In ”The Other Home Equity Crisis”, Judity Warner claims there’s no real “Opt Out” trend, that instead:
“Women left the workforce when the cost of child care ate up their entire after-tax salaries, or when family-unfriendly workplaces pushed them out. Or when, like women without children or men with and without children, they were laid off in a bad economy.”
She quotes a congressional report that says:
“Women may be more susceptible to the impact of the business cycle than they were when they were more highly concentrated in a smaller number of non-cyclical occupations, like teaching and nursing”.
She also mentions that because women who leave jobs are viewed as deciding to be “moms” and men are viewed as “unemployed,” the latter are more likely to get benefits.
So what do we make of this?
Well, it’s critical for workplaces to become more family friendly. Single parents, poor parents, don’t have the option for one parent not to work. And for women and men to have equal access to unemployment benefits.
But it’s also critical for this “family friendly” path not to become a pink collar ghetto. I think the percentages of women and men who avail themselves of these options should ideally be more equal, to the extent we have power over that.
The head of litigation at one of my clients emailed me recently (I’m editing because he’s close to illiterate in his typos and grammar on email): “I want part time tracks to be out there for women, but guys don’t take them because it is harder to make as much or be promoted. But the part time tracks can’t come with the same promotions and compensation. I don’t want to subsidize my partners by seeing my kids less.”
In the ideal world, there would be no monetary power dimension in a relationship for anyone to be concerned about. Either the man or the woman in either a hetero or gay relationship would earn more, or both/all would earn equally, and either way it wouldn’t really factor in to power within the relationship.
Sadly, we don’t live in the ideal world.
We all know the Terry Hekker story, right? What in the individual instance (note: I am not saying there is one right answer for each woman, or man, or couple) is just a variation that makes sense, when it’s slanted overwhelmingly one way, something worse develops: a trend, that’s weighted in one gender direction.
If a male/female couple has kids, then there is a period in which the stay-at-home parent, typically the woman, is occupied, possibly stimulated. But what about after the children are in school – earlier and earlier these days. You have one parent who has risen in whatever career of whatever collar, to a full professor or a manager at Starbucks or head of a janitorial union or a partner at a law firm or a licensed therapist. And another who has what might be a closer bond with the kids and a bigger voice on the PTA, both very meaningful. And the individual woman, if she’s the one at home, may have developed some hobbies that can be developed into entrepreneurial ventures, either lucrative or meaningful in some other way.
But very often that’s not the case, and there’s an imbalance. One partner will have a fulfilling, or at least varied and adult, outside life in which there is constant affirmation of value, even if that’s just a paycheck. The other will need to be creative to develop this, which will be difficult in light of the tasks that will fall to her – household responsibilities, chauffeuring duties, etc.
So my belief is that, to the extent women have more confidence than men that we can skate a bit on the economic side without our desirability or eventual lifestyle or responsibility level suffering too much, this is a curse rather than a blessing.
In some places (like – college, earnest young couples’ dinner tables, the Feminist Blogosphere…) all this talk of money is…kind of tacky. Why be concerned about the (ugh) money and power balance in a relationship? That’s so Republican, right?
Even I, a hardcore sellout, used to view things differently at the tender age of 28 compared to my current 40. At 28, I wasn’t too bothered by this either. I had finished my third academic stint after two initial hiccups. I was easing into a new job (which would turn out to be another hiccup, but that’s another story). Most of my friends of both genders were still working and weren’t married, or just beginning to get married.
Fast forward three years, most of them were having kids, or if not kids, then settling into some kind of semi-permanent domestic state. And yeah, at this point the above-mentioned trend was becoming disappointingly clear. Friend after friend opted out of the sometimes disappointing result of her often expensive education: the J-O-B word. After all, you didn’t have to be accomplish-ing to be accomplish-ed, right? The husbands were OK with it; their wives were still witty companions who were also willing to be maids. It was all good.
Five years later, it wasn’t always. Again: I have nothing against women or men who stay home. In the individual case, it may be a great idea. But as a trend slanting the estrogen direction, it doesn’t seem to be. Many of the women were signaling Betty Friedan-type frustration. Many of the men, though of course not all, were finding the nubile young MBA making deals in Prada suits in the office next door to have more interesting things to say than their aproned housemate.
