Half Changed World

Working women are the target constituency of the day for the Kerry campaign. It was a nice speech, although the accompanying policy paper is just a rehash of proposals that have been on the table for months — an increased minimum wage, reiterated support for social security, an expanded child care tax credit, and so forth.

There’s no surprise that the Kerry campaign should be targeting women — for years women typically are more likely to vote Democratic — the famous gender gap. It is interesting to me that they’re framing the appeal as to “working women” rather than “mothers” or “working mothers” or “workers” or “women.” (Women with no more than a high school education and unmarried parents are among the groups most reached by the voter registration drives this year.)

I got an email today about Parents’ Action for Children, the new name for what used to be called the “I am Your Child Foundation.” Their legislative agenda focuses on quality child care, preschool, and health insurance for all children. This overlaps extensively with the Family Initiative, which focuses on child care, preschool, and afterschool care. I think the main difference is that the Family Initiative comes out of the women’s movement, and is somewhat more oriented towards child care solutions that work for working parents, while Parents’ Action comes from a child-focused perspective. As long as we’re mostly in the consciousness-raising phase, they’re clearly allies, although I could imagine conflicts if we ever got to the stage of drafting legislation.

The Parents’ Action website also has parenting advice, which I think is in part a hook to draw parents in. That makes sense: Sara Horowitz used to argue that AARP was so successful as a lobbying group because of all the people who joined to get their discounts on drugs. I keep telling people that I think we should colocate all sorts of social services with laundromats, because they provide a captive audience that isn’t necessarily in a rush.

I’ve been staying up too late watching baseball, so today’s post is just a few links to things that have caught my eye recently.

I’m praying for Margaret Hassan, the director of CARE in Iraq, who was kidnapped on Tuesday by persons unknown. May she be released safely and soon.

The Tampa Tribune ran an editorial today, explaining why they’re not endorsing Bush. THis is newsworthy because they’re very conservative, and haven’t endorsed a Democrat since 1948. (They also declined to endorse Goldwater in 1964.)

I’m totally obsessing about the election, so I’ve been checking electoral-vote.com every day. Remember, the national polls don’t mean a thing; it’s the electoral college that counts.

I recently read Jason Lute’s Berlin: City of Stones. It’s a graphic novel, set in Weimar Germany, and it’s heartbreaking.

In Caitlin Flanagan’s March 2004 Atlantic screed “How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement,” she suggests that upper-middle-class women are hypocritical in their calls for universal day care, because they would never use it — they all use nannies.

Flanagan’s a good writer, and she makes a persuasive case. But she’s completely wrong — in 1999, less than 5 percent of preschoolers were ever cared for in their homes by a non-relative. Even looking only at families with an employed mother, and family incomes of more than $4,500 a month, or $54,000 a year, the percentage only increases to 7.1 percent. Upper-income families are actually the most likely to use child care centers.

Flanagan concludes her article by arguing that professional-class working mothers (as usual, fathers are off the hook) should “devote themselves entirely to the real and heartrending struggle of poor women and children in this country.”

One of the great debates among advocates of public support for child care and other benefits is whether to push for programs targeted at low-income parents (who can’t afford them on their own), or if they should be universal. And, Flanagan notwithstanding, there are good arguments on both sides; there’s not an obvious right choice.

The arguments for a targeted program are:

1) It’s a heck of a lot cheaper to provide services for a few million low-income families than for the tens of millions of families who would use a universal program. In an policy climate where taxes are a dirty word, proposals for expensive new programs are unlikely to get very far.

2) It is hard to argue that middle-income families should be taxed in order to provide services to upper-income families. It’s especially hard when some groups — the childless, families with a stay-at-home parent — feel like they’re being taxed to support other people’s choices.

The arguments for a universal program are:

1) Programs that serve low-income populations are stigmatized as “welfare,” which makes people who qualify for them reluctant to take advantage of them. There are administrative costs involved in determining eligibility, and people may move in and out of eligibility over the course of a year.

