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]

Reviews & Interviews

Here’s a recent review by Jo Keroes at the Mommy Track’d site.

Earlier reviews include the Washington Post (see Learned Ladies Living Large post below), the Houston Chronicle , the Austin American Statesman , and the Feminist Review.

Other discussions of the book appeared in the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph, Time Out NY Kids, among others…

Radio interviews include Conceive, on Air, The Current on the CBC, Conversations with Joy/WPR, and
Northeast Public Radio.

Births Up–No, Down!

Here’s my take on the differences between the CDC and Census reports on 2006 fertility, and the context of fertility anxiety the reports operate within:

“Births Up–No, Down!: Stats and the Politics of Fertility Anxiety”

“More Women Than Ever Are Childless, Census Finds” read last week’s NY Times headline. Both the claim and the rather alarmist phrasing (“more than ever!”) may have confused readers who recalled the December 2007 headline for the story on the annual CDC birth data (gathered from birth certificates), which told us that “Teenage Birth Rate Rises for First Time Since ’91.” That article then went on to report that rates were up for women in all age categories between 15 and 45. Both reports were based on data from 2006.

So how can births be up and down in the same year? Easily, if you’re comparing to different years past.

Where the CDC report compares to 2005 data, the Census report looks back thirty years and finds that in 1976 women 40 to 44 had a total average 3.1 kids, whereas now they have 1.9–one child fewer overall. Since some women do still have three or more, part of that average is a rise in the number of women who end their “childbearing years” without bearing children – up from 10% in 1976 to 20% in 2006, the lowest level documented to date.

Easily too, if your data come from different stages in women’s fertility stories: where the CDC documents actual births in the given year, the Census takes a retrospective look at how many children women report having by the time they’re 40 to 44, an age group assumed to have largely finished having kids.

It’s no surprise that more women are childless now than were in 1976. Work and family expectations have changed substantially. For most, birth control means the chance to decide how many kids you want, and when. But for some it means the chance to say “None” and still have a romantic life.

The 2006 CDC data tell us that births to teens 15 to 19 were up 3% after a steady 14-year decline, and that, less problematically but interestingly, births to women 20-24 were up 4%, women 25-29 were up 1%, 30-39 up 2%, and 40 to 44 up 3%.

In addition the CDC report calculates that the total fertility rate [TFR] for women went up to 2.1 in 2006. The TFR projects the total number of children that a hypothetical woman currently of childbearing age might be expected to have at current rates. Given that the TFR in 1983-1986 (when the women who were 40-44 in 2006 were just starting to have babies) was between 1.799 and 1.837, the recent Census report of 1.9 could just as well have been headlined: “Women Having Slightly More Children Than Predicted.”

But that would have required cross-referencing the CDC and Census data. Doing that might also have raised other questions. For instance, since the birth rate to women 40-44 was up 3% in 2006, and up consistently for more than 20 years prior, and with egg donation offering the possibility of expanded numbers of births to women 45 and over, there is basis for questioning whether the set of women 40 to 44 actually does offer us a good portrait of “completed fertility.” Something to talk about.

Background Anxiety

Though both reports don’t purport to do more than give some “facts,” statistics are always read in context. There’s a lot of complexity to the back-story on recent birth patterns, having to do with education, economics, changing social rules, HR policy, and the relative lack of affordable childcare, but the takeaway from the Census article for many readers was one more drop in the bucket of fertility anxiety.

Though the Times article began with a statement about women choosing not to have kids, the alarmist cast of the headline plays into an ongoing story we’ve been hearing constantly over the past five years about rising problems with infertility, in spite of the fact that that story is highly unspecific.

Lots of women have kids in their late 30s and early 40s, some in the usual way and some with the help of IVF, though sometimes it takes them longer to become pregnant than it would have earlier. Some try without success. After 43, increasing numbers of women employ egg donation, and many women adopt. Some decide to stay childfree.

Presumably the rise in the number of childless 40-to-44 year olds is due to a combination of some women and their partners choosing against kids altogether, others hoping for kids but out-waiting their fertility, and still others planning to start soon. Exactly what proportions are unknown. But infertility was the inference made by the reporter who called me asking if the story wasn’t evidence that working women were waiting “too late” to start their families.

