Mother Knows Best

Mother Knows Best

Woman gives birth at 70 — isn’t that ridiculous? Or worse, isn’t it unethical, to bear kids you might not be around to see into adulthood?

Those aren’t my questions — they’re the undertow in all the reporting on the latest installment in the “how late can you wait” fertility story. This time the new record comes from India where the 70-year-old Rajo Devi finally fulfilled her life-long quest for a baby, via egg donation. (But wait — didn’t Omkari Panwar give birth at 70 in India — to twins — this June?) Last year the story came from New Jersey, when psychologist Frieda Birnbaum, already the mother of two adult children and a first-grader, became at 60 the oldest woman to have twins in the US (there seem to be no end of record-setting opportunities).

Responding to dubious questioners, Birnbaum noted at the time, “I think those people [who object] need to get ready for what’s coming up in our society. … There are a lot of middle-aged women [having babies] — 40s, 50s, now I just turned 60. That’s going to be acceptable. They have to just keep up with what’s going on with society.”

What’s going on is revolutionary. The so-far only occasional 60- and 70-year-old mothers get headlines, but the hundreds of thousands of women starting or continuing their families in their late 30s and their 40s, and the increasing numbers having kids in their 50s are the big change agents, redefining women’s roles in every respect. It wasn’t long ago that they too were facing questions about their suitability as parents — wouldn’t they be too worn out and out of touch with the youth culture? But kids are a fitness program in themselves, parents who start later make the extra effort to keep up, and it turns out that older parents offer special benefits, both to their kids and to the world.

Newly supplied post-1960 with birth control, longer life expectancies, expanded adoption options, and more recently with IVF and egg donation technology, women as a group have been rewriting our life plots, answering Freud’s question “what do women want?” by example. It turns out that many of us want families, but we also want careers and a say in the way the world is run. Delaying kids makes it possible for women to have all three, for the first time in history.

That’s not the story we tend to hear however. Instead, we get lots of admonitions – either about waiting “too late” to have kids the usual way, or about succeeding “too late” to do the motherhood job well. But though the many media stories about infertility might give you the impression that nobody over 35 can have kids the standard way, many do.

Where in 1970 only 1 in 100 women started their families at or after 35, in 2006 it was 1 in 12. And 1 in 7 babies overall were born to moms 35 or more (611,000 in 2006, of which roughly 6,000 involved egg donation). Add in the adoptive moms and that’s quite a crowd of later moms.

Which isn’t to say that there are no problems. While about 11% of women are infertile at 35, it’s about 50% at 41, and after 43 very few women can have kids the usual way. Egg donation is an option for those who can afford it – chances are 50/50 at every attempt. Adoption is an option too, with its own complexities.

So why do women wait? In interviews, later moms give four basic reasons: education, establishing at work, finding the right partner and self-development. Many cite all four. It turns out that delaying kids has served women as a shadow benefits system, linking to higher lifetime salaries (delay can be a class elevator, and one study shows a 3% annual return to delay in lifetime earnings) and the clout to demand flexible schedules when they’re not offered to less experienced workers. As women trickle up into policy-making roles, family friendliness spreads. Maybe soon women who feel ready to start earlier won’t have to choose between having kids and earning a decent wage.

In addition, delay leads to greater equality in marital decision-making, a phenomenon that transforms the family dynamic and raises the happiness level of all involved. Amazingly but handily, later moms live longer (partly a physical issue and partly one of health-care access linked to their higher incomes). There’s a new twist on the “how-late” contest.

Of course, the demand to expand the fertility window pushes scientific innovation, and we can expect ongoing breakthroughs in that realm.

But perhaps most importantly, later moms are the agents of enormous social change, because their business savvyness and credentials are getting family and women’s issues a hearing they’ve never had before, and moving us toward a culture of care and fairness.

It turns out that many individual women’s personal choices add up to good effects for the group. Which brings us back to the 60- and 70-year-old moms. Rajo Devi made her choice in circumstances quite different from Frieda Birnbaum’s, to escape the negativity she’s lived with as a “barren” woman in a culture where female fertility is highly valued. Relatedly, Omkari Panwar, the mother of two grown girls, sought out IVF at 70 in order to have a son in a world where boys are preeminent. Both women have extended families who will care for the kids if they cannot. Their choices might not be yours, but apparently they make empowering sense to these ladies.

