Gender equality. Big topic. Huge. We could debate it all day, all night, and likely for the next months and years. We may or may not agree on what the issues are; we will surely disagree on the solutions.
But you can’t argue with the fact that the numbers show women statistically earning lower pay, with serious cumulative impacts.
You can’t argue with the fact that we’re all being asked to “do more with less,” which means work far more hours and for less money.
You can’t argue with the fact that those with jobs are job-scared; those without, terrified – regardless of gender.
You can’t argue with the fact that we all want our children to be raised well – whether we’re sitting in an office pursuing a white collar career, or working three part-time retail jobs to make ends meet, or cleaning toilets and mopping floors. You can’t argue with the fact that it ought to be possible for parents to provide for their kids whether they’re mothers or fathers, biological or adoptive, straight or gay, married or single.
You can’t argue with the fact that men and women are biologically different, but when it comes to the labor force, equal pay for equal work – and equal access to opportunity – are logical. They’re good business.
Stephanie Coontz on Gender Progress
In acknowledgment of the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” Stephanie Coontz at the New York Times gives us “Why Gender Equality Stalled.” It is one of the more comprehensive assessments of our current state of affairs that I’ve seen in some time: why we are where we are in our gender-based friction; why we are not where many of us once hoped we would be.
At the very least, Ms. Coontz makes mention of the multidimensional issues that impact us all. She refers to the:
… 30 years [since 1963] this emphasis on equalizing gender roles at home as well as at work produced a revolutionary transformation in Americans’ attitudes…
Likewise, she notes how progress slowed, particularly in comparison to other countries, among other reasons, for lack of infrastructure:
For more than two decades the demands and hours of work have been intensifying. Yet progress in adopting family-friendly work practices and social policies has proceeded at a glacial pace.
Today the main barriers to further progress toward gender equity no longer lie in people’s personal attitudes and relationships. Instead, structural impediments prevent people from acting on their egalitarian values, forcing men and women into personal accommodations and rationalizations that do not reflect their preferences. The gender revolution is not in a stall. It has hit a wall.
Factors: Shaky Economy, Single Parents, Aging Population
While Ms. Coontz does not explicitly address the state of the economy, blue collar or service sectors, much less the prevalence of single parent households or our aging population (older mothers), it would be hard to divorce any of these issues from the murky soup that seems less about battle lines between the sexes, and more about identifying tangible ways we can shore up mechanisms to help families.
Might I add, those of us who’ve been juggling for years – male and female – are just plain tired?
In mentioning that other countries tackle these work-life issues with greater success – there are many sources of OECD data to support this. In fact:
… when the United States’ work-family policies are compared with those of countries at similar levels of economic and political development, the United States comes in dead last.
…American workers who reduce hours for family reasons typically lose their benefits and take an hourly wage cut.
Is it any surprise that American workers express higher levels of work-family conflict than workers in any of our European counterparts?
Gender Opportunity Cost: Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later
May I also point out that nothing is without its price tag? Either you pay through taxes or you pay in human capital and more, which affects all of us.
Read the article. It takes a longer view of where we were, how far we’ve come, and the ways in which we’ve regressed – all the more reason I agree with Ms. Coontz that work-family policies are no longer gender issues, but issues of human rights, not to mention the sign of a civilized nation.
I also recommend that you visit the OECD’s Work-Life Balance site where you will find fascinating data, both global and country-specific.
For example, did you know that women work on average 2.5 hours more than men – each day – on unpaid tasks? This particular disparity varies widely by country. Still, care to contemplate the ripple effects on our children, our partners, our ability to contribute in paid positions, not to mention our health and related costs?
Your thoughts?
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Thank you for bringing this up, but the whole subject makes me tired. Or more accurately, depressed. I’m old enough to have shed a tear when witnessing the Equal Rights Amendment going down to defeat. Now as a grandmother, I see my son and daughter-in-law working their asses off and trying to be good parents to an infant and a toddler. There is no part-time option if one wants to build a retirement, pay for health insurance, and put something away for college for the babies. So they both work fulltime, stay as late as their employers require, and do chores and life-maintenance in the evenings and on weekends. As exhausted as they both are, they would be impoverished without the union protections they enjoy as teachers, but that is under relentless assault in our sink-or-swim culture. And we wonder why the birth rate is dropping? Who the hell can properly raise kids anymore when you’re running as hard as you can while under fear of job loss, loss of health care, and without benefit of adequate family-friendly infrastructure?
No arguments from me, @Lynne. And those without the sort of protections you mention? And our cumulative exhaustion – for men and women both – especially those trying to raise families at all (but the highest) income levels?
Personally, I’ve always been annoyed when I hear about the gender pay gap. When it first started out, before there were legal protections in place and companies regularly paid female works less than men for the exact same job, the figure made more sense. Now the figure really isn’t apples to apples. The statistics might look at a man and a woman from the same school with the same GPA in the same job title, but what isn’t calculated in to the current statistics is that women are much more likely than men to work for non-profits, which pay less per hour but offer more flexibility than the for profit sector.
To me it makes sense that people taking time away from the workforce for any reason can’t expect to come back at the same position or the same salary. Skills get rusty quickly. It requires a step back to get back on the ladder at all. I was in HR for a decade, and it is simply a fact of life that with new software and changes in best practice, any gap of more than a few months makes a person’s skills (NOT the person his/herself ) less valuable in the marketplace.