2) Programs that serve low-income populations are typically underfunded and low-quality. Universal programs — such as social security — have deep popular support which fights any proposed cuts.

3) Any program that is means-tested has some sort of a cut-off above which families lose eligibility. This serves as a work-disincentive for families near the cut-off. Moreover, there is often deep resentment of means-tested programs from people who earn slightly more than the cutoff, but who are still struggling to make ends meet and who don’t qualify for any help.

4) Many advocates of universal public child care believe on principle that caring for children ought to be a societal responsibility rather than that of the individual families. They explicitly reject the notion that only those who choose to have children should bear the costs involved.

Today’s book is American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and A Nation’s Drive to End Welfare. It’s by Jason DeParle, who covered the "welfare beat" for the New York Times during the mid-1990s, when welfare reform was being debated. He eventually decided that he wanted to cover the story more in-depth than the pressures of a newspaper allowed and this book is the result.

It’s a terrific book — DeParle does a masterful job in moving back and forth between the broad strokes of welfare policy and politics, both in Washington DC and in Wisconsin, and the details of three women’s lives. I know a lot about welfare policy — it’s what I do professionally — and I learned some things I didn’t know, but it’s also very accessible for someone who doesn’t know anything about the subject. I think I should carry around a copy of it to hand to all the people who corner me at a party when they find out where I work and rant at me about welfare.

Reading the book made me very angry. Angry at the elected officials who were — and are — more interested in scoring political points off of each other than in making good policies. Angry at the organizations — some private, some "not-for-profit" — who took tons of money from the welfare department and spent a whole lot of it on fancy dinners and advertising and golf balls with the company name on them instead of on the people who needed help. Angry at the men who are almost totally absent from this story many of them in jail. And angry at the mothers for not doing more to protect their children — for drinking and doing crack while pregnant (the alcohol is probably the worse for kids) — for tolerating "friends" and "family" who literally took food out of their kids’ mouths.

The title of this book is bitterly ironic. Not only aren’t these women living the American Dream, they don’t seem to have much in the way of dreams, any hope that life could be better in the future. As DeParle notes, for all the talk of how welfare recipients are held down by a sense of "entitlement," what’s amazing is how little the women he talked to feel entitled to: not a job that pays a living wage, not a safe neighborhood, not a good school for their children. They’re survivors, and that’s both their strength and their downfall. When the welfare office screws up and cuts off their food stamps in error, or when someone steals their car, making it impossible to get to work, they cope. But they’re not doing much to make tomorrow better — either for themselves or their children.

It’s hard to know what policy conclusions to take from this book. The three women DeParle follows — Angie, Jewell and Opal — consistently deny that welfare reform mattered to them. And yet two of them were off of cash assistance and working for almost the entire period covered by the book, part of a huge overall trend. At the same time, their lives were only marginally better than before. DeParle and many others have suggested that part of the solution has to be get the men more involved — as a source of both emotional and financial support — but no one really knows how to do that. It’s a dilemna.

Thanks to Alison for the link to this essay from the Family and Home Network with another take on the problems with the official Census statistics on at-home parents. Together with RebelDad’s comments, it’s clear that there are a large number of parents who work some of the time, but not full-time year-round, and who share some or many of the characteristics of at-home parents.

One paragraph from the Family and Home Network summary of the issue jumped out at me:

“However, the most frightening result of misunderstanding the DOL statistics has been in the area of public policy, especially regarding child care. Although “working mothers” include women who participate in the labor force in a variety of ways, the notion persists that every working mother needs and desires substitute care for her children. This mistaken assumption has led many well-intentioned people to routinely misuse the DOL statistics as “proof” of the need for more institutional child care.”

Overall, this organization, whose mission is to support at-home parents and parents who have cut back on paid employment in order to spend more time with their families, is pretty hostile to public support for child care. I disagree with this point of view, but I think it should be taken seriously by advocates of increased support for child care, such as the Family Initiative, which I talked about yesterday, and not just dismissed as an anti-feminist impulse wrapped in pro-child language.

