The XX Factor: What women really think.

Let's Not Forget the Sugar Babies

Dahlia, I think you've introduced the missing ingredient that Dana, too, stirred into the equation: kids. And Hanna, mother of three, I wonder what you say to this: the fantasy of having the security (courtesy of a spouse with a regular, and large enough, paycheck or some other source of support) to mix being the person overseeing the kids and their care with being a freelancer who also pursues meaningful, if sometimes less-than-predictable, work.

Isn't that a reality that plenty of well-educated, lucky couples pursue, or would like to? (I'm not saying they choose each other with that in mind, or that it's the savviest course given the prospect of divorce, but it's where they end up.) I agree that it's more often the woman who gets the child + part-time work gig, while the man does the more regular breadwinning. And I would say that she may well sometimes publicly gnash her teeth that she isn't the one who's been able to pursue the "real" career while perhaps privately not really being so sorry that she gets to be with the kids a lot and have a more flexible, and often less stressful, work life. Does she face up to the contradictions of her predicament? Perhaps not; we all have our fantasies. But sometimes—increasingly, I would hope—the man may well be the juggler, and my bet is he's all but guaranteed to be belly-aching rather than thanking his sugar-mommy, whatever he really feels.

Give the Teacher a Carrot

I'm intrigued by today's story in the New York Times about Washington, D.C.'s, reform-minded superintendent, Michelle Rhee, wanting to end tenure for public school teachers in the district. Let me begin by saying that I've always been a skeptic of the ever-popular scapegoating of teachers' unions as the sole cause of poor performance in inner-city schools. That's not to say that unions, or at least some of their members, aren't occasionally a big problem. (Even Albert Shanker, the late head of the United Federation of Teachers, used to concede as much.) But they aren't the only problem, or even, always, the main problem.

At the impoverished, inner-city public school where I taught third grade in the early 1990s, there were indisputably some bad actors who desperately needed to be shown the door. But the same could be said of a lot of workplaces where unions don't exist. (Were this not the case, a TV show like The Office would have no resonance.) These few unproductive or inefficient teachers typically paled against the other problems the school faced: gross overcrowding, no supplies (I had to buy my own chalk), an endless stream of incoherent educational fads foisted on teachers from district headquarters, and students who couldn't be sweeter (third graders still want to hold your hand) but who were desperately poor and often saddled, through no fault of their own, with dysfunctional or absentee parents.

The union, in fact, was often one of the few forces maintaining minimal conditions at my school. I have no doubt but that for the union, my already overcrowded, third-grade class—it had 34 kids, the legal limit at the time under the teachers' contract—would have had dozens more students. And we all know of superb suburban public schools that manage to succeed despite the presence of organized labor. Obviously, labor, alone, isn't the crucial difference.

Indeed, one of the biggest problems in poor districts is that a school is often the only decent employer. Given that school board members are typically elected and the high turnover rate among superintendents, it's easy for such schools, over time, to become patronage mills. In such an environment, job protection really is a legitimate concern. There's no guarantee that those who’ll be fired will be the right ones or that they will be replaced by anyone better. One district head tried to fire me because I'd written an article that he found embarrassing to the school system; what saved my job was the union contract. Then again, the person who apparently urged him to give me the ax was the likewise-offended union rep at my school. In sum, unions aren't all good or all bad; like most institutions in American life, they're typically something of a mixed bag but one teachers have tended to prefer rather than not.

I'm also impatient with Rhee's charge that teachers' unions are only about adults and their concerns, not the kids. So what? This could be said about the compensation package at almost any job. Few people, for example, expect pilots to forgo their union just to help out the frequent flier in Seat 3A (even if that passenger is an innocent, chubby-cheeked child). Or for the UPS driver to give up his union contract just because the packages he delivers are for a kid's birthday. Why, then, are teachers, alone among the nation’s professionals, expected to labor selflessly with no regard for their own self-interests? (After all, self-interest is "market forces" at work—something many school reformers are forever touting.) The attitude that teachers should labor solely for love, not money, strikes me as a carryover from a time when teaching was seen as "women’s work"—and thus not really worthy of pay. One of the many reforms Shanker ushered in was to equalize pay between women, who were typically given the lowest-paying jobs in elementary schools (as the assignment was regarded as akin to motherhood), and men, who were disproportionately awarded higher school positions because these were regarded as "real" jobs.

The above said, unions' complaint that Rhee doesn't properly regard teaching as a lifelong profession strikes me as outdated. This idea might have made sense 50 years ago (when schools benefited from a captive employment pool of talented women and blacks, who had few other professional options). Nowadays, the labor force is far more mobile. Few people stay in one job their entire careers. Today’s selfless community organizer might be tomorrow’s president of the United States. In this environment, Rhee is right, I think, to insist that schools must be able to look beyond career educators to train and attract talent.

