Family Friendly Recession?: Cut Hours, Not Jobs

Family Friendly Recession?: Cut Hours, Not Jobs

We’ve heard a lot recently about how this recession is affecting men’s jobs more than women’s. But while women’s relative labor-force participation rises in recessions, most of the jobs women hold on to earn small wages and low status. In the long-term, recessions can have very negative effects on women’s careers — both at the individual and national levels. Gains for women earned through years of effort may be swept away in the undertow of layoffs, when flexibility and diversity efforts suddenly disappear.

Women’s movement up business ladders and through glass ceilings is endangered right now. Early reports suggest that on Wall Street, a disproportionate number of women overall and almost all those hired in through firms’ “opt-in” programs to work flex time have been let go. Little thought is being given to maintaining diversity as layoff decisions are made. This could have huge negative effect long-term. One financial insider (who requests anonymity in sensitive times) observes about the downturn: “In this industry, it definitely set women’s progress back at least 20 years.”

The current issue of Forbes documents a resurgence of sexism in the finance field — “In the worst financial crash since the Depression, financial services and insurance firms have cut 260,000 jobs. Seventy-two percent of the missing workers laid off have been women, even though they constituted 64% of employment before the crash began.”

Women overall earn a lot less than men do because many industries are still strongly sex-segregated, often because women with kids need part-time or otherwise flexible work. Historically the jobs offering such arrangements have paid less.

But the professions are not as gendered as they used to be, and some women do make high wages. Additionally, once sufficient numbers of women reach positions of influence within business and government, they change the gender-dynamics of the workplace at all levels, introducing family-friendly policies and challenging the gendering of the pay structure. The work still gets done, but on a new, more flexible schedule. It takes a while to establish these new dynamics, which allow women to contribute more fully to the national economy.

While women comprise only 15.2% of boards of directors and 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs, they hold 50.6% of professional and management positions. As a result, 79% of businesses reported offering some flex options in 2008, the pay equity bill is now law, and we have several initiatives in Congress to put all workers on an equal playing field.

Progress has been made, but the recession could halt it, and not just in the finance world. In troubled economic times the historical tendency has been to send the ladies with higher-status jobs back home, or down ladder, pushing them out not just through individual actions but through policy changes and negative media messages.

In the Depression, working women were scapegoated for men’s lack of jobs, and the group’s career progress was set back for decades. Similarly, in the recessions of the 70s and 80s and in this decade, women’s progress up ladder was slowed by a hostile environment that paralyzed the EEOC, undermined access to abortion and birth control, and portrayed women’s job losses as the result of a choice to stay home.

When recessions past ended, laid-off men returned to good jobs. Women remained largely in dead-end, low-wage work. With their collective status diminished, post-recessionary women had less ability to influence business policy than before the recession, and the system remained biased in favor of people without care-giving commitments (remember that these are not “merely personal” commitments, they are essential to the running of the nation). Eventually the trickle up began again, but the recessionary cycle ensured that it remained just a trickle. Recessionary setbacks have been a big part of the answer to the question “Why has women’s progress been so slow?” The Wall Street example makes it clear that long-term setbacks could occur again now.

Can we break the recessionary pattern? Absolutely.

Firstly, as Ellen Galinsky of the Families and Work Institute notes, flexibility has suddenly become a mainstream business strategy for companies seeking to retain current workers rather than having to start from scratch with new employees come the upturn. Reduced hours are among the cut-backs on the table, until things improve. President Obama endorsed that option in his Inaugural speech, and the savings to the nation when people stay in jobs speak for themselves.

Reduced hours may look like automatic family friendliness, but if the reduction is entirely on the employers’ terms it doesn’t help parents in need of flexibility much more than the standard workweek did. If employers work with employees, male and female, in devising reduced schedules, all parties gain.

And the government can assist. In 17 states, a Shared Work program helps employees and employers who must reduce hours by paying pro-rated unemployment benefits. In 2008 in New York 83% more employers participated in this program than in 2007, and a 2009 surge is already underway. In Texas the program is little known, but word is spreading. This option makes much more sense than layoffs in many environments and should be available nationwide.