There are two different reasons why an organization of at-home parents might be opposed to public support for child care. One is simply a matter of money — they object to the idea that families who are sacrificing financially in order to enable a parent to stay at home should pay more taxes in order to support child care, especially for families who have higher income than they do. The other is a much more subjective complaint; they believe that public funding of child care is a value statement that child care is just as good as — or better than — parental care. I’m not sure how to respond to this.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t some common ground. Woolsey’s Balancing Act, which would expand child care funding, also includes provisions that would make it easier for parents to work part-time, as well as a provision that would allow states to provide stipends to parents caring for newborns. Both of these are priorities of the Family and Home Network.

Last week, a group of women from the DC Working Moms email list met with some people from Legal Momentum’s Family Initiative, which is trying to mobilize grassroots support for public investments in quality child care, preschool, and after-school care.

It was an interesting conversation — the repeated theme was highly educated, well-off women commenting on how difficult they found it to navigate the crazy child care system and wondering how people without those sorts of resources ever managed to do it. It sounds like DC has a particular problem with infant care — even if you have the money for a child care center, the waiting lists are incredible, and for some reason there’s not much regulated in-home care.

The legislation that encompasses all of the issues that they care about is the Balancing Act, introduced by Lynn Woolsey. This bill is a wish list — more money for child care, paid family leave, guaranteed benefits for part-time workers — rather than anything that’s likely to get passed into law anytime soon. But if you think that it’s a good idea, write your Representative and ask him or her to cosponsor it. Even better, go to a town meeting sometime this election season, and ask about it during the open question period. The idea is to convince elected officials that this is something that their constituents — that means you — care about.

As described yesterday, I searched all over the internet to try to substantiate the claim that the number of stay-at-home moms (SAHMs) has increased by 15 percent in less than 10 years.

And finally, I found it: Table SHP-1: Parents and Children in Stay-At-Home Parent Family Groups: 1994 to Present. In fact, this table reports that the number of stay-at-home mothers increased by over 19 percent between 1994 and 2003, from 4.5 million to 5.4 million.

I hope that some of you are saying "but…" right now. Doesn’t 5.4 million sound awfully low? For perspective, there were over 93 million women between the ages of 16 and 65. How can this be right? The catch is that Census is using a very narrow definition of what constitutes a stay-at-home parent: you have to be a married parent of a child under 15, out of the labor force for an entire year, say that the reason you’re not working is to care for "home and family" and your spouse has to be in the labor force for the entire year. RebelDad did an excellent job least year of explaining the drawbacks of this definition, so I won’t repeat them.

Even though this definition isn’t perfect, this is the first longitudinal data I’ve seen on the number of stay-at-home dads (SAHDs), applying the same definition to a consistent data series over time. They found 98,000 SAHDs (using this narrow definition) in 2003, down from a high of 106,00 in 2002, but up from just 49,000 in 1996. However, because the number of SAHDs is relatively, there’s a lot of "noise" in the figures — I asked the Census bureau, and they said that the drop from 2002 to 2003 isn’t statistically significant. One way that statisticians deal with this kind of noise is to pool the findings from several years. So I compared the average number of SAHDs for 1994-1996 to the average number for 2001-2003, which suggests a whopping 50.8 percent increase. Just comparing 1994 to 2003
produces a 28.9 percent increase, also quite impressive.

One way to get a sense of the limitations of the definition is to compare this series to a similar one that just looks at married couples, and whether one, both or neither is in the labor force. This comparison indicates that in 70 percent of the married couples where only the husband was in the labor force, the wife met the definition of "stay-at-home mother." But in the married couples where only the wife was in the labor force, only about 10 percent of the husbands met the definition of "stay-at-home father."

One reason for the gap is the requirement that only spouses of year-round workers can count as "at-home parents." I’m not certain, but I think that taking maternity leave is considered as being "not in the labor force." If that’s the case, my husband wouldn’t have counted as being an at home dad last year, because I was on maternity leave for 12 weeks. Adding back in the parents who meet all of the other requirements to be an at home parent would increase the reported number of SAHDs by 60 percent, to 157,000, but the reported number of SAHMs only by 12 percent, to 6 million. I also think men are less likely to say that the reason they’re not working is to "care for family and spouse."