The hyped-up infertility consciousness (repeated by the media ad infinitum) and the big emphasis on babies and on women’s “secret desire” to stay at home with kids long term, in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary, is a sign of another, underlying anxiety among some of us over how many women really don’t want to just stay home.

That anxiety helps shape the environment that’s putting pressure on women of all ages to have babies NOW, at whatever age–along with the recent highly politicized decreases in access to birth control, especially for younger women. Will it block the exits from the ways of yore? For many, sadly, it may.

If women are forced to step out of school at whatever level in order to raise kids they would rather have had later, our nation and our economy will suffer, especially if we offer them no real way to step back in. At a time when a strong future depends on our rigorously educating all our people, it’s not the time to throw away the real contributions that educated women make to our common wealth, both as moms educating young workers and citizens and as workers and citizens themselves.

At the same time, we have a group interest in supporting the family ambitions of our population. It’s time to move toward a really family-friendly national policy, that combines real work/family balance options in business, mandating insurance coverage for existing fertility treatments and expanding fertility research, and honoring the decisions of those who choose to live childfree.

[This piece was first posted at huffingtonpost.com]

Fertility “Facts”

Have you seen this table

or the chart it’s derived from it?

At several points in life and on the web I’ve encountered them, cited as evidence that the rate of age-based infertility in the US has risen over the past 100 years. The first time was in a fertility information session, presented by a fertility doctor to a RESOLVE fertility group meeting, where it was offered as evidence that 20th-century fertility had declined markedly from past centuries. I kid you not. The message was: call your fertility doctor.

I’ve also found the chart online: sometimes an attribution is given, to its source, a legitimate article by researcher George Maroulis. But context means a lot, and this presentation leaves out key information. The table at the top of this post I also found online. It also cites Maroulis and seems to draw on his chart, but does so very selectively and inaccurately (among other faults, it conflates and misstates the pre-20th century lines [there is no 18th or 19th-century data in the chart], omits the Iranian and Hutterite lines and misrepresents “modern USA” in several ways). And without contextualizing discussion, as in the presentation I attended and on the website linked to, it suggests that modern US women aged 30-34 have about a 50% chance of being infertile, and women 35-39 a more than 75% chance. This is entirely false.

In Maroulis’s essay, where this chart originates, it’s clear that what’s being compared here are data on actual birthrates in pre-birth-control (“natural”) populations and in the US at times when birth control of various kinds was being employed–non-hormonal (1955 and 1981) as well as hormonal (1981). The chart documents the effect of the use of birth control–not a decline in ability to bear.

The latest data in the chart comes from very early in the new later motherhood trend (1981), so the representations of births to women in their forties in the chart tell us little about dynamics today.

As I note in Ready, while the table includes a footnoted comment that the “older data is likely to include substantial inaccuracies,” no note appears on the huge inaccuracy created by the presentation of the modern data.

This kind of erroneously presented material amounts to a form of statistical fakery, and contributes to the high level of contemporary fertility anxiety.

Here’s Maroulis’s discussion of the charts:
“Data from the United States do not reflect natural fertility rates since the populations are, as mentioned earlier, practicing birth control. However, they are of interest since they are the product of a combination of biological and social inferences. . . . the fertility rates observed in natural cycles of historical populations may have a bias in that older women who have already conceived previously may not be as anxious to get pregnant. So it may be more appropriate to review data from populations in whom women purposely delay childbearing and try to get pregnant at older ages. . . . A considerable amount of data from such natural populations that delay childbearing and did not practice contraception existed from the late 1700s and early 1800s in Belgium, England, France, Germany and Scandinavia, where the mean age of marriage was over 27 and even close to 30. . . . Results [show] that women over 40 years are not, as often portrayed, hopelessly infertile but indeed can, in up to 48% of cases, achieve a pregnancy.” (George B. Maroulis, “Effect of Aging on Fertility and Pregnancy,” Seminars in Reproductive Endocrinology, 9, no. 3 [August 1991]: 168.)

