Slate Blogs

Can an App Really Close the Pay Gap Between Men and Women?

2012-02-10T21:28:46Z

Earlier this week, the White House announced a project called the Equal Pay Phone App Challenge. The competition’s goal: create an app that uses labor data and negotiation resources to raise awareness about the wage gap and aid women in pay negotiations. According to senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, the challenge is an invitation to “software developers to help women ensure that they’re being paid fairly—which in turn will help restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.”

When I first found out about the “App Challenge,” I reacted much like a Politco reader who bluntly asked in the comments section: “is this a joke? A satire piece?” The administration’s suggestion that an application could help address pay inequity seemed ridiculous and, to some extent, it seemed to trivialize the issue.

However, after reviewing the goals of the competition, one of which is to provide greater access to pay data, I realized even if this app does not have a huge impact, it’s not an altogether terrible idea.

In late August, I was coming up on a year at my current job. I knew that employees generally receive a raise at the end of a year and that I was getting promoted. However, I had no idea what other people at my level were making, and when the director of HR invited me into her office to talk about the promotion, I was a blushing, head-nodding, mess. The only question I managed to ask was if the salary I was offered was in the normal range for program associates. I was assured that it was, but I did not have the data to verify this, nor did I press for more.

I am far from the only woman who has found herself ready to negotiate but unsure of how much to ask for. And, while I have since discovered that there is some salary information available on sites like Glassdoor.com and Guidestar.org, an app that made this data easy to access and made it better known that such data exists could arm women with the information they need to successfully negotiate raises.

Hannah Riley Bowles, an associate professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has done several studies on compensation negotiations. She found that in "industries in which salary standards were ambiguous, women accepted salaries that were ten percent lower on average than did the men.” When women do not know what to ask for, they set less ambitious negotiation goals and, as a result, make less money.

Will this application close the wage gap? Absolutely not. But it could be useful next time I find myself in the hot seat. And, at the very least, it shows that though the Paycheck Fairness Act failed to pass in Congress in 2010, the administration has not forgotten about the issue; it is a creative way to reach out to private industry developers; and it raises awareness about the ongoing efforts to achieve equal pay for equal work.

Why Is Rick Santorum Afraid of “Emotions” From Women in Combat?

2012-02-10T20:47:33Z

On CNN last night, John King asked GOP-nominee contender Rick Santorum to opine about the Pentagon’s recent announcement that it would open more combat-oriented service roles to women—and predictably, he toed an archaically conservative line:

"I think that could be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved. It already happens, of course, with the camaraderie of men in combat, but I think it would be even more unique if women were in combat."

To be fair, Santorum did note that he wanted to provide “every opportunity for women to be able to serve this country,” but he just couldn’t get over these mysterious “other types of emotions” that the presence of women might conjure up. Then, on the Today Show this morning, he offered a clarification: “Men have emotions when [they] see a woman in harm's way. It's natural. It's very much in our culture to be protective. That was my concern.”

The idea of men so caring that they’re driven to distraction by concern for their female comrades would almost seem sweet if it weren’t so blatantly offensive to the brave and perfectly capable women it’s meant to flatter. The truth is that these new rules merely formalize what military leaders have known for some time: Women are just as capable of dealing with the stresses of war as their male counterparts are.

Before the change, women had been barred from serving in direct-engagement areas like infantry and special operations forces; and while the new rules still won’t allow women to serve at the front of the front-lines, they will be able to work, for example, as field medics and communications officers. Of course, as the Associated Press points out, women have been unofficially fulfilling some of these functions for years, despite opponents “questioning whether they have the necessary strength and stamina, or whether their presence might hurt unit cohesion.” The contingences of war simply made those kinds of shaky arguments seem less important.

Still, the vague notion of “unit cohesion” looms large in these debates. I wrote a piece a number of years ago on the issue of DADT and found that even liberal-minded service people worried about the instability open gays and women would introduce into the apparently delicate ecosystem of the combat unit. My opinion now is the same as it was then: If the presence of people different from you (but otherwise capable of performing the same quality of work) disrupts your ability to do your job, that’s your problem, not theirs. Santorum’s imagined soldier needs to get over his hang-ups—no matter how chivalrous they seem—and get on with it. High-stress situations and appeals to the "good of the group” can no longer be a cover for personal prejudice.

