Half Changed World

As I’ve said here before, I’m not quite ready to get on the Hillary bandwagon.  But I have to give her kudos for the set of work-family proposals that she laid out at her YWCA speech yesterday.  No one else in either party is talking about these issues at all, and she’s got all the key points there — child care, paid sick days, expanding the FMLA.  She’s even included a "right to request" flexible work conditions, modeled on the UK law.

If you had told me in 1992 that one day Hillary Clinton was going to be a candidate for president, this is the kind of thing that I would have expected from her.

Hopefully it will make the other candidates, at least on the Democratic side, feel that they have to address these issues as well.  I know that one of Obama’s senior aides used to work on these issues, so I’m sure she’s got a list of suggestions.

Leslie Bennetts has been very harsh about people who criticize her book, The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?, without having read it.  So I’m here to report that I slogged through the whole thing, and now I feel perfectly entitled to criticize it.  Here are my major complaints:

1)  Bennetts says repeatedly that she’s not making a moral judgment about the value of stay-at-home parenting, only pointing out the economic risks of dependency.  But I just don’t believe her.  She refers to stay at home parents as "parasites," to singularly focused lives as "sterile and stultifying," and suggests that the children of such parents will be overly dependent.  As far as I can tell, she believes that devoting your full energies to parenting is waste of brains as much as Linda Hirshman does, but doesn’t have the courage to stand up and say so.

2) Bennetts is unbearably condescending towards Gen X (and Gen Y) women.  She’s fallen hook line and sinker for the story that Gen X women are looking at Boomer Women and rejecting their attempts to "have it all."  So she thinks that Gen Xers are lazy/wimps/expect to have perfection handed to them.  But there’s no evidence that’s true — mothers’ labor force participation has declined slightly from its peak, but is still higher than it was in the 1980s or earlier.

3) She doesn’t take the issues of lower-paid mothers seriously.  In the section on child care, she blithely writes that "the horror stories about negligent or malignant baby-sitters do not reflect the reality of quality child care as those with reasonable means typically experience it."  That’s probably true, if you define reasonable means as earning $60,000 or more a year.  But that’s not most families.  And she rhapsodizes on about the importance of having meaningful intellectually stimulating work, with hardly a nod to the possibility that not everyone has that kind of work.

4) The issue of economic vulnerability is a real one.  While I’ve said here before that I think Bennetts overstates the risk of divorce, she’s totally dead on about the long-term financial consequences of breaks in labor force participation.  But where Ann Crittenden talks about these same issues and asks why should a 5 year interruption in work reduce your earnings for the next 40 years, Bennetts just scolds women for making bad choices, even as she quotes people like Pamela Stone as saying that these were constrained choices.

Towards the end of the book, Bennetts quotes a working mother who reports on what her pediatrician said: "I have taken care of thousands of children from all kinds of backgrounds, and the one consistent thing in raising well-adjusted children was parents who were happy with their choices."   Pity that Bennetts didn’t seem to hear what she was saying.

This week’s book is Opting Out?  Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home, by Pamela Stone.  Stone is a sociologist, and the book reports on her study of the experiences of 54 white, highly educated professional married mothers who left their well-paid careers to stay home.  The book is framed as a response to Lisa Belkin’s famous Opt-Out Revolution article, although I think Stone had actually started her research before it was published.

Overall, Stone’s thesis is that these women did not stop working because of a call to full-time motherhood, but because of the lack of flexibility in their high-powered jobs that made it impossible to both work at the level that they were accustomed to and have any semblance of family lives, especially given the expectations for intensive parenting in upper and middle class families.  Most of their husbands worked even more crazy hours, and something had to give.  Many of the women had requested part-time or flexible work situations — and in several cases, had taken advantage of such situations for a while, but were denied to permission to continue them.  Stone concludes that for these women, it was easier to incorporate professional skills into at-home parenting (often through high level volunteering) than to be a parent while working in their intensive jobs.

While Stone’s findings generally seemed plausible to me, I found it frustrating that she only talked to the women who had "opted-out."  I wanted to know what was different about those who had faced similar pressures and continued to work — did they have husbands who were more involved in family life?  more supportive bosses?  a greater willingness to outsource family duties?  healthier kids?

Since I’ve read and thought a lot about this issue, I felt like a lot of the book was old news to me.  The only real new ideas were in some of the details, like the suggestion that corporate mergers and downsizing often led to less flexible work arrangements, because people suddenly found themselves working for new bosses who didn’t have a history with them.  I also was struck by the ways that, once there was a parent at home, families’ lives rearranged in ways that made it harder for the mothers to return to work — fathers worked longer hours, the children started participating in extra-curricular activities that required them to be ferried all over town.

