Half Changed World

Here are some links that readers have recently sent me:

• Parenting as a wiki (e.g. everyone’s got an opinion and they’re all different.)
• Investment banks woo employees with shorter hours
• A new Wharton program for women with MBAs and other graduate degrees returning to the workforce after a 2-7 hiatus.  (And yes, it does say women.  I don’t know what they’d say if a SAHD applied.)
• A blog post from Prarie Mary on how educational outcomes on reservations were affected by casino money.
• An article on the growth in SAHDs in Scotland.

And don’t forget to send your comments on the FMLA.

I burned my thumb cooking tonight, so can’t type very much.  Instead, here are links to two surveys that I’ve taken recently.

• One is the WorkLife Wizard which collects information about people’s jobs, industries, and the types of organizations they work for, and then asks a set of questions about working conditions.  There were some interesting questions about perceptions of male and female coworkers, which I’m curious as to how they’re going to be used. It’s sponsored by the Labor and Worklife program at Harvard Law School, and my understanding is that a consortium of groups is doing similar surveys in several countries.  If you fill out the survey, you can get your work-life question answered by their advisor.
• The other, via Raising WEG, is the Moms as People survey being conducted by Suniya Luthar, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.  Luthar’s work is not only the basis for Judith Warner’s recent blog post on the dissatisfaction of highly educated and affluent moms, but also for the article a bit back on the drinking playdate. And yes, she asks an awful lot of questions about the various ways that one can self medicate.  As usual with these things, my experience doesn’t fit nicely into the categories available (she asks about in-person and phone contact with friends, but not about on-line connection), but it made me think.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote here about rumors that the Department of Labor was going to try to roll back the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA)  There was some good discussion about the importance of FMLA, but DOL didn’t do anything.  It looked like the we might have nipped the attempt in the bud.

Well, on Friday DOL published a "request for comments" on FMLA.  DOL "invites interested parties having knowledge of, or experience with, the FMLA to submit comments and welcomes any pertinent information that will provide a basis for ascertaining the effectiveness of the current implementing regulations and the Department’s administration of the Act."

"Interested parties having knowledge of, or experience with, the FMLA…."  That means me.  And probably you.  So let’s do it.   Comments are due by February 2, 2007. Email them to: whdcomments@dol.gov (the notice also lists a US mail address, as well as a fax number.)

DOL lists a range of topics on which they are particularly soliciting feedback, including the definitions of an eligible employee, a "serious health condition" and a "day," the interaction between paid leave and unpaid FMLA leave, the medical certification procedures, and the impact of FMLA on productivity, morale, and retention.

Based on my reading of the notice, I think they’re trying to make a case against allowing workers to use "intermittent, unscheduled" FMLA.  It’s clear that employers have complained about it, arguing that workers who are late or just don’t want to come in are claiming that it’s due to depression or other hard-to-disprove ailments and covered under FMLA.  I hear that, and I’m sure there are cases of employees who abuse the law.  But there’s plenty of legitimate reasons why one might need to take intermittent, unscheduled leave to deal with personal or family illness.   I would guess that there are far more people with medical conditions where the need for care is unpredictable — like asthma or lupus — than those where people have regularly scheduled appointments, like chemotherapy or dialysis.

The Federal Register notice is fairly dense and technical, but don’t get intimidated by it.  What they’re asking for is personal experience — your stories.  Tell them about how you needed leave when your or your child, spouse or parent was sick.  Tell them about your coworkers who took leave, and how you managed to cover for them.  If you’re an employer, tell them how the FMLA has affected you.

Also let them know when FMLA hasn’t worked for you.  Tell them if you had to go back to work 6 weeks after you had your baby instead of 12 because you couldn’t afford to do without your salary any more.  Tell them about the problems you had because your kids passed the same damn cold back and forth all month, but the FMLA regulations say that "a cold or flu" doesn’t count as a serious illness.  Tell them if you’re a doctor and find the documentation requirements a burden.