What's potentially promising about Rhee’s approach, I think, is that she is at least offering teachers a carrot instead of just a stick. She wants to significantly boost salaries (by as much as $30,000 a year) for all those (not just the few in "combat" positions) who are willing to voluntarily forgo tenure. To foot this bill, Rhee isn’t relying on taxes but on charitable donations. That brings up the question of whether these pay increases will be permanent or just an elaborate bait and switch. (Unions have reasons to worry: Rhee's eventual successor might have entirely different priorities.) But given that many school system heads want to abolish tenure without offering teachers anything in return, this at least seems like a step toward a more genuine compromise. In the meantime, Rhee would do well to remember that teachers unions are powerful not because they're inherently malign but because, in many ways, they continue to represent teachers' interests. I, for one, don’t begrudge these teachers, like any other workers, negotiating for the best contract.

Only Nicolle Knows for Sure ...

Do you mean, Maureen, that women in politics may have to be nine times nuttier and more narcissistic than even your average hey-look-at-me male of the species, just to get elected? Not sure I'm with you on that, having known some really menschy women officeholders. (And I know you're not saying there aren't any.) But maybe I would be with you if I'd had the job you had and seen all you have, right? What your post did make me think: We have no idea whether these stories about Sarah Palin throwing fits and clueless about whole continents are true; we weren't there. I've had two batshit bananas bosses in my life, one a he and one a she, and I almost never talk about either one of them—not because I am so nice, but because it's such crazyola stuff I don't think anyone would believe it. (Plus, even I don't want to hear it.) So maybe that's what Palin's aide Nicolle Wallace, or whoever the source was for this stuff, is learning, too: Sometimes, even the truth can splash back quite nastily. But if that were the case, it would certainly be an ironic coda to a deeply dishonest campaign.

Update: Sarah speaks, denies divadom. "I never asked for anything more than maybe a Diet Dr Pepper once in a while," she told reporters. She also disputed tales that she didn't know Africa was a continent and couldn't name the signatories of NAFTA: "That's cruel. It's mean-spirited. It's immature. It's unprofessional and those guys are jerks if they came away with it, taking things out of context [from debate prep], and then tried to spread something on national news. It's not fair and it's not right."

The Tangle of Opt-Out Rationales

E.J. and Linda, I'm glad you're reprising your debate, because I'm titillated by this new data about women dropping out of the workforce, paired with Heather Boushey's explanation: "When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement. ... We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.” I'm struck, as I am whenever this comes up, by how deeply some of us are invested in one explanation over the other. Lisa Belkin's 2003 thesis, that highly educated women were quitting work because, well, they just wanted to, was anathema to a lot of feminists. They (to a degree me included) just wanted her to be wrong. But of course she's not wrong entirely—in upper-middle-class circles, there are women who say their choices are driven by disaffection with the work they had and affection for taking care of husand and kids. E.J. has an interesting explanation for why they should frame their decisions in this way, and amen to her point that it's a mistake to let this small cohort of women stand for the whole. Linda responds, here in the Fray, that she doesn't see a link between the problems the economic downturn has created for lower-income women, and the conclusion that bad times are also the reason that well-off women drop out, since "the low wages and layoffs did not affect elite workplaces, where wages and demand continued to rise."

I'm eager to hear Boushey's response to this—I have a call in to her—and E.J., yours too. In the meatime, aren't all the explanations correct, to one degree or another, and isn't the argument really about how much various groups of women's choices are affected more by one (hooray for staying home) over another (I'd work if I had better childcare, more flexible hours)? I see why the numbers matter: If all women were staying home for one clear reason—or if lower-income women tended to have one reason, and higher-income women tended to have a different one—that would tell us a lot about where we're at, culturally speaking, and perhaps about the policy prescriptions we'd advocate for. But will it ever sort out neatly? So often, it seems to me, these intimate and difficult decisions are made for a tangle of reasons that shift over time.

Opting Out vs. Being Forced Out

The New York Times just posted an interesting story about women dropping out of the work force. It says that many economists now think that the supposed "opt out" movement has less to do with women's alleged desire to leave the work force and more to do with America's economic downturn. On Tuesday (tomorrow), a new congressional study will lay out all the data. As the Times reporter summarizes it:

The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing from work with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years. Ninety-six percent of the men held jobs in 1953, their peak year. That is down to 86.4 percent today. But while men are rarely thought of as dropping out to run the household, that is often the assumption when women pull out.

As Heather Boushey, an economist who's written a lot about the opt-out movement, observes, women who lose their jobs and can't get another say that they're staying home with the kids—the implication being that saying so saves face. Whereas for a man that's not the case. Another economist observes that women's median wages have dropped since 2004. She notes that this is a relatively new experience for women in the work force—not since the 1970s has there been so prolonged a decline—perhaps making women more reluctant than their male peers to accept lower wages.