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I know you shouldn't eavesdrop, but the group at the table next to me this lunchtime weren't speaking quietly or confidentially. They were having a loud, cheerful discussion of how difficult it is for a man to mention any of the fundamental biological differences between men and women. In fact, the way that is is hard for men to have a voice in feminist circles is just like the way that certain topics to do with race are taboo for white people. It's a big problem for feminism, this unwillingness to listen to men and to put the movement on a sound, objective scientific basis rather than just clinging to victim identity and unempirical but ideologically sound political theories.

These are Swedish men, a sociologist and a couple of ecologists I think, the sort of people who would be deeply offended if you implied they were anything other than staunch feminists. They knew all the right buzzwords, they talked about the difference between sex and gender, and decried essentialism. They rather deplore the fact that women are under-represented at the senior levels they belong to, though they expect it's probably mostly a matter of time lag and the fact that so many women choose family over career in spite of all the opportunities available to them.

I suppose I shouldn't complain, perhaps a generation ago a similar group of middle-ranking academics would have bonded by means of loud conversations about the fuckability of their secretarial staff. And they really do mean well, they really do seem to feel hurt about not having an equal voice in feminist discourse. It's extraordinarily unlikely that they were having this discussion with the deliberate intention of making female colleagues feel unwelcome. It's just sad that people who have lived most of their lives in a remarkably egalitarian society, people who strongly believe in principle that women and men are absolutely equal, people who by the sound of it are better versed in feminist literature and theory than I am, just so fundamentally don't get it.

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The thing is, this is Sweden, where it seems to be generally accepted both socially and legally that childcare is a shared responsibility. Most men do use their legal right to paternity leave, usually taking a significant chunk of time off work in the second year of the kid's life, though some couples have other ways of dividing things (eg both working part time on different days of the week). So these guys know that men can and do take career breaks for childcare.

The choosing they're talking about comes in at a later stage. A common pattern I've seen is that a couple start out completely egalitarian, and for reasons that genuinely are biological, they agree that the mother should take the first part of the leave period. So she'll be at home with the kid for the first six months or year of its life, then as previously agreed the man will take over. But the man turns out to be completely overwhelmed by suddenly having to do full-time childcare, and the woman forgets that she was equally overwhelmed when she first started out, and has a year of experience that he doesn't have yet, so she can easily fall into the assumption that men are "naturally" less competent at childcare. When it comes to the end of the official leave period, which is usually two years total but there are ways of fiddling that, many women say, actually, I don't want to go back to my old hyper-competitive, more than full-time job, I want to make sure I have time with my family. So she drops to part time or moves to a less competitive job, or has a second kid. The man feels he's done his bit (though he may take another six months to look after the second child), and returns to the career track he was on before they had a family.

So yes, on the individual level, many women are choosing family over career. But there's a context in which they are making these choices; the sexism they face at work probably makes them more reluctant to carry on having to be twice as good as their male colleagues to get half the credit. They have to deal with far more brainwashing that it's a woman's duty to give her child the best upbringing possible, so they are far more likely to feel guilty about packing a young child off to full-time daycare (an option which thankfully does exist in Sweden), or doing the housework less than perfectly because they're too busy at work to have time. Many women even feel guilty that their husbands aren't as dedicated parents as they would be.