Let’s spread the word.  MomsRising already picked the story up, but I haven’t seen much else about it. 

Additional resource: National Partnership for Women and Families

A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to view the Motherhood Manifesto documentary.  (I work for one of the Moms Rising aligned organizations, so we set it up in the conference room during lunch and brought popcorn.)

It’s very well done.  For each of the letters in the MOTHER agenda, they have a funny pseudo-fifties animated clip, a feature about someone affected by the issue, and brief interviews with experts who are working on the issue with aligned organizations.  It’s a nice mixture of wrenching personal stories with just a touch of policy wonkery and, unlike many discussions of work-family issues, they leave viewers with hope that progress is being made rather than with handwringing over the current state of the world.

When the movie was done, we sat around and discussed it.  Some in my organization (which focuses on low-income individuals and families) were concerned that there weren’t more low-income mothers featured in it, but I’m pretty sure that was a deliberate choice.  I think it’s almost certainly true that the way to get more affordable child care, health care, etc. for poor families is to get middle- and upper-income families to fight for changes in the system, out of self-interest as well as altruism.  But I think it’s also important to make sure that the solutions then work for everyone.  (Recently, there was a discussion on one of my parenting email lists about the high cost of child care in the DC area, and the solution that someone suggested was to increase the amount that could be put aside tax free for child care in Flexible Spending Accounts.  I tried to be polite in pointing out that FSAs don’t help people who don’t make enough to owe federal income taxes.)

The more interesting question that was raised was whether it’s limiting to frame this as a mothers’ organization rather than as a caregivers organization, since many of the proposals are needed by people caring for the elderly or sick as well as by parents.  And someone — not me — did ask my favorite question of Where Are The Dads?  I’m really ambivalent about this one.  On the one hand, I do think that always talking of these issues as mothers’ issues lets fathers and others off the hook.  But I do think that being a mother is a very salient part of lots of mothers’ identities, and so it’s a good way to mobilize them.  In particular, there are a lot of people who don’t think of themselves as activists, but if you convince them that being politically engaged is an important part of being a mother, they might do it.  And I’m not sure that a broad "caregivers movement" would engage people in the same way.  What do you think?

In any case, the documentary is worth watching.  If you’re in the DC area, and want to see the movie, the Women’s Information Network is having a screening and discussion tonight at AFSCME.  (Sorry, I won’t be there — I’ll be at D’s soccer team dinner.)  If that doesn’t work for you, let me know if you’d like me to arrange a kid-friendly viewing at my house some time.  (Probably not until January.)

A couple of people have pointed out to me Abigail Trafford’s column from this week’s Washington Post health section, where she proposes reshuffling the typical worklife so that people could receive government benefits and focus on childrearing (with some education and part-time work) while they were in their 20s and 30s, focus on work from 40 to 75, and then turn to community service at the end of their life.  It’s part of her regular focus on what she calls "my time," the time after midlife (what used to be called old age).

Trafford’s analysis of the problem is on target:

"Our current system is irrational. We concentrate on work at a time in our lives when we are having children and our children need us the most. We tend to leave or be eased out of the workplace when we have completed the child-rearing tasks — about age 50 — and now have time and energy to devote to work. And in our later decades, we are stereotyped as useless."

I’ve often said that it’s nuts that, in a world where many of us are going to live to be 80 or more, taking a few years out of the workforce in order to focus on childrearing can cripple your earning potential for decades to come.

I don’t think Trifford’s actual proposal is serious, although her underlying point is.  It’s certainly not feasible on a literal level.  She says that "Researchers have found that among healthy people with a college education, there is no change in health status between 55 and 75."  But the less educated — which largely means the poor — are far less likely to be in good health at an advanced age.  And they’re also far more likely to have physically demanding jobs.  Professionals who sit behind a computer all day may well be just as productive at 70 as at 40, but the same is far less likely to be true for people who have to stand on their feet, bending and lifting all day.