Occasionally, one of those men would ask the nubile young MBA, or JD, or whatever, to say those interesting things under the covers somewhere, or on a conference room table after hours. I’ve gotten a few such requests from a few such young married men.
None of my partners’ wives work. Recently, Time magazine came out with an article about female midlife crises. This section is particularly instructive:
“Unlike their mothers and unlike the men in their lives, this cohort of women is creating a new model for what midlife might look like. … however disruptive menopause may be for some women, the changes that matter most are often more psychic and spiritual than physical. …Among the growing ranks of female entrepreneurs are many who have sensed a massive Midlife Marketing Opportunity. Women are natural marketers, even of their worst fears. Their instinct when they get in trouble is to talk about it with other women. So once they have weathered the crisis, they are ready to become crisis managers. The hospice nurse opens a consulting firm to help women handle their aging parents. The escrow officer becomes a personal trainer specializing in older women. The Harvard M.B.A. with three kids opens a temp agency specializing in placing part-time manager moms…. More and more people see not a crisis but a challenge–even an opportunity, observes Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Rutgers University. ‘How are they going to spend the second half of their life? They know they’re going to have lots of healthy years, so I think it’s a period of making choices to live out one’s dreams that got put on the shelf during younger years.’”
One of my partners told me he liked the article and recommended it. Then he admitted he had hidden it from his wife. “Barbara [not her real name] has been depressed lately with her life and this would make it worse. She is bored, but with my mother ill and our daughter having some problems, she has a lot of responsibilities.”
Of course, it makes sense for Barbara, and not Jim [not his real name], to handle these responsibilities. Jim is bringing home the bacon. Sure, that often means trips to different cities, fancy meals out, opportunities to hold forth for people of stature. Yeah, patriarchal, capitalist stature, but still: stature. This enables Jim to pay for their house and bills, and it therefore is left for Barbara to shoulder Jim’s sick mom and their daughter’s issues, although Jim does his part to the extent possible. But on a nine-ten hour day, there’s only so much he can do, even though his schedule allows some flexibility.
So I guess I am tacky — I am concerned with the monetary power dimension in a relationship.
Warner has a point. Some of the opting out may be pushing out. But let’s not cast off all power to change this. Bad econonomies are beyond most of our control, but we can limit the gender-based impact to some degree.
I think delegation of responsibilities is natural, in opposite-sex or same-sex partnerships. But for the responsibilities to tilt one way too much of the time is not biology. It’s not equality. It’s not a privilege.
It’s a trap.
We’re in the Third Wave/Fourth Wave but still haven’t reached the three main goals of the Second Wave:
Equal Pay
Reproductive Rights
Cheap and Available Child Care
Notice all three are closely aligned with work/family issues, the topic of your post. They’re the main obstacles to women’s equality in the US.
This is a great post. I love Donna’s point about still being in the throes of 2nd wave struggle.
Coming around to this point of view happened organically for me. I had a baby, and for the first couple of years worked very little. I’m fortunate enough to work in a family business with a lot of flexibility, but nevertheless didn’t like the feeling of slowly, inevitably becoming irrelevant. Not because anybody told me I was, or because my husband was looking elsewhere, but because I was taking myself out of contention. It actually had little do to with money, and more to do with my feminist convictions. In a perfect world stay-home-parents wouldn’t feel so isolated, and they certainly wouldn’t be 99% female. But we don’t live in a perfect world. The only way those 2nd wave goals will be met is not capitulating.
I’ve also made the deliberate choice to have only one child. It seems like it is the second and third babies that throw a spanner into a woman’s career plans.
I hadn’t read the Hekker story. Honestly, I’ve never seen it put so starkly.
Disability throws a considerable kink in the works wrt work and my relationship. But, well, sometimes you have those moments of “put the fear of God into ya” and that’s what I’m feeling reading this. It’s not the hypothetical, it’s what has actually happened to a lot of women who “opted” to stay home, and find themselves stranded later in life.
