Half Changed World

Via Laura at 11d, I found this article from The Public Interest by Neil Gilbert on what makes a policy "family-friendly."  This article makes the policy case for the proposal from David Brooks that I discussed Friday a lot more convincingly than Brooks does, and deserves some of the attention that Brooks has been getting.  (I think the Brooks article is an attempt to popularize Gilbert’s argument, but could be wrong.)

Gilbert makes the obvious, but often overlooked, point that women don’t all want the same thing.  Far too many commentators look at a trend — whether the general trend of the past 30 years towards increased maternal participation in the work force, or the recent modest reversal of that trend — and act as if it says something about all women.  (Gilbert claims that "many feminists like to portray women as a monolithic group…." but this is a gratuitous slap; anti-feminists do the same thing.)

Gilbert argues that it’s useful to think of a continuum of work-family preferences among women in the US, from "traditional" women who "derive most of their sense of personal identity and achievement from the traditional childrearing responsibilities and from practicing the domestic arts" to "postmodern" women for whom "personal success tends to be measured by achievements in business, political, intellectual, and artistic life."  In the middle, he places "neo-traditional" women and "modern" women who fall between the two.  (Interestingly, Gilbert uses number of children, rather than labor force participation, to divide women into these categories.  I’m not convinced that’s the right measure; when I have a chance, I’d like to look up how strong the correlation between the two is.  Also, like Brooks, he totally ignores the role of men.)

This diversity has important policy implications, as I noted in my second post ever on this blog:

"Let me start by saying that I think we’ve made the right choice, for us, for now, but I don’t think there’s a single right choice for everyone, for all times. (This isn’t just a wishy-washy plea for tolerance, but a general statement of principle, which has implications when we start talking about policies to support families — but I’ll get into that another day.)"

I guess today’s that day.  Back to Gilbert.  He goes on to argue that most "family-friendly" policies  — specifically referring to day care subsidies and family leave policies —

"address the needs of women in the neo-traditional and modern categories—those trying to balance work and family obligations. The costs of publicly subsidized day care are born by all taxpayers, but the programs offer no benefits to childless women who prefer the postmodern life style and are of little use to traditional stay-at-home mothers."

Fair enough.  Gilbert then proposes several alternative "family-friendly" policies that are aimed instead at the needs of women in the traditional category such as tax credits, social security credits, tuition breaks, and hiring preferences, all targeted to stay-at-home parents.  In other words, pretty much the feminist agenda of Mothers Ought To Have Equal Rights. (A similar proposal has also been getting some attention on a thread over at MyDD.)

Where Gilbert makes a lot more sense to me than Brooks is that he doesn’t pretend that these credits are going to move women dramatically from the postmodern or modern groups into the traditional groups.  At most, he suggests that they might move some women from the neo-traditional category into the traditional category — and he argues that this would mostly overcome the existing bias of public policy towards women who are combining work and parenting.  He also acknowledges that women entering the workforce after 5-10 years of childrearing would be at a disadvantage, at least in some fields ("those careers that require early training, many years of preparation, or the athletic prowess of youth"), which Brooks blithely ignores.

This post is getting long, so I’ll come back another day to discuss some of my concerns with Gilbert’s specific proposals. (I’m much more inclined towards something along the lines of the Simplified Family Credit proposed by EPI.)  But I think the underlying point — that people have different preferences, and public policy shouldn’t only work for the majority preference — is an important one.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2005 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Magazines and Newspapers, Work-family choices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.