Note that the “over 40” category he invokes at the end of the quote is not defined in terms of upper age limit, and so could involve a number of women over 43, who skew the information on women 40-42, who current data indicates are substantially more likely to be fertile than women 43 and over.

Happy Daddy Day

For the happy daddies everywhere, and their families, here’s my post on the Father’s Day centennial, called

“Morphing the Daditude”

Parents had a big year in 1908 — our modern Mother’s Day had its start that May in a church in West Virginia. Inspired by that service, and in the shadow of a mining disaster that killed many local dads, the first Father’s Day followed fast, two months later and 15 miles away.

After that florescence of filial feeling one century ago, Mother’s Day (which had an earlier post-Civil War pacifist moment) zoomed on and became an official national holiday in 1914. Father’s Day had a slower momentum. In 1910 Father’s Day reappeared, across the country in Spokane, backed up to the third Sunday in June. That date has been celebrated since then, but it didn’t become an official holiday until 1972.

Why the 58-year gap? Difference in sentiment toward mom and dad? In our sense of what was appropriate? (Did the manly men of yore seek or even accept recognition for love — or did that seem too Lear-ishly needy?) Difference in our levels of guilt? (Mothers have historically had to deal with lots more daily dreck while sacrificing other ambitions, and the special holiday served as a bit of a sop.)

The officializing of the father’s day holiday might link to the start of a gradual shift in the nature of the relationship between dads and kids. Or maybe it was all about commerce… with the official holiday arriving just in time to grab some of the cash increasing numbers of women were just starting to earn.

Whatever the reason, the dads celebrated today have come a big distance from the dads of a hundred years back, a trip they’ve made in concert with today’s moms: As the moms have moved out into the workforce and established themselves there, the dads have moved into the home life in new ways.

While dads have always loved their kids, they haven’t always been encouraged to know them well. Gen-X and Gen-Y dads spend more than half again as much time with their kids each day as their dads did, and they do loads more laundry. Modern dads are often “dual-centric” according to the Families and Work Institute (meaning they are both work- and family-centric). Of course that’s not every dad–some still operate in separate spheres from their partners, and some don’t participate in their kids’ lives at all. But overall a huge culture change is in the process of remapping the gendering of work and family. Employers (especially employers of middle class workers) are increasingly having to rethink their HR offerings to accommodate the needs of both working moms and family-focused dads (while also finding ways to ensure that their child-free workers don’t get overloaded when the parents head home).

These changes don’t come without complexities. We hear plenty about “mommy wars”–a divisive misnomer for our continuing dialogue around the recent big shifts in women’s roles.

Though we hear less about it, those complexities affect daddies too. There’s the isolation stay-at-home dads can feel, or the stress of the careerist who’s also an involved father–staying up late and cutting corners to operate in both worlds. There’s the effort of inventing the relationships with our partners as we live them (or of parenting solo) rather than going an established route. Sometimes there’s pressure from other dads to do what they do, even if it doesn’t feel like a fit for you.

It’s not easy for any party to this change, but the rewards can be considerable and the scene is shifting. In the workplace, employers increasingly build in flex options, move to results-based rather than face-time models, and recognize that a few years out of the workforce don’t mean a loss in brainpower. While these innovations evolved initially to meet the needs of moms, once in place they can’t be denied to dads as well. These options benefit families, so parents can be there for their kids when needed, not just at a time set by the employer. The workplace benefits too, with more available long-term labor force participants, when those who dial down for child care are allowed to dial back up when the kids demand less time (especially important as we approach the big worker drain that the Baby Boom retirement wave will bring), and a deeper (and happier) national talent pool.

Not least among the upsides of this shift is the new daditude that lets fathers get to know both their kids and themselves in new and often unexpectedly positive ways, even when and maybe because it sometimes involves some dreck. Today’s fathers discover what moms have known all along: that kid care and interaction has many pleasures. The kids raised with lots of dad input move forward into the next decades with a new sense of possibility for the kinds of roles they can take in society and for the relationships they can have with their own kids. I know my children are immeasurably enriched by their dad’s involvement in so many parts of their lives.