It’s funny how men never have to concern themselves with such thing, or make these kinds of “choices.” Women are having to fight and struggle to get just a portion of the privileges extended to men, who get them simply for *existing.*
There is the occasional man who opts to stay home. And that’s pretty much it. There are no men who are working part-time or struggling to keep a foot in the door in their field as they have children. I wonder why.
O, I love your posts on the work/life balance. That is all.
i wonder about this. Is it possible to have a more family friendly work place in a global economy? To quote form the post “But the part time tracks can’t come with the same promotions and compensation”. Part time tracks can’t come with the ame promotions and compensation, should they? Can they if as an accountant your work can be sent out to India to someone willing to work those 60 hour weeks? How would this work in a nation of 300 million? Even in the nordic countries where they have a ton more benefits than we do, women are still “opting out” in high numbers.
Will a food service worker, non-unionized janitor or part-time wal-mart employee ever be able to afford full time child care for 1 or more children? Is that a benefit that should be built into our society? If so, who should pay for it? Should we subtract things we’re already paying for? If so, what?
In high paying career track jobs, anyone who misses time for any reason or works reduced hours will fall behind, is there really any way to change that without punishing those who choose not to have children or cant have children? “I know you love your job Dan and you put in 3500 hours a year but we’re going to make Danica partner even though, even with full time cheap, childcare available she chose to have children and chooses to work 1700 hours a year” If we are talking about people with privilege, as most people who are on these kinds of tracks do have it, how would this work exactly?
Yes in a perfect world things would be different but on our way to getting there, what kind of policies would be imposed? What kind of regulation? Would it be posible for a female or male to have a kid at 18 and be set for life with childcare, housing, food and education subsidies? .
Donna – you’re right! When we flatter ourselves we’re post-Second Wave, that’s deceptive.
SMMO –thanks! In our culture, yeah, there’s both push and pull in getting to closer-to-equal SAHD and SAHM percentages. I wish I could sit here and say honestly I think guys will do this on their own. But no – the corporate (even academia, or nonprofit) culture is a macho one and also men tend to feel more shame/responsibility for neglecting work than neglecting family. I don’t think this will change organically, and think change is more likely to come with women leading the way on closing the gap. I think only then will men see that there is support for them choosing another option. Yeah, ideal world, we shouldn’t have to handhold them into this. But as you said…
I have only one child as well. For the same reason as yours.
Amandaw: yeah, disability adds another layer. I don’t know what field you are in, but I hope high tech communication options and telecommuting provide alternatives with fewer obstacles. I know they aren’t always as doable or realistic, though.
I agree, I think men are lucky not to get this “choice” because one door can be so hazardous. We know there’d be more safety nets if the hazardous door were one that men went through more often! So if/when they do get this “choice” then it will be a better one for us too. Unfair, yeah. Real world, yeah.
Lauren –thanks! That means a lot coming from you.
Dananddanica: short answer to pretty much all your questions: no. In my humble opinion, of course.
Dananddanica: are you really billing 3500? Hopefully that was a hypothetical.
What do I make of this? That we have so much further to go in terms of women’s rights. This is utterly depressing and aggravating.
And this put me over the edge:
“Yeah, patriarchal, capitalist stature, but still: stature. This enables Jim to pay for their house and bills, and it therefore is left for Barbara to shoulder Jim’s sick mom and their daughter’s issues, although Jim does his part to the extent possible.”
There are some exceptions, but it seems as men are conditioned to think women will care for everything. I wish men had to work taking into consideration childcare and eldercare the way women do. Women are still being taken for granted in this country. God forbid there was another WW2 I feel like telling the government to shove their rivets.
Nice post, Octo. As one of the people who often complains that there is too much emphasis on the wage gap and on income in some facets of Western feminism, I think you make a good case here. My mother suffered a great deal when she divorced my father because she was in a financially vulnerable position. I don’t quite feel comfortable with generalized statements about working trends, but I do agree that the economic empowerment of women is an important goal. And… Well, cynical fuck that I am, think it’s difficult to predict that the kind of thing that happened to my mom could never happen to me. So, yeah… I hear you. And I’ll always have my own goddamned bank account.
