Births to Asian Women 40+ Jump in 2009

This week’s CDC detailed report on 2009 birth data, confirms their earlier finding that while births to women overall dropped 3 percent, births to women 40-44 continued to climb –- up 3% over 2008.

And leading the 40-44 climb were births to Asian women, which rose 6/10’s of a point (from 15.2 births / thousand to 15.8), while births to white women rose more slowly from 9.7 births/ thousand to 9.9, and births to black women rose from 8.9 births to 9.1. (Births to women 45-49 held steady for Asian women at 1.2/thousand, where they’re at 0.7 for whites, 0.6 for blacks, and 0.3 for Native Americans.)

Later births to Asian women have been ahead for decades, linked to rates of employment, time invested in and level of education, culture around work and work-purposed immigration.

While the pattern for Asian women mirrored the rises and falls in births to all other groups of women in all other age bands, it differed in the 35-39 age band, where the rising trend continued upward.

While little research has been done on the topic by social scientists, one recent article does explore the income effects of Asian women’s work/family patterns, finding that as a group Asian women engineers and scientists (the group the writer had data on) take less time off from work when their kids are born than women of other races in the same fields with equal education. As a result of this greater time at work, they make more money over the long term than their female peers of other races and there is less of a wage gap between Asian men and women than between white men and women (Hispanic and black men and women also have lower wage gaps, because due to difficult economic circumstances, women’s work has long been an important part of the economic equation). (Greenman, 2011) This is relevant, in my view, not just as a pattern true of one culture (or set of linked cultures) but also for the model or basis for analysis it provides of potential work dynamics in all cultures.

Asian women may also, Greenman hypothesizes, be more likely to have grandparents living at home or nearby, to make it easier to return to work quickly, as well as a culture that doesn’t expect women to stop working when they have kids (and, I derive, may be less likely therefore to stigmatize childcare).

Clearly birth timing plays a role in here too, so we’ll be exploring that further in the near future.

Works Cited
CDC [Martin, Joyce A., MPH; Brady E. Hamilton, PhD; Stephanie J. Ventura, MA; Michelle J.K. Osterman, MHS; Sharon Kirmeyer, PhD; TJ Mathews, MS; and Elizabeth Wilson, MPH, Division of Vital Statistics] Births: Final Data for 2009.

Emily Greenman, “Asian American–White Differences in the Effect of Motherhood on Career Outcomes,” Work and Occupations February 2011 vol. 38 no. 1 37-67.

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The Real No-Brainer

Last week NYTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof endorsed major investment in early childhood education as the only way out of poverty for millions — the only way to even the playing field for all citizens. This has been the elephant in the room for so long, the words you’re not allowed to utter in “reasonable” company because it just isn’t “feasible.” But, as we know, things become feasible only once you start talking about them, brainstorming as a society on how to make it work.

Currently, millions of children sit in front of TV’s for the first five years of their lives — either at home, or in bad childcare (because that’s all their parents can afford). No thoughtful interchanges, no challenges to figure things out for themselves, no active play. Add to that lots of sugary, fatty food. Formula for failure. Almost literally, a no-brainer — on two fronts: reducing the brain power of our kids, through society’s failure to use its brains to create a workable system for all its citizens.

We know our elementary ed is failing many kids. But the reality is that even the best elementary ed is bound to fail kids who enter kindergarten completely unprepared. The damage has already been done.

A good, affordable childcare system would provide the educational fix.

If that’s not enough of a positive for you — such childcare is also a jobs engine. Hundreds of thousands of good, well-paid jobs would be created for teachers in the centers, for construction workers to build the centers, and for those who teach the teachers.

Though we think of childcare jobs as low paying (because they so often are!), they are not low paid when the (good) care provided actually involves skilled workers. Which is why, within the current pay-as-you-go system, the words “good” and “affordable” can be linked for so few families.

To work for all citizens, good care has to be subsidized. That has been the case for Head Start and within our military childcare system, but those are not available for most kids. Thus millions of working moms and dads have to put their kids in bad care. They lose, the kids lose, and we all lose, because the American workforce ends up enormously under-skilled.

So who provides the subsidy? The only fair way is to have the beneficiaries pay. Which means… business.