Birnbaum operates in a different but related world in which she and her husband expect to live long in good health and choose to spend their later years actively parenting young children. Sounds neither ridiculous nor unethical, but it does sound new. All these women are exercising choice, which in itself may be what shocks the naysayers. It’s a new world when women can write their own life stories, and as they do they further change the world for everybody.

For millennia, mothers have been strategizers, making good choices for their families and themselves in whatever circumstances, based on the available information, and building upon one another’s experience. Instead of admonishing mothers for not doing the familiar, it’s time to listen and learn. In this season of innovation around standard maternity, we can celebrate and support the familial, in all its forms.

Childcare as Infrastructure: Minting the Common Wealth

Childcare as Infrastructure

In presenting his plan for an economic recovery last week, President-elect Obama spoke of creating 2.5 million jobs by 2011–jobs that would both address the immediate crisis and work as long-term growth engines, by shoring up our crumbling infrastructure and laying the groundwork for the alternative energy industries of the future. These industries are not two but three mints in one (taking mints in the value-producing sense)–supplying jobs today and tomorrow and fighting global warming at the same time! Here’s another means of multiplying value and jobs: add childcare to the jobs-creation list.

An expanded national childcare system can also provide at least three mints, of both the short and long term kinds. While Obama aims to fund traditional infrastructure-maintenance work (rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools), in the big picture, good, affordable childcare shores up infrastructure of an even more essential kind, our citizens.

As the enormity of the failure of the current business culture of greed has demonstrated, it’s time to rewrite the business model. It’s time to move from a culture of greed toward a culture of care, one that invests in all citizens on the understanding that together we are our common wealth. Along with the move to universal education for four-year-olds that Obama has proposed, we badly need a network of care for children 0-3, both to provide all kids with good care and to allow mothers who want to work to contribute fully to the national economy.

To date the case for a national childcare system has been a political nonstarter in the US, though for decades we’ve seen that the French program serves its families and that nation well–much more satisfactorily than does our lack of program. But in troubled economic times, political barriers to good framework choices suddenly look less imposing.

In the US, good childcare is available to relatively few children. The lack connects to life-time poverty and diminished opportunities for many people, both the children who do not receive good care and the mothers who step out to raise their kids and as a result cut short their own educations, their lifetime earnings and their retirement incomes.

Women of all classes are also discouraged from putting their kids in childcare by the politicized media coverage that over-stresses the importance of constant mom care, partly through contrast with the frequently inadequate childcare now on offer. This negatively affects their long-term earnings ability and women’s influence overall in shaping our social institutions because they do not trickle up proportionately into policy-making roles.

There are many ways that a national childcare system might be configured–but here’s an outline to open the discussion: neighborhood centers, staffed by trained and well-paid professionals, would provide good, affordable childcare to all the kids in the area whose parents chose it. These centers would also offer parenting classes and drop-in care and would be linked to the health care system. As in France, these centers could take a variety of forms, and might include expanded pre-existent Head Start programs, newly constructed centers run by a national childcare agency, and private businesses, new and pre-existent, run to meet rigorous federal standards and under federal supervision. It would also include partial funding for in-home care for those who need it. Different centers would involve different costs to parents, who could choose among the available options. Funding would involve sliding-scale payments by parents along with government underwriting both directly and through tax credits.

Jobs generated would include construction work for new centers and renovations, hundreds of thousands of teaching positions, as well as new positions for those who teach the teachers. As in both the French and the US Military’s childcare programs, teachers in this initiative would be well trained and well compensated, and centers would be supervised and accredited. Teacher turnover would plummet, enrollment would rise and children would thrive. Women of all classes could feel comfortable leaving their kids (the next generation we all count on) in a safe and affordable educational environment while they went to work. What a concept!

