Senator McCain's choice of a running mate has stimulated lots of discussion in news media and blogs about the balance of family and career in women's lives. Most future societies imagined in science fiction take it for granted that women will have careers similar to men's. As someone mentioned on this blog many months ago, SF characters often embark on their adventures with no mention of the possibility of children. Maybe this phenomenon results from authors and readers taking it for granted that future technology will guarantee infallible contraception. Even so, some people will certainly want offspring, and someone will have to take care of them. I like the system envisioned in J. D. Robb's mid-twenty-first century mysteries, when the position of "professional parent" exists, with individuals who choose that path being paid a stipend at public expense. Still, there would be many couples in which both partners want to work outside the home at the same time. Robb's fiction also predicts robots advanced enough to serve as nannies.

Will housekeeping and child-care robots, if they ever reach that degree of sophistication, put an end once and for all to the home-career conflict? Or will they produce a class dichotomy in which wealthy and middle-class people have practically unlimited choices while those who can't afford robots still face the same quandaries present-day families do? Would households able to afford robot servants be in the same position as the wealthy people who kept houses full of human servants in the nineteenth century?

There's no assurance, of course, that the present-day trend toward gender parity in employment and career flexibility for both sexes will continue in the direction it's going. Economic and social upheaval might lead to a reversal of the cycle. The 1950s middle-class North American ideal of the two-parent-single-earner household, made possible only by the postwar economic boom, was a short-lived anomaly. It followed a period in which women flooded the workplace. A reversion to the one-earner family might occur as a result of a catastrophe like the population crash postulated in William Tenn’s short story “Down Among the Dead Men,” in which laws forbid women from working in any remotely hazardous job because they are too valuable as “breeders.”

In pre-industrial eras, women almost universally contributed to the household's earnings; they did it within the home, as most men also did. If wage-earning work could be returned to the domestic setting, numerous problems would be solved. Unfortunately, many jobs just don't lend themselves to telecommuting. Moreover, lots of people actually like going out to their jobs rather than staying home twenty-four hours a day.

In Japan, household and caregiving robots are already becoming commercially available. There is hope that robotic “servants” may encourage women to bear more children and alleviate the economic problems caused by Japan’s low birthrate.

Notice that the problem continues to be stated in terms of persuading WOMEN to devote more energy to families. Returning to the topic of a female presidential or vice-presidential candidate, have you ever heard a reporter ask a male politician how he expects to harmonize the demands of family life with a high-pressure career?