Book of the Week: The Invisible Ones

2012-02-10T18:48:48Z

Controversial statement: The most compelling television series of 2011 was not The Walking Dead or some other high-concept drama, but the British reality series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. Not just another frothy wedding show, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding explored—albeit imperfectly—many issues of import, particularly gender relations and societal expectations of women in traveling communities. I can’t wait for the U.S. edition, which TLC promises is coming soon.

Which is why I was so taken with The Invisible Ones, by Stef Penney. A mystery set in 1980s England, The Invisible Ones follows a half-Roma private detective—his father was Roma but married an outsider and settled down in a house—who is hired to find a missing Gypsy woman. Her father has not seen her in many years, since her arranged marriage to into a family close-mouthed even by Roma standards. Rumor has it she ran away after it became clear that her only child suffered from a devastating genetic disease, leaving the baby behind with her strange husband and his clan. The detective, Ray, must rely on his Roma background to conduct the case, though it is a world he is not entirely comfortable in.

Like My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, The Invisible Ones delves into some of the thorny issues faced by travelers of both Roma and Irish extraction in England and elsewhere: the conflict between Irish travelers, Roma, and the rest of the British Isles; the strict, troubling gender roles that require girls to marry young, have many children, and tolerate controlling husbands; the lack of education among many Gypsies; how their way of life is changing in modern times. Penney demonstrates sensitivity by alternating narrators: In addition to PI Ray, who is at best ambivalent about and sometimes disgusted by the Roma, the story is also told from the perspective of the missing woman’s young nephew. J.J. is on the cusp of adolescence and just beginning to realize that some things he has taken for granted, like the cramped trailer he calls home, will leave him disconnected from society at large.

Obama Punks the GOP on Contraception

2012-02-10T18:04:03Z

After two solid weeks of Republicans rapidly escalating attacks on contraception access under the banner of "religous freedom," Obama finally announced what the White House is proposing an accomodation of religiously affiliated employers who don't want to offer birth control coverage as part of their insurance plans. In those situations, the insurance companies will have to reach out directly to employees and offer contraception coverage for free, without going through the employer. Insurance companies are down with the plan, because as Matt Yglesias explained at Moneybox, contraception actually saves insurance companies money, since it's cheaper than abortion and far cheaper than childbirth. Because the insurance companies have to reach out to employees directly, there's very little danger of women not getting coverage because they are unaware they're eligible.

That's the nitty-gritty. The fun part of this is that Obama just pulled a fast one on Republicans. He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women's access to contraception, which is what this has always been about. (As Dana Goldstein reported in 2010, before the religious liberty gambit was brought up, the Catholic bishops were just demanding that women be denied access and told to abstain from sex instead.) With the fig leaf of religious liberty removed, Republicans are in a bad situation. They can either drop this and slink away knowing they've been punked, or they can double down. But in order to do so, they'll have to be more blatantly anti-contraception, a politically toxic move in a country where 99% of women have used contraception.

My guess is that they'll take their knocks and go home, but a lot of the damage has already been done. Romney was provoked repeatedly to go on the record saying negative things about contraception. Sure, it was in the frame of concern about religious liberty, but as this incident fades into memory, what most people will remember is that Republicans picked a fight with Obama over contraception coverage and lost. This also gave Obama a chance to highlight this benefit and take full credit for it. Obama needs young female voters to turn out at the polls in November, and hijacking two weeks of the news cycle to send the message that he's going to get you your birth control for free is a big win for him in that department. I expect to see some ads in the fall showing Romney saying hostile things about contraception and health care reform, with the message that free birth control is going away if he's elected. It's all so perfect that I'm inclined to think this was Obama's plan all along.

Mystery Solved: What Happened to Pamela Druckerman’s Threesome Essay

2012-02-09T19:38:10Z

I posted last night on my quite accidental discovery that Pamela Druckerman, author of the newly published Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting had written an article for Marie Claire in 2010 about taking part in a threesome with her husband and another woman to mark his 40^th birthday. The article was available as a PDF uploaded by someone else, but it was unavailable from the Marie Claire site itself.

I wondered if the magazine had pulled the article at Druckerman’s request or if it was a technical glitch, and I promised to report back if I heard anything. And today, I received a call from Joanna Coles, the editor of Marie Claire, who kindly explained why the article was down and said that it will be available online again soon.