Ultimately, I’m not sure that Stone’s understanding is as different from Belkin’s as she thinks it is.  Belkin too had argued that her subjects were pushed from the work side as much as pulled from the family side.  Belkin focuses more on on- and off-ramps, while Stone is more interested in part-time and flexible arrangements.  My guess is that’s more a difference between parents of younger versus older children than anything else.

Here’s something that I pulled together at work, and then wound up cutting from the document I did it for.  So I thought I’d share it here. 

This chart (from the new Indicators of Welfare Dependence report, issued by my old friends at HHS) shows the trends in labor force participation of married vs. divorced/separated/widowed vs. never-married mothers over the past 30 years.

I think it’s pretty remarkable how sharply the line for the never married mothers goes up in the 1990s.  So, what’s going on here?

Before turning to the question of why never married mothers labor force participation (LFP) rose so much during the 1990s, it’s first necessary to consider why it didn’t rise before the 1990s.  Another way to think of this question is to ask why did the labor force participation of married mothers rise during this period, and why didn’t the same factors increase the labor force participation rates of never married mothers (at least until the 1990s).

• One reason that labor force participation rates increased for married women is that women now have greater potential wages, which make paid labor more attractive.  Women are both more educated and more experienced than they used to be, and blatant labor market discrimination is far less common, opening many lucrative career options to women.
• However, these economic explanations only go so far; a key part of the story is changing societal norms that have made continued employment by married mothers, regardless of economic need, far more common.  As Blank and Shierholz comment, the effect of marriage itself on women’s labor force participation “virtually disappeared over time.”

What about divorced mothers?

• Same arguments as for married mothers, plus:
• Lack of alternative resources makes for lower reservation wages.
• Among more skilled women, single parenting has a positive effect on labor supply – true in both 1979 and 2003 (Blank and Shierholz)

So why didn’t the LFP for never married mothers rise in the 1980s?

• On average, younger, less educated than divorced mothers, so potential wages are much lower – may not equal the cost of child care or other lost benefits.
• In addition, the “child penalty” on LFP rate is higher for younger mothers, and less educated mothers, even when children are the same age (Boushey)
• Welfare provided a meager alternative to low-wage work – not a great living standard, but possible to eek by.  Kathy Edin’s work showed that low-wage work often didn’t provide any more disposable income.
• Welfare policies provided large incentive to keep all earnings off the books.
• In 1979, but not 2003, less skilled single moms were less likely than comparable childless women to work (Blank and Shierholz) – may be capturing the effects of welfare policy

What happened in the 1990s?

• Strong economy led to employment expansions for most low-income workers – male and female, parents and non-parents.
• EITC expansion greatly increased the returns to work in the formal sector for low-income parents – studies have shown that the effect was concentrated on single mothers.
• Time limits and work requirements largely removed the alternative of choosing full-time parenting over low-wage work for welfare recipients, even for parents of young children. Just between 1996 and 1999, the employment rate for single mothers under 200 percent of poverty with a child under the age of 6 increased from 44.4 percent to 58.5 percent.  (TANF 7th annual report, page IV-33).
• Work supports reduced the cost of going to work – child care, SCHIP, expanded earnings disregards.
• Rate of increase in LFP did increase for divorced women, but not as sharply as never-married women.
• Some of the increase in employment among never married mothers is likely due to composition effects – with declining teen birth rates, increases of overall non-marital birth rates, never married mothers are more likely to be older, more educated.

And in the 2000s?

• Weaker economy reduced both employment and LFP for all types of workers
• But married women’s LFP peaked in 1997, when economy was still booming – suggests that recession isn’t the whole story .  May be due to substitution with husbands’ earnings (although women’s LFP has become far less affected by husband’s earnings over time.)  (Blau and Kahn)
• Divorced women’s LFP peaked in 2001; never-married women’s LFP in 2002; single mothers under 200 percent of poverty in 2000.

Here’s the latest cartoon for my office’s caption contest:

Vote here for your favorite caption.

***

One of my friends said that she thought the cartoon was anti-working parent.  I can see where she’s coming from — the idea that the baby is being neglected because the parents are so busy.  But that certainly wasn’t our intent.  We thought of it more as a comment on non-family friendly work environments, and how frazzled parents are as a result. (Heck, even with T. home full-time, I still often feel like we’re running a relay, passing the parenting baton as we race past each other.)

