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Following up on Anne A. and Melinda H.'s posts earlier in the week: Let me confess here that I have entirely stopped reading primary coverage. Wake me when it's over. I am more than a little outraged (OK, so I'm cranky today) that so much of each day's NYT front page is devoted to the primary horse race and to the psychological profiling of the candidates, the voters, the pollsters. ... Isn't there any *real* news worth covering? *Must* we keep eating these rewarmed meals? I even turn off NPR and switch to music whenever I can smell primary punditry coming.
And yes, there's a limit to that shrinking news hole. My organization (shameless promotion here: Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism) has been told outright that there's no room for "soft" news on the issues we've been researching (say, family policy or sexual harassment case law) because the election coverage is eating up so much space. Is it that the reality show of primary coverage is just cheaper to produce than original reporting?
I hope that will be my last word on the primary. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
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Try to imagine the Obama-Clinton race reversed at this point: She is the clear nominee, but he just won’t get out of the race and starts trying on different personas and makes increasingly incendiary racial comments. Actually, it’s impossible to imagine because if the situation were reversed, Obama, as with all the other candidates who knew it was time to get out, would have gotten out, his dignity and reputation intact. A while ago, the first time it looked as if Clinton was not going to make it, Emily B. observed that even if she lost, Clinton was the first woman candidate to have run a serious campaign for the presidency, and the skill, intelligence, and strength she brought to the race would well serve future female candidates. It doesn’t look that way now, however. The horrid, grasping way she is finishing this contest is harming the party and turning her into a reviled, even comical figure. Is she so devoid of an inner life that the prospect of returning to being a high-profile, multimillionaire senator fills her with dread because it means accepting she will never achieve the ultimate fulfillment of her ambition? I suppose she can stay through next week to rack up the votes of her beloved “white Americans” in West Virginia and Kentucky and then still manage to graciously bow out. But as Peggy Noonan wonders, is there anyone who can get her to accept reality?
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I am just sick to my stomach today from reading about the ongoing trouble with relief efforts in Burma. The details keep changing, but the United Nations had to at least temporarily suspend its relief effort because the ruling junta has seized food and other relief supplies to "distribute on its own." More like a "shakedown," as blogger Spencer Ackerman calls it. The end result? One U.N. official says he "has never seen such delays" in a relief effort, and the New York Times is pointing out that it took only 48 hours to set up an "air bridge" of flights to Indonesia after the devastating tsunami in 2004 while only a handful of flights have been allowed into Burma in the six days since the cyclone.
It seems like a cover for either nefarious purposes or utter incompetence, but the junta is claiming the delays are being caused at least in part because of complications in issuing visas. Are you telling me that paperwork is holding up the efforts to save tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lives? No one can work on the weekend to issue some visas? Or, even better, can't a military dictatorship issue a decree putting a temporary moratorium on the need for visas?
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Just a quick note to welcome EJ Graff to our midst! EJ, thanks for the great post. I just finished reading a terrific law review article by Judith Kaye—the chief judge of New York's Court of Appeals—and Anne C. Reddy, looking at why women haven't caught up to men at law firms. Well worth the read.
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Rach, my jaw is still on the floor, too; the "hard-working Americans, white Americans'' remark from that person who still thinks she can be president absolutely disqualifies her from joining the ticket she would have been a drain on anyhow—because Obama cannot say his presidency would be all about turning the page on the old politics, only if anything were to happen to him, the masters of old politics would be back in charge. I really do want to hear the counterargument from women who remain in her corner, though. How does she (or should she?) get anywhere without the support of those shiftless non-whites she apparently can't even hear herself disrespecting? And not too slick a pander to her self-described base, either: "C'mon, y'all, join with other hard-working white people.'
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Hey y'all,
I am delighted to be joining this brilliant assembly. For my first post here, I'd like to point out that Mother's Day is coming up. A year ago I wrote a great deal about how the news media gets working mothers' issues all wrong—talking about these issues as personal problems for individual women, rather than shared economic and public policy questions for a 21st century economy. I was asked to give a short talk on this today... and for my debutante moment, I am posting the talk below. At the bottom I'll give some links to my articles last year, and to research sources for some of the facts here. It's long for a blog post, I admit. Sorry! I didn't have time to be brief ...
Mothers work: Get used to it. Too often, issues faced by working families are treated as personal problems for individual women, private questions of how to balance irreconcilable duties, work and family, things that don’t go together by nature. The consequence: We live in the most family-unfriendly of the developed nations.
But women with children have always worked. Centuries ago, in the Wwestern European and American traditions, for instance, married women with children—at least in the classes of butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers that most of us descend from—would have been the business partners who took goods to market, kept the shop’s accounts, and oversaw the adolescent labor (once called housemaids and dairymaids, now called nannies and daycare workers). Early in the 20th century, they might have done piecework, gone out into domestic service, taken in laundry, or fed the boarders. But with industrial and consumer capitalism, work left home. Married men got shoved out of the house to work for salaries and wages. And in white, middle- or upper-middle class families, married women got shut in.