Oh, the “mommy track” articles always piss me off. Most of my female friends with kids didn’t get a choice on staying home with them–they have to because they can’t afford child care so that they can work.
We absolutely haven’t gotten those original goals, and certainly not all three at once. You might (might!) get equal pay, but as soon as you want to have a kid…oh, no.
One of the things that really pisses me off when feminists of all “waves”, as an aside this wole fucking wave thing bugs the shit out of me too but that is a rant for another time, talk about women working and the need for affordable childcare they forget about the fact that “affordable” childcare means underpaid female workforce. I listen to these feminists talk about affordable quality childcare, and then ask how much should a childcare place cost you a month or how much are you paying your daycare provider? The number is astoundlingly low in a vast majority of cases, and families that do pay an exhorbiant price for childcare, I ask them how much the daycare worker is making and they don’t know. That is shameful, we want high quality affordable day care, but we don’t want to pay for it.
In my area, daycare providers are charging $3.00 to $5.00 per day per child. The behomoth of a hospital and our area’s number one employer pays their day care workers $6.15 an hour and REQUIRES at least an associate’s degree in early childhood education. This hospitall turns a profit every year and has a mission statement of “caring for the community” yet their own workers need food stamps to survive.
So, when you talk about “affordable childcare” just remember that your affordable childcare means underpaid, undervalued childcare providers. Perhaps it would be a good idea to start saying “affordable childcare with well paid highly trained staff”
Sarah J, out of curiosity, did they really not get a choice? What about day care? If their jobs would yield less money than day care would cost, then why did they choose these jobs ahead of time, with some advance notice on what the math would be? I know in some instances there are some pretty good answers to these, but in all instances?
Octo, that comment seems to be radically oversimplifying the issue.
Let’s say, for example, that a woman gets married young, divorces, takes two jobs to make rent, goes back to school full time while working full time and taking care of ailing family, gets sick, has to drop out of school, remarries, loses savings while taking care of another ailing family member, has babies, insurance premiums double during gestation, can no longer afford to leave job OR pay for daycare, turns life into pretzel to pay insurance premiums that are triple the average car payment because one child is sick…
Maybe I really didn’t get a better choice. I love my kids. I would pick them over anything, but when you’re trying to make rent or secure health insurance, you can’t sit around thinking “Hmm…will this job be best in the long run, or should I put everything on hold and go back to school so that I can get a better job in four years?” It’s not like your landlord will wait, or the doctor will accept “Oh, but I’m in college!” in lieu of payment.
It’s easy to say that I should have chosen a better job, or done the math ahead of time, but in general, it’s not women chipperly taking lower paying jobs for giggles and not realizing that it would be bad in the long run.
Give women SOME credit–we’re not that dumb. Sometimes you have to make rent. Daycare is insanely expensive. Sometimes going back to school isn’t a viable option. Life happens.
Akeeyu, did you miss “I know in some instances there are some pretty good answers to these”? Your example is one of those instances.
Also, Sarah J’s example, that I was referring to, discussed a woman who could afford to stay home.
As I said in the post, I am not trying to dictate what makes sense in the individual instance, but to suggest that women might enhance our security and power if we closed the voluntary-stay-at-home gap with men. I nowhere made the claim that a woman who is trying to madly juggle a number of balls should somehow go back to school to be an investment banker or something.
I do give women credit, and I give you a ton of it. I hope your situation gets easier, and let me know if you would like my email if you’d like to brainstorm.
[...] Opt Out, Push Out, and Pink Collar Paths Well, it’s critical for workplaces to become more family friendly. Single parents, poor parents, [...]
“it seems as men are conditioned to think women will care for everything.”
Yep, I see a lot of that, speaking only from my own experience and the experience of the majority of my male friends over the years, men are pretty much conditioned to believe being a provider is all important and pretty much should be all consuming. As octo points out this is changing but I don’t think women need to hold mens hands to do it, men will do it with their help but I’m still unclear on this will actually work. If you don’t brainwash a significant portion of your men into thinking working until they die at their desk/workbench is the way to go, who is going to do that work? It’s not as if men can reduce their work hours 25%, women increase theirs 20% and all of a sudden every company in the country, from wal-mart to the two person small business will remain competitive with their peers.