These cartoons are an attempt to be lighthearted about serious subjects, to start conversations outside our usual wonkish circles.  But they’re inherently a bit ambiguous, with potential for varying interpretations — someone told me she thought one of the captions in our first contest was anti-immigrant.

The New York Times ran a bunch of letters in response to Judith Warner’s column on the Pew report about work-family preferences.

Of the 5 letters:

• 2 pointed out that many older workers also want part-time work as an alternative to working full-time or retiring all the way;
• 2 noted that fathers might want to work part-time as well to spend more time with their families; and
• 1 made Joan Williams’ argument that discriminatory treatment of part-time workers should be treated as sex discrimination under a disparate impact argument.

So it’s not like we’re out on the radical fringe here.  But while the Times will publish these letters, none of this ever seems to make it into the articles themselves.

On a related note, the New America Foundation is busily arguing for removing responsibility for health insurance and retirement from employers, and creating what they call a "citizen-based social contract."  One of their arguments is that if everyone has access to these benefits independent of their jobs, more people will be able to work part-time and spend more time with their families, develop small businesses on the side, etc.  I do think it would help, but not as much as they suggest.  As Jennifer has pointed out here before, Australia does have national health insurance, and they have many of the same issues over part-time jobs that we do here in the US.

When I wrote about the Motherhood Manifesto movie last fall, I mentioned that my colleagues had a good discussion about whether it was a mistake to limit the call to action to mothers.  So I wanted to mention that Moms Rising now has a "Families Rising" section which includes a bunch of thoughtful dad-bloggers.

If you are in the DC area, and haven’t seen the movie yet, there will be a screening of it this weekend:

Saturday, July 21, 2007, 10 am – 12 pm

The
True Reformer Building
1200 U Street NW,
Washington, DC

Child care and snacks will be
provided
Please
RSVP to Liz at 202-293-5380 x110

Sponsored by Councilmember
Mendelson with the Center for Economic and
Policy Research, DC ACORN, the DC Employment Justice Center, DC Jobs with
Justice, Empower DC, Jubilee Jobs,
Inc., the National
Association of Mothers’ Centers, MothersOughtToHaveEqualRights, the National
Partnership for Women & Families, and the National Women’s Law Center.

I’ve got family visiting over the weekend, so won’t be able to make it, but it should be a good event.  The discussion afterwards will focus on the DC paid sick and safe days act.

The "Liz" to whom RSVPs are addressed is not me, and I’m not one of the organizers, but I do claim a smidgeon of credit for pushing the folks putting the event together to figure out a way to provide child care.  They said "kids welcome" from the beginning, but I knew my kids wouldn’t have the patience to sit through the movie, and I suspect most others wouldn’t either.  Which means that at least some of the moms would probably have wound up either leaving early or taking their kids out into the hallway and missing half the movie.  Far better to line up some people who have agreed in advance to do the child care, whether as paid or volunteers.

[David at Scrivenings had a couple of really good posts earlier about a discussion on Twisty’s blog about kids in public spaces, where some commenters started with the statement that when kids are around, there is often an assumption that all women will take responsibility for watching them, and then wandered off into nasty statements about how awful kids are.  In brief, my take on the back and forth:

• it is a feminist position to say that mothers should not be individually responsible for arranging child care in order to participate in public life;
• it is also a feminist position to say that random women (whether parents themselves or not) should not be assumed to be available to provide child care simply because they are women and/or mothers;
• it is not a feminist position to say that women (or men) who dislike being around children should be a entitled to child-free spaces (or spaces where children are seen but not heard).  They’re allowed to prefer such spaces, and there may be enough places to go around that they can even get their preferences met in some of them, but they don’t get to claim any particular feminist cred in support of their preferences.]

The Washington Post today had a front-page story on a recent poll that found that 60 percent of working mothers said that part-time work would be the ideal situation for them.  This is an increase of 12 percent since 1997.

It’s hard to know what to make of this finding since, as the newspaper article points out, only about 1/4 of working mothers work part-time, and that hasn’t increased in the past decade. The question asked was "considering everything, what would be the ideal situation for you, working full-time, working-part time, or not working at all outside the home?"  It’s hard to know how people interpreted that — if people thought about a hypothetical part-time job that paid as much (per hour) as a full-time job, with benefits and interesting work, or if they thought the part-time jobs that are actually out there.  Who wouldn’t want the "have your cake and eat it too" version of part-time work?*

I know I’ve said that at some point I’d like to cut back to part-time (probably 3/5 or 4/5 time) work.  I’d like to spend more time with the boys, and I’d like to have more time to do all the other things (reading, blogging, cooking, hanging out on the lake) that I never have enough time to do.  And I could even do it at my job without it being a major career-limiting move — Rachel Schumacher, who is quoted in the article about her part-time job, works for my organization.