This program would pay forward on at least three levels–many mints in one: 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. Many of these jobs would go to women. They 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 women at all class levels to participate more fully in growing the economy by making good childcare more affordable and by changing the current culture around childcare–countering the current guilt-inducing media coverage 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. The program’s expense would be offset in the short term by economic gains from the stimulus it would introduce between 2009 and 2011. It would be offset in the long term by economic gains from women’s more consistent work and expanded productivity; from savings on worker replacement and training when parents have to step out because good childcare is not available; from drops in the costs of crime, welfare, and prisons among disadvantaged children; and from the pervasive societal gains in innovation and vitality that expanded education brings to all citizens. Every crisis brings opportunities. By shifting from a culture of greed to a culture of care, we can multiply our common wealth many times over. Innovations in our provision of health care, family-friendliness and elder care will also mint new value for our national economy and our culture. In addressing recessionary concerns, it’s essential that we make innovative use of all our resources. Rather than throwing good money after bad debts, let’s bank on the future by creating a level playing field on which all workers and their children, of all classes and both sexes, can flourish and contribute. [This piece first appeared at huffingtonpost.com]

Thinking Ahead, on The New Longevity

The likelihood is, whatever your age, that you’re aspiring to be even older. Whether she thinks about it this way or not, every young woman who hopes to live long and happily aspires to being an old lady. And every young man an old man. The good news is, these days we have a good chance of getting there.

But while we’re encouraged to live long, we get a lot of mixed messages about how we regard the old, and ourselves as we age. Ours is a youth-focused culture that equates youth with beauty and excitement and age with un-beauty and tedium. How do we put it all together? With some difficulty, frequently!

But increasing numbers of the population are crossing the border into older territory. Due to increases in public health measures, people in the developed world, and increasingly the less developed world as well, are living longer and longer. We’ve added nearly 30 years to the average life expectancy in the US over the past century, jumping from roughly 47 for all in 1900 to 75 for men and 80 for women in 2004.

That is an immense change–one that you may take for granted, but one that neither our culture nor our social systems has any real precedent or preparation for. Soon 20% of the population will be over 65, up from 5% not long ago. This affects our lives in all directions–shaping our investment strategies, our aesthetics, our decisions around healthy lifestyles, our housing construction, our career trajectories, our patterns of family formation, our health and elder care system, our relationships with parents and children, our tax structure, our sex lives, and on and on.

In 2011 the first of the boomers will reach 65–which means we’ll get to see what their patterns of retirement are. There are predictions – based both on the economic downturn and on indications about choice – that many of boomers with their big work identification will not retire at all, at least not at 65, or they’ll move to a second career or realm of volunteer work, which means we’ll be seeing a new sector of productivity in our workforce.

In the coming years, we’ll be learning about what the new longevity means at every turn, since the boomers as a group will be more educated, and more well to do than elders past – and as a result they’ll be healthier longer as well, since health has a direct connection to socio-economics in our system.

Expanded longevity leads to new options for life sequencing and for life choices. Quite a few boomers will still be raising kids in later life – since our increased longevity has shaped the choice of many women and men today to start their families later than their parents did – a choice made possible by the twin agencies of birth control and the new longevity. If we didn’t expect to be around a good while longer, we couldn’t be starting our families at 35 or 40 or even later.

While increased longevity affects everyone, women experience it in special ways, both because they live longer than men on average, and because their circumstances are often very different from those of men. Women face a special form of ageism, since their social value is often linked to fertility and youth—even though grandmothers all over are essential to the lives of their families.

Anthropologists attribute the evolution of the human brain to the fact that humans are one of the few creatures who experience menopause. The existence of postmenopausal women who could help their toddler grandkids while the moms tended the newborns allowed toddlers to avoid having to grow up fast and gather their own food. As a result, their brains could grow bigger and mature longer. Many thanks to the grandmas past for that!

In spite of their service, women are more likely to live in poverty in old age than men, and because their husbands often pre-decease them, they tend more often to live alone in their later lives. These issues need addressing in terms of social security policy and the re-structuring of communities, and those are some of the issues we’ll be addressing in the next few days.

Chances of developing dementia increase with age, and since women live longer they have increased chances of developing dementia. While scientists work toward developing cures or means of slowing the rate of onset, it’s also key that we develop better care mechanisms than we have.

While aging involves losses, it also involves gains. For one, we as a society have an opportunity to discover on a large scale what wisdom comes with long life, and to incorporate that wisdom into our social structures. As elders live longer, we have our history and traditions present among us in new ways.

Gains may be gender-specific too. Women may also find that old age offers an escape from a lot of social pressures, and a chance to set their own agenda.

Clearly the scene is changing fast for all of us, both in terms of prospects and in terms of current reality. As a group we often buy into the ageist view and don’t want to think about the old or about ourselves becoming old. But that’s a formula for trouble – since if we don’t address the reality, we can’t re-shape it to work well. It’s time to explore all the issues that the new longevity presents –both the opportunities and the challenges, and to respond creatively to them.