But the general point — that a system that expects continous work for 30 to 40 years and then continuous leisure for a period that may be almost as long doesn’t make sense — is dead on.  It makes far more sense to let people distribute their free time more evenly throughout their lifetimes, whether that means working part-time for long stretches or moving in and out of the labor force.  Parents asking for that kind of flexibility have made only modest progress, but the oncoming wave of baby boomers may reshape the landscape of work far more dramatically.

So I finally got around to reading Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.  I sort of felt that it was my obligation, given the topics I cover on this blog.  I shouldn’t have bothered.  I’d read most of the essays that were adapted into the book, so there wasn’t much new here.  Moreover, Flanagan seems to have thought better of some of the most over-the-top lines in the essays; while I agree with the substance of the move, it takes away most of the elan in her writing.  And elan and a willingness to make breathtaking leaps are pretty much all that Flanagan ever has going for her.

Most notably, Flanagan now describes her Atlantic essay, "How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement," as "a convoluted and slightly insane cover story on the topic [social security benefits for nannies] for a national magazine."  The most infamous line from that piece — "when a mother works, something is lost" — has migrated into the preface, where Flanagan transforms it into a platitude:

"What few will admit — because it is painful, because it reveals the unpleasant truth that life presents a series of choices, each of which precludes a host of other attractive possibilities — is that whichever decision a woman makes, she will lose something of incalculable value."

I also don’t remember reading in the original article Flanagan’s description of summoning her nanny when her son was throwing up.  Flanagan writes that Paloma would

"literally run to his room, clean the sheets, change his pajamas, spread a clean towel on his pillow, feed him ice chips, sing to him.  I [Flanagan] would stand in the doorway, concerned, making funny faces at Patrick to cheer him up — the way my father did when I was sick and my mother was taking care of me." 

If it had been there, I can’t believe that any of us would have taken Flanagan’s attempt to claim the moral high ground as worthy of anything but snickering.  (I’d love to hear her try to explain why hiring someone to pick nits out of your kid’s hair is "perilously close to having someone… come in and service my husband on nights when I’d rather put on my flannel nightie and watch Dateline NBC" but calling someone to change him out of his pukey PJs is not.)

Overall, the main thing that jumped out at me reading the collection is how much better a writer the late Marjorie Williams was than Flanagan.  Compare these lines:

"The slip of paper [her 11th grade report card] was not a testament of past academic glory, only of a hard new fact: there was no longer anyone in the world who loved me enough to save my report cards and school pictures and Christmas poems.  I wasn’t anyone’s daughter anymore." [Flanagan]

and

"Yet still there are moments when it stops me in my tracks to realize that I will never peel an orange the way my mother once did for me.  And sometimes those moments are too much to bear." [Williams]

Or compare the "few will admit" passage above to Williams’ tart: "On a personal level, and as a matter of social policy, we often seem to be waiting for the No-Fault Fairy to come and explain at last how our deepest conflict can be managed away."

So, go read Sandy’s review of Flanagan, and then go read The Woman at the Washington Zoo.

In her comment on my post about my tri, Trishka wondered: "I don’t know how you manage to do all that you do — work full time, have two small children, volunteer, and to train for a triathlon on top of it."

The short answer is that I do it by not trying to be perfect at any one of the things I do, let alone all of them, and with a lot of help from my husband*.  This doesn’t strike me as that radical a concept, but it occurred to me that maybe it is.  In her comment on Landismom’s open letter to moms who have left the paid workforce, Mary Tsao wrote: "I couldn’t do the crazy busy lifestyle anymore. I didn’t feel I was doing any of my jobs (mom, wife, worker) to the best of my ability."