Last week’s 60 Minutes story on (Women) Staying at Home, included the statement that "Census bureau statistics show a 15 percent increase in the number of stay-at-home moms in less than 10 years." I hadn’t seen any hard numbers supporting the claim that there’s been a big increase in the number of women staying home, so I set off in search of this statistic.

First stop was the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s useful databook on Women in the Labor Force. I soon learned that the labor force participation rate (meaning the fraction of the population employed, or looking for work) for women was in 2002 was 59.6 percent, a slight (0.7 percent) decline from the 1990 peak of 60.0 percent, but higher than any year between 1970 (when it was 43.3 percent) 1996.

But, of course, women with children are only a small fraction of all adult women, so there’d have to be a pretty big drop in the number of working mothers for it to show up in the overall labor force participation rate. So I kept looking.

The same databook reports that the labor force participation rate for all women with children under age 18 was 72.2 percent in 2002, down from a peak of 72.9 percent in 2000.* Looking only at women with children under age 3, the rate is 60.5 percent, down from a peak of 62.2 percent in 1998. We’re still looking at changes in the 1-3 percent range, nothing earthshattering. So I kept looking.

Next, I found an interesting article from the Monthly Labor Review, a journal put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics with the headline: "Are women leaving the labor force?" It includes this quote from Barron’s, claiming that "In just the past two years, a quiet counterrevolution has begun…" The most interesting thing about this article, however, is that it’s from July 1994, shortly before women’s labor force participation hit new all-time highs. (For the record, the author, Howard Hayghe, correctly concluded "it is too early to proclaim that the trend of increasing labor force participation rates of women has been halted.") So, is the claim of the retreat from the workforce just hype? I kept looking.

Moving over to the Census bureau’s bi-annual report on the Fertility of American Women, which turns out to be the source for this Womens eNews story from last year. This report says that of women who had a child in the last year, 54.6 percent were in the labor force in 2002, down from a peak of 58.7 percent in 1998. That’s a 7 percent decline — albeit from an extremely high point. Looking at the breakout by education, it looks like the biggest percentage decrease is for women without a high school degree, and the smallest decrease is for women with a high school degree, but no college.

So what’s going on? I think there are two different stories, at different ends of the labor market. At one end, is the story about the stars and planets aligning in the late 1990s to get more low-income mothers into the labor force than ever before**: welfare reform removed an alternative to working, increased federal and state support for child care made working more possible, the Earned Income Tax Credit made working more profitable, and the strong economy made jobs available. The economy isn’t so strong these days, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that fewer poor mothers are working. (The big unanswered question is what are they living on, because it’s not welfare, but that’s a topic for another day.)

The second story is about well-off well-educated women who have the choice whether or not to work because they have other sources of income, most often husbands. For the last 30 years, this group has been more likely to work, not less, than other women, because they have access to the most interesting, renumerative, and flexible jobs. And it does look like there’s a small increase in the number who have chosen not to work in the past few years. Whether this is a blip in the trends (as the apparent decline in the early 1990s was), possibly caused by the weak economy, or is the start of a real change (post 9/11 reprioritizing?), I have no idea. And no one else does, either, no matter what they tell you.

Coming tomorrow: The plot thickens: another source of data on stay-at-home moms is found. And stay-at-home dads, too!

Footnotes:

* Yes, mothers have a higher labor force participation rate than all adult women; it’s because "all adult women" includes senior citizens.

** I am aware that not all never-married mothers are low-income, but this was the closest graph I could find to what I wanted to show.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation issued a new report this week, called Working Hard, Falling Short. It’s about low-income working families, defined as those earning less than twice the poverty line, or about $36,800 for a family of four. About 1/4 of all working families with children fall into this category, accounting for about 1/3 of the children in working families. Those are pretty grim figures.