The process of evolving all aspects of our work systems–both inside and outside the home–has been ongoing for at least the century since Father’s and Mother’s Day began. The development and enforcement of OSHA rules (still problematic–but at least mining disasters that kill hundreds are rare) and the changes in the current daditude are enmeshed, linked through a shared pressure to recognize the importance of care and to compensate it with more than a bouquet and an annual dose of sentimentality. There remain lots of problems still to resolve, but we are all living the ongoing change.

Parenthood has never been simple, and we all do our best where we are. These days we labor together–men and women, parents and non, to re-function the work world for the 21st century, while raising the next generation – of workers, consumers and citizens. Happy Daddy Day to you and yours!

[This post first appeared on huffingtonpost.com.]

That Girl, the Continuing Story

The other day I had my hair done and came home with a bit of a flip–not my usual style. My elder daughter noticed and remarked that “you look like Ann Marie.” If that doesn’t ring a bell for you, maybe you’d recognize Ann as That Girl, the working girl heroine of the 60s TV show that made Marlo Thomas famous. Anna, who’s ten, knows Ann–and a raft of other characters from sitcoms past–courtesy of Netflix. At her age I watched it on primetime, Thursday nights.

So apropos! During the months when That Girl episodes were playing almost nonstop in our house two years ago it struck me that the show gives us the younger days of the first wave of new later moms. Ann wants a career before family, and the show is all about the confusion her ambition creates for her parents and even for her boyfriend Donald, though he supports her goal. But she’s clear about what she wants, and perseveres. When the show ended, Ann and Donald were engaged but not married.

It’s a story that’s been part of the TV sitcom world from its start: I Love Lucy was all about the 50s disconnect between a woman with career dreams and the family-pressures of the post-WWII decades when Rosie the Riveter suddenly became persona non grata. [I explore the Lucy paradox–at the same time that we’re told that Lucy’s incompetent, we know she’s making millions as the star of the show–in chapter one of Ready.]

Lucy (a pre-trend new later mom, whose second pregnancy at 41 was built into the plot of the show, though her age is not discussed) was the 50s response to the work/family balance question (maybe not so much an answer as another question), and That Girl moved the question along in the 60s and early 70s (Marlo was in her 30s for most of the show, but Ann seemed meant to be a bit younger). Their TV story continues through shows like Mary Tyler Moore and finally arrives at the motherhood moment in Murphy Brown in 1992. Murphy’s son Avery arrived in the arms of his 44-year-old single mom character to much public notice. Candice Bergen (2 years older than her character) had herself started her family 7 years earlier at 39. Since then? Judging Amy? Story-lines to do with family and work don’t jump to mind–what’s up with that? But the issues are certainly all around us. Birth timing, as I’ve noted before, is practically the only story in the tabloids. Is everybody watching Netflix?

While Ready provides a new look at the new later mom trend, the basic storyline is one we’ve all been following for years. Whether or not it’s been or might be your personal story, and whatever your hairstyle, the negotiation of birth timing, work and family issues means something to you–to all of us. At some level or another, all girls are that girl–persevering across the decades to figure it out together.

Happy Mother’s Day #100

Though my friend Ignatzia (not her real name) has issues with Mother’s Day (“they do a bad job of breakfast and then feel proud of themselves while doing nothing for the rest of the year!”), I like it pretty well. I like the cut-out cards and the effort put into whatever gift they decide on this time, even if the gift itself languishes in the days thereafter (last year it was my fault because I asked for a camellia bush when I meant gardenia, and then wasn’t interested enough in the resulting red plant with no particular smell to take it out of the pot).

But it’s not a big deal. There’s too much going on with two kids and two jobs in the house for anything to be too big of a deal for long — minutes after it happens, we’re on to the next thing. Another baseball game, another music lesson, another camp-out, another standardized test, another ailment, another meal, another play date. The backfield is always in motion when they’re small.