“Pamela asked us to take down the piece because she felt it would distract from the book, and we agreed to take it down for about a month,” Coles said. “She’s a good writer and a valuable contributor to Marie Claire.”

As I wrote in my initial post, I could understand why Druckerman would want the article to disappear for a little while. The article was daring, in the way she put herself out there knowing it would most definitely generate negative feedback, but it wasn’t salacious. Still, it’s bound to scare off some potential readers of a parenting book. (Personally, I wouldn’t be brave enough to write such an article in the first place, because I have kids, and someday they will be clever enough to Google me.)

Should a publication take down an article like this? I think there’s a difference between, say, hiding an old political scandal or a public figure’s embarrassing DUI, and a personal essay on the author’s sex life. And even if you take it down, you’re really just making it harder to find, as was the case with this article. I asked Coles about her thoughts on the way the Internet keeps old pieces, which might otherwise be forgotten, bouncing around.

“Today I read that Facebook photos that you delete have a life of up to three years. In this digital age you cannot keep anything secret.” She added that Druckerman’s article received more reader feedback than any other that year: “I suspect that even if she had written the pages only for the magazine that people would have remembered. Readers were fascinated and outraged in equal measure.”

Do Divorced Men Really Need Special Decorators?

2012-02-09T18:04:01Z

Given the potential pitfalls of her subject matter, reporter Emily Weinstein did an admirable job with her piece in yesterday’s New York Times, titled “In Dire Need of Design: For Recently Divorced Men, A New Breed of Decorators.” Weinstein’s article does its due diligence (more than two examples, larger economic contextualization, divorce stats, etc.) in plausibly making the case that a certain group of recently-single men, despite being “alpha-male” types, can’t seem to figure out how to hang a picture on their new pad’s barren walls. These men are so helpless, in fact, that interior decorators have found it lucrative to shift their respective firms’ entire focus toward coddling them; and we’re not just talking about the taxing task of choosing upholstery—these intrepid designers will even feng shui your pantry with handpicked canned goods:

The designer’s team began by installing the man in a SoHo rental with nothing but a box spring, a chair and a TV. In short order, they had fully outfitted the apartment down to the books, dishes, sheets, towels and toys for his son. “We even found him a housekeeper,” [one decorator] said.

Everyone knows that divorce can be extremely disruptive, especially to the tempo of day-to-day life and doubly so when kids are involved. Dads understandably want to return their home lives to some semblance of normalcy as soon as possible for everyone’s sake. But the assumptions at play in this paradigm of expedited home installation are at least as troubling as some mismatched furniture.

I’m reminded of the scene in Mrs. Doubtfire in which Robin Williams’ kids visit his new apartment for the first time; it’s unfinished and a little rough around the edges, but perfectly safe. Yet, when Sally Field comes to pick up the children, she acts as if Williams is living in a trash heap, as if the kids couldn’t help but be gravely scarred by spending time outside of a Crate and Barrel photo spread. That’s the attitude at play here, too—paper over the real and profound rupture that has happened as quickly as possible so that we can pretend that it doesn't exist.

Far more healthy, in my view, would be to let children gently confront the fact that dad is having to make a new life, part of which is the process of creating a new home. Now, I have nothing against decorators, but a willingness to have one’s books, dry goods, and toy curation outsourced says something disconcerting about one’s engagement with parenting. If dad really can’t get it together to make such basic choices about his new life, he probably needs more help than a decorator is qualified to provide (and may also have an answer as to why his marriage failed).

In any case, a home is not something you can order from Amazon. The sense in Weinstein’s piece is that mom has kept the old house, a space that was presumably built over time with input from (hopefully) everyone who lived there. The movie sets described here can’t hope to capture that kind of cozy energy, and there’s nothing worse for divorced kids than to have one parent’s house be home and the other’s a hotel. Building something unique together, over time, seems like the best way to prevent this dynamic—and it’s probably not a bad way to renew a sense of family, either.

Is Madonna-Hate Always Sexist?

2012-02-09T14:00:00Z

On the heels of Madonna’s glitter-nuke of a Super Bowl performance, Naomi Wolf wrote in The Guardian on Monday that Madonna-hate—which Wolf defines as “the reliable media theme [that emerges] whenever she steps out of her pretty-girl-pop-music bandwidth”—is based on a sexist rejection of an ambitious woman daring to consider herself a “serious artist.” Wolf identifies this disdain within the decidedly negative critical reaction to Madonna’s new film W.E. (which she directed and co-wrote), leading Wolf to question why such ad hominem hateration seems to be reserved especially for Madge. The answer?

