Graduation Day. Credit: David Morris from Flickr.
A few weeks ago the prize-winning French economist Thomas Piketty was interviewed for the Financial Times for the regular ‘Lunch with the FT’ interview profiles which typically include a copy of the bill inserted into the text. However on this occasion it was not the very modest bill which aroused my attention (Piketty insisted, presumably to save time from his working day, on eating at a local café) but rather the overall account of his working days. He told the journalist that to be an academic one really needed to be buried away writing or in the library from 9am to 7pm each day. He also referred in passing to the enjoyable family life he had, as a 50-something French academic. This included a second wife along with two daughters from his first marriage, ‘the girls’.
These unremarkable facts somehow got stored in my feminist brain, especially the idea of being totally alone and able to work uninterrupted for up to 10 hours a day. As an academic I could hardly disagree, this is indeed what is required to do the job properly, as a feminist I thought that this working day surely relied on high levels of unseen support to shop, cook, and attend to the various aspects of domestic administration so that bills are paid, food is bought, clothes are collected from the dry cleaners, parents nights are attended and so on. In this case one might guess that Piketty leaves his home at 8am and returns at 8pm, and has perhaps done so throughout his entire working life.