This is not to say that I don’t appreciate the hard work of the feminists who came before me that have allowed me to see the world as full of professional opportunities. I have read the work of Betty Friedan, and I was started by how contemporary it sounds. It discusses the problems of helicopter parenting and the need to feel a real purpose in life that I think is universal.
As a member of the AAUW , I see first hand how providing education to women (regardless of where in the world they live) strengthens the society as a whole and can raise the economic viability for entire communities.
One thing that isn’t stressed that could make a HUGE difference in the equality issue is to de-stigmatize money. Women choose to work in non-profits because they want to help people, a role that is drilled into us from birth. Well, what if there was a group understanding that by pursuing big paychecks, women could help even more people by funding non-profits for the groups whose causes they support. Their dollars could potentially do an even greater good than their direct involvement, and their family and community would benefit from the wealth as well. Money is not evil. It is neutral. It is what we choose to spending it on that matters.
I agree, Tammy, that de-stigmatizing money would help, or more specifically, de-mystifying it.
That said, part of the pay gap is the issue of negotiation, which comes back to self-esteem as well as training. Women typically have not negotiated salaries with the same aggressive approach as men. Big problem, and one that results in a cumulative pay gap over the years. Bias that men are the primary breadwinners (therefore require more money) remains, lodged in our psyches – another factor in pay differentials.
Some good articles on this topic and related issues have appeared in Forbes. I’ve written about this as well over time:
Women and Money: Are We There Yet?
– I discuss the need for “Money 101” early on, as well as negotiating skills;
Show Me the Money –
This article addresses the need for negotiation skills, as well as some of the particular challenges that single mothers may face. And incidentally, I continued to work full-time throughout the years I was raising my children. There was no “gap” or time off. I’m not recommending it; I am stating it clearly, for context.
But carrying a solo parenting load while trying to continue a career? That’s another matter. Without a support system, a high paying job, or an ex / other parent pulling his or her weight, it’s all about struggle. Years of it.
Last, while this can hardly be construed as representative data, I have had a small measure of experience in nonprofit. The pay was certainly lower; if anything, the demands to be available 7 days / week were higher due to events, dealing with volunteers, fundraising deadlines and so on. So “more flexibility” – certainly in that experience – was fiction, rather than fact.
I agree with some of your points Tammy. But it’s too simplistic, and inaccurate, to say that women prefer to work in nonprofits. There are many, many women working in the corporate world–holding jobs at the same level of commitment and work as men. And, there are many men who work in the nonprofit world.
When we continue to label women as the ‘more caring’ or whatever other label one might apply, we are boxing women in. It reinforces the stereotypes that many of us struggle to overcome. And that contributes to gender discrimination, lost opportunities and less pay.
Coontz’s article is terrific. We are up against a structural wall that blocks adequate childcare. That wall needs to come down, and she rightly frames the consciousness raising necessary to bring this about: “We must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders.”
I didn’t mean to imply that only non-profits pay less for more flexibility (and that all non-profit positions offer that flexibility – mine did, but I know that is not universal). I have made the conscious choice of selecting more free time than salary throughout my career. I view my time outside work as what gives my life value. Only one of my numerous positions have been in the non-profit world, the rest have been with corporations, but ones that don’t pay as well. This has been a deliberate choice on my part. My point was that the gender pay gap should be comparing apples to apples, which it often is not.
I definitely agree that women should all take negotiation skills classes. It is amazing how different the process can be when potential hires view themselves as being in a position of strength (whether that is true or not is immaterial) versus simply grateful for a job offer. That mental shift, which was the focus of the workshop I took, has made all the difference in the world to my approach and confidence in standing up for myself when it comes to salary.
Impossible dream? No. Impossible in my lifetime? Most likely yes.
Ms. Coontz speaks of “structural impediments to living our egalitarian values”–my take on this is that American culture is so conflicted and “at war” about whether our culture should continue as an I-me-and mine focused culture or a “all of us” culture basing our decisions and love of country on the “we” of us, making basic decisions for thriving on the basis of the “good for all”, broadly speaking.
I look at Sweden and Denmark (all the Scandinavian countries actually) and somehow they “evolved” to creating cultures that honor and value safety nets rather than disparaging safety nets as “taker” nets! I too am so tired of this whole ongoing why are we not equal thing and have become more “go for the jugular”!
Read “Unplugging the Patriarchy” by Lucia Renee (and this is NOT just a woman’s issue but a human issue–getting out from under the foot of a 5000 year old “winner take all” dominant thoughtform–).
My take? Everything will change out “there” when women really change “in “here”–within themselves and believe it—give up speaking in baby little girl voices, sink down into their power center and act like we are in control of our own destinies–body posture and voice quality are huge in this—I quote from the book: “If you think of yourself as being feminine–in the sense of being weak, genteel, CONSTANTLY SELF EFFACING, always cleaning up after others–then you misunderstand your power and YOUR PURPOSE….WE are approaching an Age of Women. It’s imperative that women throw off their conditioning and begin to stand in their own power.”
I too wrote in my own book that borderless broads only result when we throw off our deeply embedded social training and believe ourselves to be pivotal to this time in our human evolution and it is OK to fake it until you feel it and believe it!.
See Amy Cuddy ofnTed.com and this article (body language, power poses).
Thank you! You said exactly what I have been saying to myself inside my head (or out loud when I am driving) but of course a lot more eloquently. I believe Stephanie Coontz was the one who said something about women not only have to do it all, they also look hot while doing it all. AND that’s exactly my point!