It seems less like talking about a perfect world or system and more like talking about perfect people, who will always make the right choices, balance things correctly and have the privilege to do so while simultaenously never overspending to keep up with their peers, making use of all their free time to entertain but also train/educate themselves, never feel envy or jealousy, etc, I just don’t see people being that way no matter what system they live in.
I guess my problem is, I can agree with the ideas but I get bogged down in how things would actually be applied, what regulations would be put in place for the various things people want, how eligibility would be determined, etc.
I also feel its a mixed blessing, the way things are now its fucked up, people working too much, not balancing things, women getting the shaft with family care men getting the shaft with working hours but if we didnt have the assets that system has provided us and the world, would we be able to make the changes suggested in this thread? Is it a necessary evolution? Who knows
octo,
No didnt bill 3500 hours, I’m not a lawyer though my hours are tracked and I generally average between 3000-3500 hours a year, more if I have to do some training, depends on where I go.
Dananddanica – if this happened, it would happen across the board, so the concept of competitiveness with peers would not apply. Also, I’m not sure workaholism is that effective. If law firms, for example, billed 5% less a year (so – average hours would be 1900 instead of 2000), do you really think their clients’ results would be that much worse? I highly doubt it.
Also, not all companies rely on overwork. In those companies, women’s increases would equal men’s decreases.
I also disagree strongly that “the assets that [the male-worker dominated] system has provided” are so unique and wonderful that we wouldn’t have them if women spent more time working and men more time at home. The evolution toward men dominating the workplace and women the home is NOT necessary, as you speculate it might be, especially in the technology age.
At a similar point women didn’t have the vote, didn’t work at all; we had things like slavery, etc. So taking a particular phenomenon and speculating that it’s “necessary evolution” seems quite sketchy and a bit Bell-Curve-esque to me.
Finally, 3000-3500 hours seems quite aggressive. What business is that?
““affordable” childcare means underpaid female workforce”
this is NOT true. Are female child care workers under paid? Absolutely! Do many of these female child care workers also have children? You bet! Affordable childcare means (to me) that the State needs to pony up and start fucking subsidizing childcare so it’s affordable for people who need it. It does not mean that I don’t think childcare workers (who in Canada are very well-educated, as a rule) shouldn’t get paid what they deserve. I think both things need to happen and the State needs to pay it’s share to make sure that both goals are met! The reasons that childcare workers are so underpaid AND affordable daycare is so elusive are related: the STATE and many of its citizens undervalue the contributions that women make to society and generally think they should pick up the childcare slack for little to no financial reward. The issues are inextricably linked and the fact that women are underpaid does not at all negate the fact that childcare is way too FUCKING expensive for even a two income professional family to afford.
We need to stop pitting women against women and recognize that women need to fucking work – whether it’s because they are educated or not or they need to pay bills. And having affordable childcare should be a basic right of ALL women.
“If their jobs would yield less money than day care would cost, then why did they choose these jobs ahead of time, with some advance notice on what the math would be?”
When I was starting out as a lower paid worker, summer day care ate up pretty much all of my income since I had to pay full time rates for 2 kids. I couldn’t wait until the school year started and the rates went back down because the kids were in before and after school care only.
And when I said “lower paid worker” that meant entry level after college (which I slogged through with the kids, and the strange patchwork of daycare that I put together to make that happen is something I won’t even go into).
I can’t even imagine trying to do it on an even lower service worker’s salary. It’s hard to find something right out of undergrad that pays enough to support a family these days, and not everyone’s life works out where they can or do wait until they are 35 or 40 to have kids. It’s not like the math magically works out if you become pregnant, and it is also not reasonable to expect that the rational response to an unintended pregnancy is to do a math formula and divide your current salary by daycare expenses with the amount left over determining whether you carry the pregnancy to term or abort. Life’s a lot messier than that, and situations change.