Kisses for My President: Work/Family Balance in the White House and in Your House

Kisses for My President

Polly Bergen played the mother of the first female President in ABC’s Commander in Chief a few seasons back with a wink to those who remembered her past. Back in 1965 Bergen also played the first female POTUS, in a movie called Kisses for My President.

While her husband (Fred MacMurray) hung about awkwardly, President Leslie McCloud handled her job ably. The first gentleman wasn’t sure what his job was, however, and all the implied questions about where the dividing line between men’s work and women’s work lay and why were resolved when she, already the mother of two older kids, became pregnant and resigned, facing a choice between losing the job or losing the baby. Even in the sixties a working woman with kids was imaginable, but working with a baby was not.

Forty years later, Geena Davis’s Mackenzie Allen might have been that child Leslie McCloud left office to raise. With three school-age kids, the baby question didn’t arise for mama Mackenzie, presumably for two reasons: first, things had changed enough that the point of the story was no longer to find an ending that pushed her out of office, it was to show her managing there. Second, and equally pragmatically, because, as the female candidate for VP in the 2000 film The Contender assured those worried about the chance that she might become pregnant in office, Mackenzie and her husband could be assumed to employ reliable birth control (something still fairly new in 1965).

Nonetheless, though she had many devoted fans, Mackenzie too left office early–when the show was canceled. So, yes, she could be imagined holding the job, but then again, not so much.

Those two story lines in tandem with this year’s political stories suggest both that we’ve come a distance, and that we’re still conflicted about what kinds of work women are supposed to or are allowed to do in our world. Hillary has already lived the life of a working mother with a young child in the White House, but her status as First Lady looked enough like a familiar role and occurred against a backdrop quite different from that of today. These days advocates for revising the national work/family dynamic speak on every other corner. In between you’ll hear voices raised for a return to a world in which women knew their place and stayed in it.

Part of the conflict stems from the fact that the system we operate within makes it so hard for women to succeed. The question of how to accommodate the dual needs of kids of all ages–and babies in particular–as well as a demanding job remains a huge issue in contemporary America, and Sarah Palin’s candidacy brings it front and center even though she herself has not made it a talking point.

It’s an issue for working women all over America, from executives to middle management to line workers, shop assistants, and clerks. And increasingly it’s an issue for men, whose working wives make child care a family concern. The world is full of working people with young kids, and they need answers.

A few basic changes could make enormous differences. A national investment in an affordable, reliable system of good childcare (see the French example) would release a torrent of talent and energy into the rebuilding economy on at least three levels: the childcare workers who will earn more and get more education while providing more consistency to the children they’re tending; the mothers and fathers of those kids who will be freed to participate more fully in growing the economy; and the children, who will themselves be more educated and more able to contribute down the line.

If we value families as the source of the next generation of citizens, there’s plenty of room to make changes in the work culture so that people who want to spend time with their kids while building careers can do so. And framework changes in areas like the tax code so that mothers’ income isn’t unfairly charged as it is in the current income averaging system could reshape the way women’s work adds up in the home budget. Many more changes, large and small, could emerge from a vigorous national discussion.

While this political season won’t yield a woman president, it has seen a movement of women into the political forefront as never before. We’re ready for a national leadership (male and female) that takes seriously the contributions on both the home front and the business front of all citizens and commits to facilitating both. So far Barack Obama is the only candidate who has demonstrated an interest in pursuing such family-friendly change. If he, as an active father to young children, can carry that banner into the White House, he can count on lots of kisses, of the metaphorical kind, from families all over the nation. And the groundwork for a return to a burgeoning national economy for good measure.

[This piece was first posted on huffingtonpost.com]

GENDER, CREATIVITY and the NEW LONGEVITY

The Women’s Studies Program at the University of Houston will be presenting a symposium on GENDER, CREATIVITY and the NEW LONGEVITY, on November 13 – 15, 2008.

Speakers will explore the social and personal outcomes of the new longevity and our creative responses as a community to the changing scene.

Katha Pollitt will give the keynote on the evening of the 13th. Speakers include Margaret Gullette and Martha Holstein, among many others.