My own mom will be getting flowers — as a small token of my esteem. I’m glad of the chance to tell her I appreciate her hard work and big love. It was the chance to re-create that bond and the good times I remember from my childhood that made me want to become a mom myself. Hoping to pass it on.

For a more political angle on the dynamics and history of Mother’s Day (this year is the centenary), see my recent Huffington Post piece: Mother’s Day Born Yesterday: A Quick Century of Big Change for Modern Moms

Cheers!

Mother’s Day Born Yesterday:
A Quick Century of Big Change for Modern Moms

What’s in a mom? On any other day she might smell as sweet, but we give her particular credit (and roses) on the second Sunday of May. It’s been this way for 100 years.

Our modern Mother’s Day was born a century ago (on May 10, 1908 — in Grafton, West Virginia), and it became a national holiday in 1914 by Congressional decree. This sentimental occasion — a chance to celebrate the essential contributions moms make to their families and to the nation while supporting our local florists and restauranteurs — carries with it a soothing association with tradition. But a hundred years are a mere twinkling compared to the millennia moms have been on the job. Interesting that the all-moms holiday popped up just when the business of mothering was morphing more radically than ever before.

Picture the turn-of-the-last-century gender ferment: suffragists marching, women’s colleges proliferating, typewriters pounding out new career options, modes of contraception multiplying, birth rates falling (where the average mother had 7 kids in 1800, she had 3.6 in 1900). For the first time, motherhood couldn’t be taken for granted as the default option for girls. Suddenly motherhood had to be sold to women – not just within individual families, but across the nation as a whole. With a lot at stake from the national perspective, a special day of appreciation might make the option more attractive. Politics and sentiment have always gone hand in hand.

Fast forward 100 years, and the ferment, like the holiday, continues. Women now make up half of the national workplace talent pool, and though the pace is slower than many would prefer, women are rising to positions of power in business and in the political realm. The birth rate is nearly half what it was in 1900 — for lots of reasons (partly to do with the leap in infant survival rates). The wide availability of reliable birth control and our expanded longevity have transformed the landscape in which families form today — revising the life scripts of moms, dads and all family members so that we have lives radically different from those of all our ancestors.

Some things haven’t changed — among them the warm connection between moms and their kids. Though it costs a bundle to raise a child, most women today still say they want to be moms, and sooner or later, most of them are. But where in the past motherhood was thrust upon most moms willy-nilly and often meant limited opportunity for both mom and kids (cue the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe), these days millions of American women come to motherhood by choice in a context that allows them to invest abundantly in both their own and their kids’ educations (less emphasis on “whipping them all soundly” before bed). Many combine career building with child rearing, doubling their contributions to the common wealth.

But not everybody likes the new order, and birth control and the positives it offers for families and the nation have become less available to many young Americans today than even a decade prior — either through restriction of access or through lack of education. Unplanned births to teenagers were up for the first time in 14 years in 2006. As we celebrate the Mother’s Day centenary (and the 48th birthday of the birth control pill, also on May 11th!), those of us whose families have benefited from access to birth control (dads as well as moms) can commit to guaranteeing it to the next generation, by passing legislation that makes birth control affordable and available to all who seek it (as in the Prevention through Affordable Access bill), and that offers kids real information about all their options (through repeal of abstinence-only education laws).

Just as essentially, the centennial Mother’s Day offers us an occasion to look back at the transformations the world of motherhood has undergone since the holiday’s start, and to reposition for the next century to best serve our dovetailing national and personal interests. Here’s the moment to reassess the way we as a nation support those who do the basic job of raising the citizenry — time to recognize that all our nation’s kids are essential to our common future and to move beyond the view that “it’s your family, it’s your problem.” We’re already farther down that road than ever before, and though there’s still a ways to go, the path is clear.

Love your mom? For the 21st century, show her you care with the gifts that keep on giving: Pay equity (starting with the Paycheck Fairness Act)! Good and affordable childcare! Flexible work schedules! Paid sick days (the Healthy Families Act)! Paid family leave (the Family Leave Insurance Act)! And of course roses and the occasional breakfast in bed. In the long run, the whole national family celebrates.