Because she must be punished, for the same reason that every woman who steps out of line must be punished. Madonna is infuriating to the mainstream commentariat when she dares to extend her range because she is acting in the same way a serious, important male artist acts.

Wolf strains to portray Madonna as something she calls the “Nietzschian creative woman,” presumably an allusion to the philosopher’s sense that a “genius” should not allow his “will to power” to be constrained by the limiting morality or social expectations of the larger culture. In Wolf’s view, we gladly afford male artists the latitude to explore work (often with mediocre results) beyond their home-medium, but hold contempt for women who do the same.

While I agree with Wolf that Madonna-hate is a real and strange thing, I have to dispute her eager jump to sexism as the explanation. Not because women aren’t often judged by different rules than men in certain areas—double standards are our culture’s bread and butter; it’s just that Madonna, at least in the way that Wolf appraises her, is not a genuis in any medium.

I’m not saying anything new by pointing out that Madonna isn’t a particularly talented singer or dancer (and though I haven’t yet seen W.E., based on previous efforts I’d say that she doesn’t really shine around a camera either). But who ever said being a pop icon required actual talent? To be a superstar, all one needs—and these Madonna has in spades—is a cultural prescience and the lucrative gift of self-promotion. We don’t hate (or, for that matter, love) Madonna for her artistic genius; we’re just jealous of the fact that she’s been so successful without it.

Speaking less glowingly of artists at another point in his writing, Nietzsche contended that they are no more than the “pre-condition, the womb, the soil…from which [art] grows.” External influences use the vessel of the artist as a way of manifesting themselves in the world. To my mind, this characterization is far more accurate a description of Madonna than Wolf’s overdriven “Nietzschian creative woman.” Like Andy Warhol and others before her, Madonna is a master curator and synthesizer (a less generous word might be thief). She adapted voguing from a relatively unknown gay African-American subculture in New York and packaged it to sell, just as she has more recently channeled the latest trends in pop music into her own work via producers like Timbaland and cameos from new artists like Nicki Minaj. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear assimilated dubstep infusions on the forthcoming album MDNA.

The fact is, Madonna plays the fame game better than anyone; it’s just that her longevity has caused the internal machinations to become increasingly exposed. Certain people (including myself) get a thrill out of peeking behind the curtain—we’re riveted by the ambrosial combination of camp and connivance—while others are turned off by the lack of something romantically called authenticity. I revel in the audacity of Madonna’s ability to make millions from derivative and/or middling art, while "haters" find her gall and enduring popularity offensive.

Anyway, there’s no accounting for taste; the point is that neither perspective has much to do with gender. The underlying motivation of Madonna-hate could just as easily be directed at a man (the artist Damien Hirst comes to mind) or really anyone who refuses to let pesky little things like genuine talent or originality get in their way. As Madonna says in the song, “Every record sounds the same / gotta step into my world.” Like it or not, it’s a command, not an invitation.

Pamela Druckerman Wrote About Her Ménage à Trois Before She Wrote a Parenting Book. Should We Care?

2012-02-09T03:26:00Z

Pamela Druckerman is getting plenty of attention for her book, Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting. Telling anxious American parents not only that their parenting techniques are all wrong but that the French—the haughty French—should be our role models is a sure way to get yourself booked on the Today Show.

Bringing Up Bébé is based on Druckerman’s own experience raising Anglo-American children in Paris (she is American; her husband is British), and her willingness to reveal details from her family life helps ground the book. But Druckerman might be regretting having been so open about her personal life a few years ago.

I am reading Bringing Up Bébé for a Slate book club discussion (look for it next week!), and today in the course of looking up something about Druckerman, I came across an article in which she writes about how her husband asked her to engage in a threesome with him and another woman for his 40^th birthday. “Weird,” I thought. Not what you expect to see from someone trying to sell a a parenting book. The version of the article I’d clicked on was an undated PDF, and it offered a link to the article on the Marie Claire website, which I clicked on to find out when, exactly, the article had been published.