I’m willing to admit that I’d probably be better at my job if I didn’t have as much else going on in my life.  I’d do more reading in the evenings and more travelling.  And I wouldn’t have afternoons where I just found out that the principal of my kid’s school resigned and spend half my time emailing around to try to learn more.  I don’t think I could love my kids more than I do, but I could be less frazzled, have more time to spend in their classrooms or just hanging out, bake cookies more often. 

But I don’t think I’m short-changing either my boss or my kids.  At both work and home, I feel like I’ve got a good grip on what’s necessary, what’s nice, and what’s icing on the cake.   (For example, in this household, reading a story at bedtime is necessary; a bath every night is icing on the cake.) And I’ve got enough flexibility at both ends, that I’ve never felt like I’ve had to sacrifice something that’s necessary, and often — although not always — get to do the nice things too.

Running provides a good analogy.  I know that I’m a far better runner when I run 20 miles a week than when I run 5 or 10.  And I’m a better runner when I run 40 than when I run 20, but the improvements are more subtle, and only really matter if I’m trying to set a personal record or to qualify for Boston.  And above about 50 miles a week, additional training becomes counterproductive — my body starts to protest, and there’s a real risk that I’m going to injure myself. 

There are people who are happy focusing all their energy in one part of their life; I’m just not one of them.  Barbara Sher calls people like me "scanners" and has a new book out called "Refuse to Choose! A revolutionary program for doing everything that you love."  For years, I’ve been carrying around two quotes from Composing a Life, by Mary Catherine Bateson:

"Composing a life is a little like making a Middle Eastern pastry, in which the butter must be layered in by repeated folding, or like making a samurai sword, whose layers of differently tempered metal are folded over and over."

. . . and this:

"It would be easier to live with a greater clarity of ambition, to follow
goals that beckon toward a single upward progression. But perhaps
what women have to offer in the world today . . lies in the very rejection of forced choices: work or home, strength or vulnerability, caring or competition, trust or questioning. "

"We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting
of a massive tree trunk . . . rather than something crafted from odds
and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different
nights and bodies."

*Amended to acknowledge, as Laura pointed out, that I also get an enormous amount of support from T, who is at home with the kids.  I was not meaning to downplay his role in keeping this family going, or to suggest to anyone who feels that she’s in over her head that the problem is her perfectionism.  I recognize that with special needs kids, inflexible jobs, or lack of family support, something may well have to give.  I wrote this post because I’m fascinated by how hard it is to admit that doing lots of things means that I’m often not doing the best at any of them.   And in particular by how hard it is to let go of the idea of being the "perfect mother" — even when there’s another parent at home.  This may deserve a post of its own.

I went out with some of my colleagues for drinks after work this evening.  We had a good time, drinking and schmoozing, and also had a very illuminating conversation about the culture of the office.  It started out as a discussion of the annual holiday party, and how it’s been somewhat of a focus for culture clash issues in the past, and eventually it turned into a discussion of socializing and work.

What I learned is that the two senior people in the organization are both strong introverts, and tend to think that everyone should be sitting in their office working and not "wasting time" standing around in the halls and talking.  At the same time, they’ve spent a lot of time over the last year trying to figure out formal ways to break down some of the organizational silos.  It hasn’t occurred to them that ordering in Chinese and letting people have informal conversations about what they’re working on might work better than more meetings.

What’s really strange about this is that this is not an organization with a high emphasis on clock-watching.  People work from home or flex their schedules all their time, and with very little supervision.  There’s very much an expectation that we’re all professionals and will get the job done.  If anything, people tend to work more hours than they’re paid for, since they care about the mission.  So it seems very odd to me that they’re worried about staff "wasting time" through socializing.

Of course, this conversation was precisely an example of the kinds of things that you learn through informal conversation that make you better at your job.  And while I don’t object to having a Berry Lemontini every so often, I shouldn’t have to stay late to learn these things. Landismom wrote the other day about wishing that there were other working moms in her office.  There are actually lots of moms with young children in my office — as noted above, the powers that be are very open to flexible schedules — but of the other two in my particular division, one telecommutes from another state and the other is out on maternity leave.  So there’s no one else to say "hey, I really need to get home for dinner, let’s do something that isn’t drinks after work."