That brings us to the part of feminist history that many of us already know: for the college-educated classes, women’s entrance into the waged work force has been moving in fits and starts over the past century. By the 1970s, feminists had knocked down the barriers to women entering the professions in large numbers. But the workplace still isn’t fixed. A good chunk of discrimination now tends to kick in once a woman gets pregnant or takes a maternity leave.
Researching the book I collaborated on for author Evelyn Murphy in 2005, Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men—And What To Do About It, I was startled by how many lawsuits were won because managers openly and publicly told women that they couldn’t be hired because they were pregnant; or that having a child would hurt them; or that it was simply impossible for women to both work and raise kids. Many other women we talked with had the same experience, but chose not to ruin their lives by suing. One lawyer who’d been on the partner track told us that, once she had her second child, her colleagues refused to give her work in her specialty, saying that she now had other priorities—even though she kept meeting her deadlines, albeit after the kids were asleep. She was denied partnership. A high-tech project manager told me that, when she was pregnant in 2002, she was asked: "Do you feel stupider?" Her colleague wasn’t being mean; he genuinely wanted to know if pregnancy’s hormones had dumbed her down.
These aren’t just anecdotes. Consider the work being done by Shelley Correll, a Cornell sociology professor. In one experiment, Correll and her colleagues asked participants to rate a management consultant. Everyone got a profile of an equally qualified consultant—except that the consultant was variously portrayed as a woman with children, a woman without children, a man with children, and a man without children. When the consultant was a “mother,” she was rated as less competent, less committed, less suitable for hiring, promotion, or training, and was offered a lower starting salary than the other three. In an associated experiment, if she was late or had absences, she was fired sooner than any of the other three. Researchers have found that women with children who work full time have a significantly larger wage gap compared to men than do women without children who work full time. Last I checked it was 70 cents compared to 77 cents. Meanwhile, men with children get paid more than men without children. Fathers earn more—mothers earn less. There’s a mommy penalty—and a daddy bonus. We call this discrimination.
This exists not because women with children "choose" lower-paying work in lower-paying job tracks. (We can talk about job segregation another day.) Rather, it exists in part because the American idea of mothering is left over from the 1950s, that odd moment in history when America’s unrivaled economic power enabled a single breadwinner to support an entire family. Fifty years later we still have the idea that a mother, and not a father, should be available to her child at every moment, to kiss any boo-boo. But if being a mom is a 24-hour-a-day job, and so is being a professional worker—can you say ‘crackberry’?—then the two roles are mutually exclusive. “Working mother” is treated as the social equivalent of “deadbeat dad”: someone who is failing their God-given responsibilities to their children.
But the United States cannot and will not go back to a time in which women with children do not work in the waged workforce. Over the past century, the U.S. has seen steady upticks in the numbers and percentages of women, including mothers, who work for wages. Since 2000, the percentage of working mothers with infants has held steady at 53.5 percent. When they can afford it, married women with infants take maternity leaves of a year or so, but then head steadily back to work: 75 percent of women with school-age children are on the job. That’s because the vast majority of contemporary families cannot get by without women’s income.
Now, let’s flip this and think from the point of view of the best interests of the children: 70 percent of American children are growing up in families with all adults in the workforce. That means most American families need flexibility to care for their kids. And yet, on a variety of basic policies—including parental leave, family sick leave, early childhood education, national childcare standards, after-school programs, and health care that’s not tied to a single all-consuming job—the U.S. lags behind almost every developed nation. How far behind? Out of 168 countries surveyed by Harvard School of Public Health researcher Jody Heymann, the U.S. is one of only four without mandatory paid maternity leave—along with Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland. And any parent could tell you that it makes no sense to keep running schools on 19th century agricultural schedules, taking kids in at 7 a.m. and letting them out at 3 p.m. to milk the cows, when their parents now work until 5 or 6 p.m. Why can’t 21ss century school schedules match the 21st century workday?
But the news media and public policy makers still don’t see working families’ issues as economic or public policy questions. Consider: If fathers get pushed off the job, that’s discussed under the heading of labor, business, globalization, world trade, all public issues. But if mothers get pushed off the job—because jobs disappear or are redefined during her maternity leave, or because bosses stop promoting a woman with children on the assumption that she will soon refuse to travel or cut back or go part-time—if mothers get pushed off the job, that’s discussed as women making private emotional choices. How natural: She just wanted to stay home with her baby.
In other words, women are seen as having personal lives even in the same arenas in which men are seen as having public lives. And that has consequences. When the demands facing working families are posited as personal issues for individual mothers rather than as a major public policy issue for a 21st century economy, each family must tackle these issues alone. This focus makes as much sense, according to media critic Caryl Rivers, as saying, “Okay, let’s build a superhighway; everybody bring one paving stone. That’s how we approach family policy. We don’t look at systems, just at individuals. And that’s ridiculous.”
For more info:
The Opt-Out Myth, E.J. Graff, Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2007. (This includes footnotes and links to the supporting research.)
The Mommy War Machine, E.J. Graff, Washington Post Outlook section, April 29, 2007.