But clicking on the link (http://www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/relationship-issues/articles/threesome-sex-menage-a-trois-planning) redirects readers to the home page of the magazine’s current lifestyle features section. Was the original, which appeared in Marie Claire in 2010, legit? There’s no reason not to think so. Jezebel blogged about it at the time (and their link redirects to the lifestyles home page as well), as did Vanessa Raphaely, who is editor of South African Cosmo, which is published by the same company as Marie Claire. A photograph of accompanying the article sure looks a lot like the photographs of Druckerman that appeared in reviews of her book Lust in Translation,.

Did Marie Claire pull down the article at Druckerman’s request? I am trying to contact them to find out, and I will report back. (UPDATE, Feb. 9: I did get a call from Marie Claire's editor in chief, Joanna Coles, and I wrote a new post about our conversation.) There could be a number of legitimate reasons the link doesn’t work—it’s the Internet, it happens. But, it’s easy to access other articles from 2009 and 2010 in Marie Claire’s archives. It’s understandable why Druckerman might not want that article floating around while she’s trying to sell a book about parenting. I’m personally no prude, so finding out that she took part in a threesome isn’t going to hurt her credibility in my eyes, however, that’s not likely true of her entire target demographic. But it’s almost impossible to make anything truly disappear from the Internet.

And there’s another, less obvious reason that I think the threesome article isn’t beneficial to Druckerman. In Bringing Up Bébé, she posits that American parents are overwhelmed by the responsibility of parenthood from the moment they get that positive pregnancy test, that American-style parenting requires you to plow through stacks of books and pick a parenting style and write a birthing plan and then carry on similarly throughout your parenting years. If you read Druckerman’s article about her threesome, though, you see that it’s largely about the planning of the threesome. She and her husband rule out their friends, reject the idea of a sex club, ponder the ideal candidate. She scours the Internet, goes on lunch dates with women, primps, stresses about her clothes, and asks her husband how to talk to women.

It leaves one wondering: Regarding the overzealous reading and plotting and planning and the stress of overparenting that inspires Druckerman to write the book, is it indicative of an American style of parenting, or just the Druckmerman style of parenting?

Are Stay-At-Home Dads Just Babysitting?

2012-02-08T20:00:10Z

KJ Dell’Antonia, formerly of this blog, has an interesting post up at the New York Times Motherlode, which she now helms. She’s discovered that the U.S. Census Bureau considers moms who care for their children to be the standard, whereas men who care for their children are, in essence, baby-sitting. The bureau's view of what constitutes normal family life is revealed in a report called “Who’s Minding the Kids?” When moms take care of the kids the government considers it standard, the language of the report reveals; when dads do it, that’s called a “child care arrangement.” Which is weird because, as Dell’Antonia points out, the number of children cared for by their fathers is growing.

I stopped working for almost a year after our daughter was born, and during that time there was a sizable number of stay-at-home dads in our Bronx neighborhood. For some reason, they tended to congregate at one playground, which was my favorite. The dads were doing all the same stuff as the moms – pulling out Ziploc bags of cheerios, brokering arguments over doll strollers, filling up tiny water balloons at the fountain so their kids could throw them, leaving the ground littered with tiny bits of wet rubber. (It’s as annoying and satisfying as it sounds.) Like the moms, they weren't being paid, and like the moms, they came every day and considered this their work. Their presence there constituted parenting, not an “arrangement.” It may well be that in most American families, the mom is the “designated parent,” as the Census Bureau puts it, but in the face of demographic change, it seems time to reconsider what we label deviation from the norm.

The Realities Vs. The Myths of Catholic-Affiliated Institutions

2012-02-08T17:02:21Z

With all the fussing going on over the Obama administration's sensible refusal to carve out huge exceptions in their new contraception rules for religious-affiliated institutions that serve the public, I fear that there are a lot of misperceptions floating about regarding what it is that Catholic-affiliated hospitals and universities are really like, or how actual Catholics feel about this situation. Some numbers are helpful. Twenty-eight states already require religious-affiliated institutions that serve the public to offer equal insurance coverage as non-religious institutions offering the same services.The tragic results predicted by anti-choice hysterics have not come to pass because of this. The notion that Catholics as a group are offended by these regulations is also false; a poll run by Public Policy Polling found that 53 percent of Catholics support the administration on this, which isn't substantively different than the population at large.The group who actually opposes the ruling are evangelical Christians, as a poll from the Public Research Institute found. Only 38 percent of evangelical Christians want the coverage.

