Lived a Full Life

For decades, research has found that obituaries give men more lines about their careers than women. So a woman who spent years at a switchboard or a sewing machine can end up as "beloved wife, mother and homemaker." In our first episode, Rosa and Walt follow the three groups who have written obituaries in turn: newspaper staff, then families paying by the line, and now families typing into funeral-home and AI drafting forms. Each one gets some of the blame. None of them gets all of it.

The surprise is that the drafting forms already ask for occupation and employer. The gap comes down to who knew. Memory research says older adults remember their teens and twenties most vividly, and those are often the jobs their children never heard about. We end with one question you could ask the older person in your life this week. Where the research disagrees with itself, we say so. In particular, no study has measured whether the move to family-written paid notices changed how often women's jobs get named.

Sources:

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