats what socializing into gender roles means.

And I thought I wanted to be the one with the more flexible career, so I planned it that way. Now, I'm not so sure. Too late now, though. It wouldn't make financial sense for me to take the demanding job and dh to take the flexible one. He's had years to build experience and reputation to climb the ladder. I have not done that and my career is not nearly as far along as it could be. Also, my profession is not as lucrative, so it makes sense for dh to be the main breadwinner. But all things being equal, it didn't have to be along gender lines. We were socialized differently in how to think about career.

All that longwindedness, and we've definitely strayed from the topic. This should be on the thread this is a spinoff of. This is about whether you or not you need to be good at math to manage family finances. And I believe the answer to be no Smile

amother

Tue, Jun 18 2019, 11:15 am

Why would a not so physical job be harder on a woman? When I'm pregnant or on my period, it's not any harder to sit on my tush at a computer in an office than it is to sit on my tush on the couch at home. Putting aside very physical labor, what makes a career hard in terms of family is the time and commitment. You're spending less time with your kids, you have less time in which to get stuff done, and logistics like appointments or school events are harder. The more demanding a career, the harder it is to have that balance. I do believe that if both parents are working, one of them needs more flexibility in order to attend to these things. I don't think that someone needs to be the mother. And choosing a more flexible, family friendly career doesn't mean you weren't willing to work hard. It means you weren't willing to deal with missing school plays or having to get information about doctors appointments second hand because someone else was the one to take them. Honestly, it would be nice if neither mothers nor fathers had to make those tough decisions. But let's be real, who gets told "that's going to be tough to juggle with kids"? Who gets warned that they won't see their kids enough if they do XYZ? There are a lot of fathers out there in terrible pain that they only get to see their kids on Shabbos. Maybe they would have chosen differently if someone had thought to talk to them about family.