U.S. business depends on there being an educated workforce available — already they’re complaining about lack of skilled blue and white collar workers to fill the available spots. Microsoft has asked Congress to raise the cap on green cards so they can bring in more high tech savvy foreign workers. That’s easier than just educating the folks at home? Apparently yes, given the unwillingness to talk about (let alone address) real issues.

But once those issues really enter the conversation, a business-funded national consortium willing to invest for the long term, supervised by responsible educators of proven experience (not sharks aiming to make a quick buck) could do the job.

Best case, government would be part of the collaboration (an educated populace serves the public interest too) , maybe along the lines of the KIPP Academy model (funded through state charter school dollars with contributions from corporations like the GAP and other visionaries). New taxes are not playing well these days, but a “worker development fee” could be a concept whose day has come. There’s lots of room for thinking this through. But whatever the particulars — it’s time for leadership here.

A national good affordable childcare system would pay forward on at least three levels: First, it would increase our human capital and put our nation on track to compete globally with the many nations who already invest more in their kids than we do. Studies suggests that a universal pre-school program would return many times the value to investment over the child’s lifetime, and benefits would multiply further with expanded early education.

Second, it would inject a huge economic stimulus, creating many good jobs nationally. The teaching jobs would differ from current childcare positions in levels of pay, training, and respect. The human capital of teachers would grow as well as that of kids.

Third, the program would free moms at all class levels to participate more fully in growing the economy and as citizens by making good childcare more affordable and by changing the current culture around childcare — countering the current guilt-inducing climate that misrepresents childcare’s role. Good childcare has much to offer kids in terms of socialization, range of activities, structured environment, and skills development, especially if it’s combined with flexible work arrangements that allow parents to cut back on work to be with kids when needed.

Enough with the no-brainers! Let’s get busy with the hard work of thinking it through and actually educating the workforce of tomorrow.

This post first appeared on the Huffington Post.

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Tina and Beyoncé Knowles Rock the Library

Tina and Beyoncé Knowles (Sarah Gish Photos)

On October 3rd, UH’s Friends of Women’s Studies’ Living Archives oral history interview series featured Houston entrepreneur Tina Knowles. The Headliners salon owner is now in the big time with her Miss Tina and Déreon fashion lines, and she’s designed many outfits for her daughter Beyoncé, the girl band Destiny’s Child, and others. Some of these very cool dresses were on display.

There were also a lot of Beyoncés on hand – the star’s first name is also her mom’s maiden name (their roots are in Galveston and Louisiana), and many family members attended, along with some from the Knowles side. When the pregnant Beyoncé joined the audience, a few excited tweets brought hundreds of students to the library, rocking the house. Tina spoke of carrying forward the strength, vision and love of fashion of her seamstress mom Agnez. Likewise, Beyoncé acknowledged her mom’s teachings and example as a source for her own musical focus on independent women and girl power.

After the interview, Beyoncé and Tina waved to the fans, then talked briefly on camera. The Living Archives video becomes part of the Carey C. Shuart Women’s Archive and Research Collection in the UH Library. For more info on the Friends of Women’s Studies, and the Living Archives, click here and here

More press on the very cool day: 1, 2

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New Parents @ 50+

Here’s a link to a cover story in New York Mag this week, about the way delayer trend — women who have kids at 50 or later. Parents of a Certain Age. The article, by Lisa Miller, discusses both egg donor moms (mostly) and adoptive moms (the bigger group). And a few dads.

The piece pulls its punches a bit — beginning with a heavy dose of the yuck factor, and citing Nancy London at length arguing that biology is destiny, and 50 is too late. Then midway through it changes gears:
“Here is why the arguments against old parents put forth by this article thus far are actually all bunk: They rest on the assertion that people above a certain externally imposed cutoff should not have children because it is not natural—and nature is a historically terrible arbiter of personal choice. American states used to legislate against interracial couples on the basis that miscegenation was “unnatural.” Some conservatives continue to fight gay marriage and gay parenthood on the grounds that homosexuality is “unnatural.” Broad-minded people see these critiques for what they are: bias and personal distaste hiding behind an idea of natural law. And yet some of these same broad-minded people still feel comfortable using chronological age to sort the suitable potential parents from the unsuitable. That’s because those judgments, and the backlash they’re fueling, are a product of ageism, the last form of prejudice acceptable in the liberal sphere. Sitting so ostentatiously on the boundary between “youth” and “age,” 50-year-olds threaten an image we hold of good parents (i.e., the handsome, glossy-haired ones depicted in the house-paint ads). By acting young when they’re supposed to be old, they cause discomfort for the people around them. Parents like Kate Garros have felt this all too acutely. “If you don’t meet people’s expectations of what a mother looks like, they can’t hack it,” she told me.”