So the divide here isn't between Catholics and non-Catholics, but religious fanatics and non-fanatics. You might not realize it from all the wailing about how Obama offended the Catholics, but most Catholics aren't actually sex-phobic religious fanatics. They use contraception and have abortions at the same rate as everyone else, in fact. The hyper-conservative representatives of the U.S. Conference on Catholic Bishops cannot be equated with American Catholics, any more than the Branch Davidians can be considered representative of Texans as a group.

The notion that the culture of Catholic-affiliated universities and hospitals is substantively different than secular or Protestant ones, and thus deserves some kind of special dispensation from having to obey the law, is something that direct experience with these institutions should immediately disprove. I personally went to a Catholic-affiliated university, and the reason that it was a fine fit for my atheist self was that "Catholic-affiliated" is basically meaningless when it comes to the daily business of a university. Culturally, there was no real difference between my school and a secular school. We had a LGBT group, co-ed dorms, no curfews, and while I was there our school theater did a performance of The Rocky Horror Show. Half the students and staff weren't even Catholic, and of those who were, most were like self-identified Catholics everywhere, which is to say not particularly interested in the church's extremist doctrines. The cafeteria served meat on Fridays during Lent. Campus entertainment, such as free movies and parties, was exactly like at secular universites. I remember sitting on a blanket on a warm summer night watching Pulp Fiction as it was projected on a wall on campus. My friends who went to private Catholic school in high school would often joke that they had better sex ed than you get in public schools. The only thing from the secular world that the USCCB cares to take a stand on is contraception, which suggests that this isn't about religion at all, but just about controlling women.

Komen Sheds Handel, But Will It End the Firestorm?

2012-02-07T18:49:50Z

In the most unsurprising development so far of the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure P.R. meltdown, Karen Handel, who was appointed Komen's vice president of public policy after losing a bid as governor of Georgia, has stepped down in order to get some of the heat off the breast cancer charity. Handel was widely believed to be the force behind Komen's attempts to cater to anti-choice activists by defunding breast exams at Planned Parenthood, and while there were attempts to deny this during Komen's disastrous P.R. clean-up campaign, anonymous insiders told Laura Bassett of the Huffington Post that Handel was, in fact, the source of the pressure.

Getting rid of Handel isn't going to solve Komen's problems, however. Stepping back a bit, it's easy to see that Komen's status as a corporate-friendly, nonpartisan, untouchable charity was always untenable in the long run. Komen's strategy since its beginning was to frame breast cancer as an apolitical issue, where left and right could come together in support of women's health without all that nasty bickering over sex and who has the legal right to control women's bodies. It was an admirable goal; women's health care shouldn't be politicized and women should be free to seek whatever care they need without culture warriors riling people up about dirty ladies with their dirty lady bits.

Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. We live in a world where female sexuality so alarms a loud minority of our population that it insists on banning abortion, restricting contraception, keeping young women from accessing the HPV vaccine, and having anti-contraception propaganda taught in schools. Komen escaped notice while the fear-the-lady-bits brigade was mostly interested in abortion, but now that they're branching out in earnest--attacking employees of Catholic-owned hospitals and universities who want equal rights to contraception coverage as people fortunate enough to work for people who aren't religious fanatics, for instance--Komen's stance of "leave boobs out of it" wasn't going to fly anymore. Women's bodies are a fertile ground for right-wing demagoguery. Anyone who works with women's health is a target in this environment; it's just a matter of time before you're forced by anti-choice pressure to choose sides.

Komen's mistake was choosing the right when forced to make a choice. There's just no sustainable fundraising strategy for a women's health care organization that's on the books as only being for women's health care some of the time. They realize that now, thus the shedding of Handel. But I'm skeptical that it's going to solve their problems.

In Defense of Sheryl Sandberg

2012-02-07T14:00:00Z

The lady blogosphere seems to have turned against Sheryl Sandberg. But the more I watch her controversial speeches—at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 27, at Barnard’s commencement on May 17—the harder of a time I have criticizing her. Sunday Jezebel called out Facebook’s COO, soon to be worth $1.6 billion, for understating the external factors that may have helped her parlay her brilliance into success. Sandberg had argued at a WEC event that women suffer from an “ambition gap,” reinforced throughout their lives by the reality that achievement and likability are negatively correlated for girls. (“No one calls little boys bossy,” she quipped.) Zuckerberg’s second-in-command urged women to pour themselves into their careers for as long as they chose to work, instead of holding back out of deference to social norms, or in anticipation of “starting a family one day.”