Or are they?

Last month’s Washington Post article on the decline of the middle class reported that about 41 percent of all American households (including those without children) make less than $35,000 a year, down from 54 percent in 1967. (All these figures are in inflation adjusted dollars.)

So, is it terrible that so many families are low-income, or encouraging that so few are?

One thing to note is that a significant portion of the gains of the last 30-40 years are due to the increase in women’s labor force participation. A lot of families worked their way out of low-income status by having multiple wage earners contributing to the family income. But that results in child care costs, which come out of the discretionary income. And it doesn’t leave families with as much flexibility to respond to family crises. People feel like they’re working harder just to keep up — and there’s not a whole lot of room in the day for more work.

Are low-wage jobs “worse” than they were 30 years ago? They’re more likely to be in the service sector, less likely to be in manufacturing. They’re less likely to be unionized. They’re less likely to be 9-5 jobs, more likely to be evenings or weekends, keeping the 24-hour economy running. Or they may be variable shift, with the employer deciding how to staff based on the previous week’s sales. I don’t know whether such benefits as employer-provided health insurance and paid leave have gone up or down over that time period — anyone have a data source?

One hint about the problem comes from the title: “Working Hard, Falling Short.” Falling short compared to what? Precisely because average incomes have increased so much, the same amount of money feels like less. And, as Tyagi and Warren argue, it’s not just a matter of envy, but that low-income families have to compete with better off ones for houses in safe neighborhoods, for access to quality schools, and so on.

In that infamous article on the "Opt-Out Revolution," Lisa Belkin argues that –on average — women are less ambitious than men, less interested in the conventional measures of success — money, power, titles — and suggests that it may be due to biological differences between men and women.

This conclusion is firmly rejected by Anna Fels, author of Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. She makes a classic liberal feminist argument: ambition is not seen as a "feminine" quality, especially in the mainstream white middle-class definition of femininity; many women censor their own ambitions and choose not to compete with men as a result; and society penalizes women who are overtly ambitious and competitive. This argument should be familiar to anyone who has read Susan Faludi’s Backlash or taken an introduction to Women’s Studies class.

What’s new and interesting in this book is Fels’ emphasis on recognition as a fundamental human need. She has a very specific definition in mind here:

"Recognition means being valued by others for qualities that we experience and value in ourselves; it involves appreciation by another person that feels accurate and meaningful to the recipient. Because recognition affirms a person’s individual experience or accomplishment, it is different from other forms of attention."

Fels’ description of how women simultaneously hunger for this sort of recognition and deny that they desire it (and are uncomfortable when they receive it) rang very true to me. For example, she cites repeated examples of women running for elected office — perhaps the ultimate action of seeking public recognition — who frame their activitism as just another form of caregiving. However, she sometimes pushes this argument to the edge of absurdity. Reading this book, one might think that the biggest danger of divorce to homemakers is the loss of the recognition provided by their ex-husbands rather than the financial threat or that the biggest advantage of the "old boys network" is the recognition it provides rather than the doors to power it opens.

Fels is about as negative about full-time parenting as anything I’ve read since The Feminine Mystique. She writes that a body of literature "document[s] the large component of child care that consists of demanding, low-control, repetitive tasks. This aspect of child care undoubtedly accounts for the fact that virtually everyone who can afford some kind of child care has it. It is the reason that full-time parenting, frequently praised as the most important and meaningful job in the world, is not one that men are lining up to do." Further, she argues that few people receive recognition for their parenting skills, because children are notoriously self-centered (Fels says "comically oblivious") and no one else is paying attention to what you’re doing.

Fels argues that — except for the very stressful years of the late 20s and early 30s when both careers and young children are highly demanding — working mothers are happier and more satisfied with their lives, their marriages, and their sense of self than at-home mothers. Her basic recommendations are for more government support for child care, more paternal care, and for women who are unhappy at work to seek out better jobs rather than to give up on paid employment entirely. She is concerned that women who "opt-out" will be buying temporary relief at the cost of long-term depression.