A linked exhibit called THRIVE!, curated by Mary Ross Taylor will open at DiverseWorks on November 14th, with an opening party from 6 to 8. www.diverseworks.org

Check out www.friendsofwomen.org for full details.

Ready or Not?

Here’s a piece from earlier this year:

Ready or Not?

What do Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama have in common? They all began their families at relatively advanced ages. Hillary was 32 when she had Chelsea in 1980, Laura was 35 when the twins arrived in 1981, and Michelle was 34 and 37 at the births of her daughters in 1998 and 2001. All three are part of a decades-old worldwide trend among women, who, when offered the chance, often choose to start their families later (sometimes quite a bit later) than their mothers did. The CDC’s recent birth data release reveals that births among first-time later moms increased again in 2006 (up 1% over 2005).

Births to older moms have been rising for years (10 times as many first births to women 35-39 in 2006 as in 1975 and 13 times as many births to 40-44 year olds), while the rates for younger moms have generally been descending. This year however the numbers of births to younger moms also rose (up 3% for teens — the first rise since 1991, and linked to reliance on abstinence-only programs — and up 4% for women 20-24). The average U.S. woman starts her family at 25.2, up from 21.4 in 1970. College-educated women generally put a hold on kids while they go to school and then establish at work, so their average age at first birth has been over 30 for several years. For many reasons, birth timing shapes a woman’s life.

The thirty- and forty-something new moms, like Laura, Hillary and Michelle, are educated women with work histories, whether they’re currently in a job or staying home. And that history, it turns out, offers many benefits — to the individuals, their families and to society.

Most media stories on later motherhood focus on infertility, but my study of New Later Mothers (women who started their families at 35 or over, by birth or adoption), found that many women succeed in having kids later in the usual way (over 600,000 in 2006 – 1 in every 7 babies). Those who don’t succeed with their own genetic material often find alternate routes to happy families via egg donation (another 6,000 or so) or adoption.

The women I interviewed were overwhelmingly glad they waited until they personally felt ready for family, because for them waiting brought many advantages. Established in their jobs and secure in their senses of self, they can focus on their kids’ development rather than their own. They have fewer money worries and more clout at work (handy for negotiating family-friendly schedules). The self-confidence they’ve built at work transfers to their mothering. Their marriages feel sound. And, remarkably, they even live longer!

Today’s later dads are also a new breed. Though in years past some dads started their families later, those guys tended to have younger wives, whereas in 2007 the older dads tend to be married to peers, which creates a different family dynamic. (Bill was 33, George was 35, and Barack was 36 and 39 when their kids were born.) Home life is more egalitarian, tasks more evenly shared, when women have cultural clout equal to their husbands’.

The new later motherhood involves an enormous cultural shift — maybe even a form of species evolution. It’s made possible by two prior changes: the broad availability of reliable birth control, and the health advances that have greatly extended the life expectancy of middle-class Americans.

These additional years mean that we can sequence our life-stages differently than ever before. For women, that means more opportunities to explore realms of life that they didn’t have time for when they had to focus on raising the next generation before hitting the graveyard (at an average 47 in 1900). For men, the expanding workplace family-friendliness that women’s trickle up has wrought means the chance to participate in their children’s lives and to share the burden of family support. Women’s education and work experience mean big additions to our pool of innovation and skill — in the women themselves and the kids they nurture.

While many people feel ready to start their families in their twenties, readiness at any age involves choice and presumes access to reliable birth control. Beyond that, all families need expanded social support, which can be enacted through business and legislative policy. Real family friendliness builds a strong workforce for tomorrow while allowing the current workforce to focus on their jobs and perform at their best.

We are beginning to recognize the cascading ramifications of the changes the new later motherhood brings. But the diverse accomplishments of Michelle, Laura and Hillary (respectively, hospital administrator, librarian, and politician, and, similarly, wife, mother and envoy) just hint at the kinds of benefits that can flow when all women can decide for themselves when they feel ready to start their families.

[This piece was first posted in January 2008 on huffingtonpost.com]

Never Done and Under Paid

“A farmer works from sun to sun,” goes the adage, “but a woman’s work is never done.” It’s also been said that women who don’t hold paying jobs “don’t work.” What’s that difference about?