This emphasis on personal responsibility led Jezebel to opine, “She is implying that the only impediment between the average working woman and the riches of corporate America is attitude.” And to remind us that “her path to success was paved just as much with hard work and ingenuity as it was with powerful mentors and … good fortune.” Aside from being counterproductive and slightly petty, these critiques miss the point of Sandberg’s speeches, which is not that women are to blame for the glass ceiling, but that society rewards different qualities in different genders, so business-minded women must be prepared to beat back against all kinds of negative conditioning. For Sandberg, the problem of finding child care is just another manifestation of the double standard working women need to fight. Yet Jezebel almost seems to wish this problem upon her, by snarking that she and her husband earn enough not to make affording baby-sitters a challenge.

The fact is, if women hope to hold more than 15 percent of the country’s CEO positions, they do need to fight. Sandberg calls on women (and men, for that matter) to reform the system, not defer to it. No one would deny the complexity of the dynamic that keeps women from achieving equality in the boardroom. But is it really so hard to concede that we have a role to play in our own advancement, and that part of that role consists of challenging the voices from our upbringings that insist on demure behavior?

What Does the Susan G. Komen Foundation Actually Do?

2012-02-06T22:00:27Z

In the wake of last week’s dust-up over the Komen Foundation’s short-lived decision to cut its funding ties with Planned Parenthood, many of us at Double X started to wonder just what the pink-ribbon organization actually does with all the money it collects. After all, though Planned Parenthood was at risk of losing about $700,000 in grants, that’s a pittance compared to Komen’s impressive income of about $400 million dollars in 2010. Where does all the rest of that cash go, and, more importantly, is it really being put to the best possible use?

I took some time to go through both Komen’s tax filings for 2009 as well as its Annual Report for 2009-10 (PDF), and the breakdown of expenditures goes like this: 12 percent for administration; 8 percent for fundraising; 7 percent for treatment; 15 percent for screening; 24 percent research; and 34 percent for education. Putting the administrative costs aside for the moment, let’s break down what each of the remaining categories actually means.

While Komen understandably touts cases in which its funds have directly subsidized individuals’ cancer treatment, such intervention only accounted for about $20 million in 2010. In terms of individual patient care, far more money goes to screening (including Planned Parenthood), which include mammograms and general clinical exams; Komen claims to have funded 625,000 of these at a cost of a little under $50 million in 2010. On the research front, the foundation provides grants totaling about $75 million to both individual researchers and organizations with specific research projects, such as a study about the efficacy of flax seed as a cancer prevention measure. Finally, Komen dropped just over $140 million on breast cancer awareness education, which they say reached 2.2 million people in 2010.

In our internal discussions, that last number—the remarkable amount of money spent on education relative to the other services—roused the most suspicion. Emily Yoffe wondered if such an intense focus on awareness was misplaced: “When Komen started 30 years ago part of its mission was 'breast cancer awareness.' They've won that war. Who's not aware of breast cancer?” And indeed, the use of “awareness” as a somewhat murky concept in the health-focused nonprofit world has come under some scrutiny as of late. How can one tell when the target audience is sufficiently saturated with awareness, and how do you measure that on an individual basis? When do awareness campaigns cross the line between honest education and organizational self-promotion?

These are not unfair questions to ask given Komen’s near-monopoly of the breast cancer advocacy stage, a status that has been controversially maintained by a rather aggressive legal policy against other charities who want to use the phrase “for the cure” in their materials. (According their tax filings for 2009, Komen spent about $375,000 on external legal services in addition to rewarding their then general counsel, Jonathan Blum, with a total compensation package of just under $218,000.) Beyond the issue of education, the actual medical usefulness of all those mammograms—for which Komen advocates fiercely—is also worth considering. Recent studies have shown that the tests don’t actually reduce the risk of death from breast cancer by all that much, and, in some cases, the exaggeration of their relevance actually leads women to have unnecessary and invasive procedures.