Too bad for those expectations, however. The scene is morphing fast.

You can find a few words of mine toward the end about older women, money and clout. Given free rein I would have gone on a length about how it’s only when women delay kids that they get the chance in the work world as it’s constructed today to finish their educations and climb the ladders at work to points where their voices can shape policy. But Miller makes many great points here – tracking a trend that a good number in her NY audience are already on board for.

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Local Labor Ladies / Happy B’day, B!

Led by reports of zero US job growth in August, in a national context of big pushes to roll back workers’ bargaining rights, this Labor Day is signifying hard.

So much to say, so much of it deeply irritating, I’m celebrating the holiday with a trio of local Houston labor heroines.

Houston Mayor Annise Parker

Elizabeth Warren

Beyoncé Knowles

Yes, all of these ladies know Houston well.
Annise Parker, our mayor, just passed a Hire Houston First plan to keep growing local jobs, while working to hold onto her own job in a second term on November 8th, effectively unopposed.

Elizabeth Warren, a UH grad and former UH law prof, just stepped away from the job she created at the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to return to teaching business law at Harvard, while exploring the possibility of a Senate run in 2012, with a major citizens’ rights focus.

Famous for being—and singing about being—a hard working woman and wage earner (to “all the honeys making money!”), Beyoncé is now taking on the other side of “woman’s work,” as she goes about the business of bearing her share of the population, having her first child. And today (September 4th) just happens to be her birthday – the big 3-0.

Happy B’day, B!

Keep up the good work, ladies!

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Male Scientists Want More Children Too

We’ve known for a while that women are turned away from academic careers in STEM fields (Science, Engineering, Technology and Math) at least in part because they fear that they’ll end up not having a family or being able to have fewer kids than they want.

A new report from Rice and SMU expands the research to men — and finds that men are also turned away from STEM academic careers out of fear that they’ll have too few kids, though the proportion is somewhat smaller.

(“Women [postdocs] are much less likely than men to report considering a tenure-track academic job at a research university [69.1% of women vs. 84.0% of men, p<0.0001, n = 472]. But both men and women are equally likely to report considering a career outside science entirely [for graduate students, 25.2% of men and 26.4% of women, p = 0.7379, n = 639; for postdoctoral fellows, 16.4% of men and 20.3 of women, p = 0.2790, n = 463]. [Per the study’s regression analyses, “having had fewer children than desired due to the science career is the only factor that predicts seeking a career outside science.”])

And among those (male and female) who are in these careers, the men who report having fewer kids than they wanted also report a HIGHER degree of overall dissatisfaction with their lives than do the women (male scientists average 1.5 kids, female scientists 1.2).

The report (by sociologists Elaine Howard Ecklund and Anne Lincoln) concludes that “universities would do well to re-evaluate how family friendly their policies are… and [for example] might leverage additional resources to help foster scientists’ work-family balance, such as providing on-site day care.”

And, some of us who’ve been there might add, making sure that care is available for all who want it (not just a few spots), that it’s not exorbitantly expensive, and that it can be part time for those with infants who don’t want to sign up for full time care but do want some. Too often when child care is available, it is not available on terms that families actually feel comfortable signing on for.

The take-away: if you want more scientists and engineers–male and female, you need to make the life style that goes with the work conducive to full-spectrum happiness. Presumably the same logic applies to all time-intensive fields where you want to attract workers.

Gosh, childcare. What an innovative idea. Good for families, good for employers, good for parents, good for kids, good for the national workforce. Are we nearing the point when there be enough women in policy-making roles to create the national system that we all know will benefit everyone? Maybe Kathleen Sebelius can just put a national system in place as a national health initiative (see below).

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