By the time I had advanced enough so that the summer rates would not have been a financial burden, my kids were old enough to be on their own in the summers. By the time I was making a professional’s income, my kids were teenagers and/or out of the house. However, had I stayed home for the periods where the math was dubious, I would never have reached the professional’s income (and level of grown-up stature and intellectual stimulation, as you point out). We’ve got to make it possible for women to succeed.
re Jen’s comment: “It’s not like the math magically works out if you become pregnant, and it is also not reasonable to expect that the rational response to an unintended pregnancy is to do a math formula and divide your current salary by daycare expenses with the amount left over determining whether you carry the pregnancy to term or abort. Life’s a lot messier than that, and situations change.”
I second that emotion.
and this, Octo: “I hope your situation gets easier, and let me know if you would like my email if you’d like to brainstorm” – while I understand that you mean well – is more than a little condescending.
Lisa, yes, quite.
Jen — again, I think you’re ignoring the context: “I know in some instances there are some pretty good answers to these, but in all instances?”
So I did grant that life can be messy. If it doesn’t apply to you, it’s not about you.
Lisa, re my being condescending: I do career counseling both professionally and pro bono. If offering assistance in brainstorming is condescending, that’s news to me. I’d take anyone up on brainstorming with me on my particular career hangups. I’m sorry that you and Akeeyu feel that this is somehow insulting.
Octo, offering ‘brainstorming’ when it’s not requested does come off as condescending. Why? Because it sounds like this: “Hi! I’m here to solve all of your problems with my massive intellect.”
Trust me, brainstorming isn’t going to change the health care situation in this country, it’s not going to make daycare supercheap and it’s not going to magically heal my children.
And lastly, because I’m leaving this thread as roadkill after this, when you use the word “sorry”, try not to follow it with a qualifier. No ‘if’s, no ‘you feel that way’s, no weasel words. If you have to ‘if’ apologize, just refrain entirely.
Akeeyu, if people reaching out to each other were always requested, it would rarely happen.
If you are convinced you’ve thought about all possible contingencies, then hats off to you. I don’t know anyone who has. Just yesterday, someone with no experience in my field at a kids’ ballet class gave me a great idea about my own work situation that I’d never considered. Wow, and I didn’t ask for her help either, nor do I think by offering it she was making any statement about her intellect. Projecting that kind of motivation seems somewhat… antifeminist.
Finally, my apology was conditional for a reason. I was sorry if my statement had caused discomfort. I wasn’t sorry to have made it.
Acckkk. Late to the thread. Anyway….
None of my partners’ wives work.
That just stuns me. You’re describing a different world. I mean, I know such people exist….it’s just that I don’t see them. Literally. Do not see them. They don’t live in my neighborhood. Don’t shop at the grocery store I go to. Don’t take their kids to the same park (or any other kid activity) I take mine to.
But these people seem to have a greater political voice than I do. And I see that as part of the problem, too. Childcare has to be accessible and affordable (which doesn’t have to mean low wages for childcare workers. It does mean subsidizing childcare and sliding-scale payments for parents based on family income) in order for women to choose nontraditional employment. I chose nontraditional employment, but lucked out in finding childcare compatible with my working hours—those pre-7:00AM slots are very rare, even though a 7:00AM start time for work is becoming more common. And for crying out loud, when are school hours for school-age children going to match parental working hours? They do in the rest of the industrial and so-called “postindustrial” world.
And one thing frustrates the living shit out of me in these conversations: the inevitable assumption that the income gap is based on longer workdays for men. No. Just, no. Someone always shows up on a thread (usually some lawyer, *wink*, Octo!) to talk about 80 hour weeks, but I see quite a bit of career-length income gap in my area based on the mere 40 hours. How can there be such an income gap in a unionized work environment, with all journeymen paid the same basic scale?
Easy. Male journeymen have far, far more opportunity to become foremen (especially if they’re white), and are less likely to be laid off than female journeymen. When the economy gets tight, women in nontraditional employment are the first to be let go—and that’s despite being the Superwoman who Gets Things Done. The predominant myth of men needing employment more than women because “they have families to support” is still present. We need a Critical Mass of women in nontraditional venues in order to change that perception.
Because the people making policy—-formal or informal—are a lot like your partners. They don’t see women like me, either. We reside in a different world.