Male professors who take paid leave tend to use a majority of their time on things other than infant care, such as advancing their publishing agendas, he said. In contrast, women use the time to do a significant majority of infant care tasks -- on top of breastfeeding, perhaps the most time-consuming and physically demanding task.The last quote is key.
"In this area, refusal to take sex differences seriously, rather than helping women, leads to a policy that could injure females seeking tenure by giving their male counterparts an unfair advantage," the study concludes. While only about 12 percent of men currently utilize their post-birth leave option, the study finds, "if men should begin to take leave in much larger numbers, far from leveling the playing field, gender-neutral, post-birth leaves are likely to tilt the field further in favor of men."
"We ought to figure out if there are sex differences, and then figure out what to do about them," he said. "There may be liberal-versus-conservative splits about what to do about them, but it shouldn't be a question whether there are deep-seated sex differences, because that's where the research is pointing."
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