Here’s my take on the many aspects of Women’s Work–both in the home and outside it, in honor of this year’s close conjunction of Women’s Equality Day (the suffrage anniversary) and Labor Day:

Never Done and Under Paid

This year Labor Day and Women’s Equality Day bookend the week: a timely conjunction, since tension over what properly constitutes women’s work is the crux of much of our current public discourse.

That concern feeds the babble about baby bumps that fills the celebrity magazines, lies at the root of the Supreme Court’s rejection of Lilly Ledbetter’s suit for fair pay restoration, of the push to pass legislation to reverse that judgment and for pay equity overall, and of the efforts by the current administration to cut access to sex ed and to birth control wherever they can find an opportunity. The Democratic primaries operated in part as a labor debate over what kinds of jobs women are allowed to hold (president or clothes presser, in one formulation). The endless stories on fertility and Mommy Wars play into the debate as well.

It’s the change in definition that “women’s work” has undergone in the past 50 years that generates the controversy. For ages, women’s labor, apart from sex and reproduction, was largely limited to care work, whether it was done in the home for free or outside it for pay. Within the family, care work is viewed as private and personal. But this work has a very public aspect too: the nation and the business community depend on mothers to bear and raise children to be good citizens, reliable workers and avid consumers.

In effect, mothers have been underwriting the national bottom line by raising their young for no pay.

Insofar as the business world presumes their efforts, mothers have always been part of the larger economy, but their contributions have been invisibilized by the economists who segregate “production” from “reproduction” and calculate the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by omitting the work that goes on in that most domestic of spheres, the home, because it is unpaid. A more-apt acronym would be GIDP, since it’s fundamentally Grossly Inaccurate.

What’s more, instead of being recognized for their generosity, mothers have been further punished economically, with low pay and limited benefits when they work outside the home, and with small protection when they divorce. Motherhood is a big predictor of poverty in old age.

Jobs available to women in general have been paid less than the same or comparable jobs done by men. Women’s work has been considered just worth less–not because it was but because women didn’t have the status to command better treatment. Or the time to fight for it: they were too busy tending the torrent of babies, many of whom died young of ailments now treatable.

But since the advent of hormonal birth control in 1960, the social fabric woven over millennia around the assumption that women were baby machines has been undergoing quick redesign. When offered the chance, women and their partners in the US and around the world have chosen to start their families later and to keep them smaller. Most have kids, but some do not, by choice or default. Birth control has allowed large numbers of women to enter the universities and the workplace in an ever-expanding range of fields. In so doing these women have doubled our national talent pool and strengthened our skilled workforce. When mothers are well educated, the children are too, and the population lives longer in better health. The playing field has changed utterly.

In this new arena, women combine raising the next generation of workers and citizens (often in active partnership with the dads) with actively contributing as workers and citizens themselves — an overall increase in efficiency.

The new gender realities of employment and national interest call for equal pay for equal work as well as workplace policy that allows people who wish to be parents to build both families and careers. But though women’s status has been rising, we’re not there yet: women still make just 78 cents for every dollar men make, and 80 cents on the dollar adjusting for occupation and rank. Oppression anyone?

Gradually, the work rules have been changing, as women trickle up into positions in business and government that either allow them to institute change themselves or cause their colleagues to make change in order to retain them. Two much ballyhooed pay-equity bills have made it through the House, and we’ll soon see if they make it through the Senate and past the likely veto.

Those who blame feminists for focusing on women’s workplace rights and failing to tend the family side of the struggle in the early days might consider whether it wasn’t necessary for women first to establish the clout they now have in order to be heard around equity and work/life issues at all.

In the face of the ongoing redesign, there’s plenty of push back by the forces of yore. This is exercised both around opposition to pay equity and work-place flexibility and in the recently very-pressurized discourse around that specifically female version of labor — the work of child-bearing.

A network of real supports for people of both genders would promote the maximization of our potential, as workers and as parents, for personal and national benefit. It would include the usual suspects like fair pay protections, access to affordable good child care, affordable access to and information on birth control and abortion, and paid sick days, and it would expand to fund FMLA, mandate infertility coverage, and create real on and off ramps for women and men who need time off from a career to focus on family, and more.

We’ve just had a fine example of what a business model focused on short-term profits does for us. A better model would focus on long-term growth and honor all the work that women have done and will do in the home and outside it.

For millennia women’s work has been underwriting the bottom line for business and the nation. It’s time for some return on that investment.

[This piece was first posted on huffingtonpost.com]