Where potential savings on worker health care pushes employers to consider cutting workers they might prefer to cut hours for, government should cover the difference.

A second break with old patterns lies in society’s enormous capital investment in women’s education and in the extensive work experience women now have. Like any other form of capital, business leaders should find ways to utilize this human capital in a downturn. Smart employers will make every effort to hold onto their best talent, whatever the worker’s gender.

Thirdly, the enormity of the failure of the business culture of greed means the time is ripe to rewrite the model and move toward a culture of care. Rather than view the downturn as reason to turn away from initiatives that support women’s participation in better-paid jobs, the nation will be best served if we redouble our efforts in that direction, to take advantage of our full national talent pool.

It’s time for new ideas and big pictures. In today’s troubled economy, one way business and government can collaborate to keep workers, male and female, employed is by cutting hours instead of jobs, at all levels. One by-product could be that the old recessionary patterns that slow women’s progress up career ladders finally fall away. But we’re going to have to work actively and intentionally to make that happen.

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Darn It!: Recycling Frugality

Darn It!: Recycling Frugality

As jobs disappear, stocks plummet and credit freezes, many of us are cutting expenses and looking for ways to save. This is new territory for most of us, who’ve grown up in the age of disposability and more, more, more. But it’s familiar ground to the old folks, who made it through the Depression and WW2 rationing. Before them, before the past 100 years really, recycling, at home and in the wider world, was the only way of life. Turns out the finance crisis and the eco-crisis share a cause, and, at least in part, a solution.

The current emergency throws us back on old wisdom and skills. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” went the old line. “Mend and make do, ” the British government enjoined the home-front. Time to talk to grandma and your old-hippie aunt who still buys kasha in bulk with no packaging (we do pay for that stuff we then have to cart away). Or to the twenty- and thirty-something members of your local knitting group, who’ve made parsimony over into a new style and who don’t fear the realms of craft. Time to practice a new frugality, one with lots in common with the old frugality.

Last month inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander invoked images of the old thrifty ways, describing “[Someone] stitching up a hem, darning / a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, /repairing the things in need of repair.” These may be viewed as images of poverty — of how far many of us come from a darker past, but they are also images of love and caring and a model for behavior now on many fronts. There’s a lot in need of repair nowadays.

The skills themselves are not so difficult — fixing, re-using, making from scratch — though the mindset behind them may be, in the short term. “Do you know how to do that?” someone asked me incredulously, when I said I’d just have to darn the holey cuffs of an otherwise cute sweater I picked up at a clothing swap. It won’t look expert, but even I can figure out a basic warp and woof. Maybe with practice I’ll manage that special look of stylish ruin. Make it a game, not a sign of shame.

What these skills also require that’s maybe harder to come by is time. Collectively, we haven’t had much of that to spare recently. But increasing numbers of us will — if we’re out of work, or if our hours reduce. This last could have its positive side. If employers cut everybody’s hours instead of cutting some workers and keeping others (one more argument for a national health plan), everyone will have more time to talk to our families and our neighbors and to make good, cheap soup. More time to invest in looking for bargains, since, as our elders knew, a frugal housewife fattens the family fortune (works with househusbands too). More time to write letters to our purveyors reminding them to stock in bulk and to let us refill our old shampoo bottles, on the old co-op model. More time to follow through on that model and actually carry those bottles back.

Frugality can’t make soup out of a stone — nor will it provide the kind of stimulus the economy needs to pull us out of the current fast-deepening hole. We do have to spend some money in order to make money, it seems. But we recognize that we can’t just go back to the profligacy of the recent past, even if we do get access to credit again. And we do have to re-think the operations of value in all the senses of that word.

As we figure out the terms of the new economy, we could do a lot worse than to listen to the band of grandmas, knitters, granddads, historians, hippies, poets, cooks, tightwads and crafts-men and -women who connect us to the wisdom of generations past. Not only could that wisdom save us a few bucks, it could reinforce the fabric of those ties that bind.

[This piece first appeared at huffingtonpost.com]

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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.

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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]

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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.

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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]

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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.

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