As it happens, T and the boys were elsewhere tonight, so I wasn’t missing out on family time, but in general, I’d rather have these conversations at lunch.  I think I’ll try posting a menu for takeout and seeing if I can convince others to order with me some day.

Welcome to the "I read it, so you don’t have to" edition of the Tuesday Book Review.  Yup, I’m discussing Linda Hirshman’s Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, which is her somewhat expanded version of the American Prospect article that caused all the fuss last winter.

The tone of the book irritated me immensely.  Hirshman is so in love with her self-image as the lone prophet in the wilderness that she attacks her possible allies .  For example, she writes scornfully about "stay-at-home dads who contend that their decisions mean there is no such thing as a gender ideology about who should care for home and familiy."  Err, actually, SAHDs encounter gender ideology up close and personal every day.  And she quotes long passages from bloggers and others without attribution, which strikes me as intellectually dishonest.  (Bitch, PhD is one of the few bloggers who she cites by name.  Phantom Scribbler is also mentioned in the endnotes.)   Finally, she plays sleazy rhetorical tricks, such as painting all of her critics with the brush of a few of them (e.g. anti-feminist conservative wingnuts hated her article, so if you disagre with her, you must be an anti-feminist wingnut.)

I’m going to try not to repeat what I previously wrote in response to the original article, but most of my complaints at the time still hold.  In particular, Hirshman still doesn’t get that the problem isn’t just that gender ideology affects which of the available choices people pick, but also that the choices are far too limited.  So, what’s new in the book?

First, Hirshman expands somewhat on her advice to young women who want to have equal power in their relationships — get a practical degree, take work seriously, lower your standards for household cleanliness, have only one kid.  The only part of this that I thought was particularly interesting was her acknowledgment that having a job that you’re passionate about can increase your bargaining position as well as making a lot of money, as long as it doesn’t pay so little that you’d starve on your own.  But if you’re interested in understanding marital bargaining, reading Kidding Ourselves, not Get to Work.  (Hirshman does credit Mahony for much of this section.)  Ironically, this section reminded me a lot of Sylvia Hewlett’s writing — both of them are determined to save young women from the mistakes they don’t know they’re making.

Second, Hirshman does acknowledge that feminism would be smaller under her definition, but she argues that a smaller, more focused movement would be more effective.  In particular, she argues for a policy goal of removing the tax penalty on second earners.  (Interestingly, this is also the "marriage penalty" that the religious conservatives whom Hirshman reviles also oppose.)

As previously noted, men’s labor force participation has been declining since 1949.  The NYTimes had a nice article this week about the growing population of prime working age men who are out of the labor force.

Some countries — the United Kingdom and New Zealand are the ones I know about — have explicit goals of increasing labor force participation.  The US has such a goal for single mothers — welfare recipients — but isn’t willing to talk about it for a broader population.

The argument in favor of promoting increased labor force participation as a public policy goal are:

• promotes economic growth, especially in countries with low population growth;
• reduces poverty, as wages are the primary source of income for most people;
• brings socially isolated groups into the mainstream.

The first two of these are pretty self-evident.  The third is basically a version of what Bill Clinton argued during welfare reform, that work gives "meaning to your life and shape to your days."  One of the authors of the Times article is Louis Uchitelle, who wrote The Disposable American.  He makes a convincing case that, even when laid-off workers are doing ok financially, there’s a huge emotional toll to being told that society doesn’t value your skills, that you have nothing to contribute.  There’s also an argument to be made that expanding work makes it more politically feasible to provide income support when earnings aren’t enough.

But, as I wrote in response to Hirshman last fall, I strongly believe that there are ways to contribute to society that don’t involve getting a pay check.  So, while labor force participation may be a easily measured metric, it’s important to remember that it’s not the real goal.