So why don’t I?  Money is the most obvious reason.  I took a paycut when I took this job, and while we’re doing ok, it would be hard to cut our budget by another 20 percent.  T could presumably get a job that would fill the gap, but it would be tricky to align our hours.  This will likely be more manageable when the boys are both in school, and I suspect that we’re headed in that direction (although it will in part depend on how much the market value of T’s professional skills have degraded with his time out of the workforce).

But I also suspect that I’m driven enough that I’d have trouble cutting back on my work commitments.  Take next week for an example.  T has someplace else he needs to be for 2 days– we’ve known about this for months, and I’ve planned to take them off from work to hang out with the boys.  But Monday I learned about a meeting on an issue area that I’ve been trying to get into for the past year. And of course it’s scheduled for one of the days that I’m supposed to be off.  My boss literally didn’t say a word, but I knew I should be there.  So I scrambled, and have lined up some childcare for that morning.  I have a feeling that I’d wind up working at least some of the time as often as not on my days off.

* Well, fathers apparently.  Only 12 percent of fathers said that part-time work would be the ideal situation for them.  But, interestingly, 16 percent said that not working outside the home at all would be the ideal situation for them.  That’s lower than the figure for mothers (29 percent), but I think it’s fascinating that fathers were more likely to chose "not working" than "part-time work" and mothers were more likely to choose "part-time work" than "not working."  Does that mean that there’s more interest among men in "reverse traditional families" than in "equally shared parenting"?  Or that more dads still think that staying home is a permanent vacation?

I’m giving a talk tomorrow night at a networking event about women and the nonprofit sector, particularly some studies that have found that a) women are the majority of workers in nonprofits but b) women still earn less than men.  Most of the attendees are likely to be in their early to mid 20s, without kids. 

I’ll talk about how women are less likely to negotiate, more likely to expect (wrongly) that hard work will be noticed and rewarded even if they don’t.  But I also want to talk about the work-family stuff that I cover here.  I’m going to say that I think women are more likely to choose jobs based on satisfaction, less on an expectation that they’ll be supporting a family.   And that by accepting less money, they’re also reducing their bargaining power in relationships down the road.  And I also want to mention the roles of unpaid internships and student loans in affecting the options that are open to you.

Any suggestions?  Good stories that I can use?  Advice that you wish someone had told you?

The American Prospect has a special report out on work-family issues which has a bunch of interesting articles.  Brian at RebelDad has posted quick comments on a couple of them already.

Not in the print edition, but online, the Prospect has added a response by Linda Hirshman.  While she is, as usual, gratuitously obnoxious toward anyone she disagrees with, she does make a point that I think is on target:

"even if by some miracle male employers could be
persuaded to enact the reforms discussed, without a real change in
women’s attitudes about the family most of the effect would be to make
it easier for women to continue to bear their excessive share of an
unjust household. And allow the women to think they chose it!"

In their discussion of a recent conference on Rethinking Gender Egalitarianism, Laura at 11d and Harry at Crooked Timber responded to a similar point made at the conference — that things like paid parental leave are an obstacle to gender egalitarianism, because they are disproportionately taken by mothers rather than fathers.  Laura and Harry argue that parenting is not a "shit job" (as Hirshman clearly believes), but rather a source of great fulfillment for many people and that if barriers are removed, men will voluntarily take on more domestic responsibilities and joys.

I don’t think parenting is a shit job, or one that makes your brain rot.  But I also think that it’s almost certainly true that absent a massive societal shift or highly prescriptive government policy, family friendly policies probably would increase the gender gap.  Because, as Rhona Mahoney explains, every choice you make changes the hand that you have when you make the next set of decisions.  And unless we get to the point that working fewer hours or taking time off from work has zero career cost (which seems unlikely anytime soon), it’s always going to make sense for the person who has already stepped off the fast track to be the one to accommodate the other’s career.  And because of both biology (pregnancy and breastfeeding) and gender ideology, the one taking that first step off is far more likely to be a woman. 

Mahoney also makes the interesting suggestion that this is a tipping point phenomenon; e.g that if SAHDs were more common, more men would make that choice.  And on that note, I have to point out the Colbert report piece on SAHDs.  (And a look behind the scenes.)