Abortion-Positive Campaign Falls Flat From Incoherence

2012-02-06T20:26:01Z

The past year has seen a dramatic shift in mainstream feminist rhetoric around the ever-present question of female sexuality, as demonstrated by the loud-and-proud defense of Planned Parenthood in the wake of the attempted Komen defunding. Instead of shyly highlighting the desexualized health care Planned Parenthood offers, defenders at places such as Planned Parenthood Saved Me spoke bluntly of needing abortions, STD care, and even wanting contraception not for socially acceptable reasons such as regulating menstrual cramps, but so they could have sex without getting pregnant. Slut Walk gave women an opportunity to say they deserve to be sexual without being raped for it. Even Hollywood got in on the fun with the release of Bridesmaids, a movie based on the radical notion that women can make crass blow-job jokes, too.

I suspect that Women on Waves was thinking of all this when they decided to seize the moment by releasing a hoax-ish ad campaign that is overtly pro-sex and pro-abortion. The campaign, coordinated with the Yes Men, is called alternately Diesel for Women or Misopolis. The intention behind the ad is to both draw attention to a woman's right to abortion no matter where she lives and also to the poor working conditions for women working in clothing factories of the sort Diesel owns. To these ends, the ads show glamorized women flaunting sewing machines and measuring tapes while taking abortion pills, with slogans such as "Abortion pills, a gift from God" and "Say goodbye to coat hangers." It's a definite departure from the mainstream feminist rhetoric defending choice, where women who get abortions are often portrayed as weeping and rending their clothes at the difficulty of their decision, an obvious ploy to get more sympathy in a world where we like women better if they're suffering. These ads have the benefit of being closer to reality, as well as being more in line with in-your-face feminism. While abortion can be a difficult decision, it's rarely experienced, especially with early term abortions, as a tragedy. The most common feeling women experience after an abortion is relief, and when they do suffer, it's often more because of the stigma attached to abortion than because of the abortion itself. Ads like this that align abortion with how it is in the real world---a welcome solution to the problem of unintended pregnancy---could relieve what suffering there actually is.

All of which is why I'm sad to say that these ads don't work very well. It's not because they identify abortion as a good thing for women who need it, but because the message is muddled and confusing. The ads are both supposed to be about abortion and inhumane factory conditions, but the conflation of the two makes the ads read as if they're suggesting that abortion pills would solve the problems of women working in sweat shops. If anything, the problem of forced abortions is more of a concern for sweat shop workers, confusing the issue even further. Women on Waves should have had an ad campaign that addressed either abortion or poor working conditions in factories, but putting the two together just creates a big mess of nothing. Let's hope the next ad campaign that addresses the abortion issue with courage can also do so with coherence.

Website Says Stay-at-Home Moms Are Worth $100,000—But Misses the Big Picture

2012-02-06T18:48:35Z

Last week, the financial-management website Mint published an estimate of how much a homemaker would earn if she were paid market prices for her work. The result—that a homemaker would earn nearly $100,000 per year—seems to vindicate lots of stay-at-home moms who think their work is undervalued.

But Mint’s study—and the other perennial attempts to quantify a homemaker’s worth—should instead be about the worth of a working mother.

With women making up nearly half of the workforce and 71 percent of mothers with children under 18 working or looking for work this emphasis on how the homemaker’s job often goes “well beyond the usual 9 to 5” seems irrelevant.

To Mint’s credit, it keeps the discussion of the homemaker gender neutral—implying that a female or male homemaker is worth $96,261. However, considering that just 3.3 percent of married couple families have a stay-at-home father, it’s safe to assume this “study” is mostly about women.

Mint purports that the worth of a homemaker can be calculated by adding the daily cost of a personal chef, a house cleaner, a nanny, a personal driver, a lawn maintenance crew, and a professional laundry service. But with the majority of women in the workforce, shouldn’t the article instead have been an acknowledgement of the mothers who are doing all of these high value services and paid work?

In Dividing the Domestic: Men, Women, and Household Work in Cross-National Perspective, sociologist Tanja van der Lippe writes that, in the OECD countries—that is, mostly high-income nations—if women “do not have a paid job, they spend 28 hours a week on domestic work; if they work full-time (35 hours or more weekly), they spend 17 hours on domestic work.” Even though working women are at the office for at least seven hours each day, they only spend 40 percent less time on housework than stay-at-home women.

Furthermore, says sociologist Liana Sayer in Dividing the Domestic, marriage in the United States still means an increase in women’s housework time and a decrease in men’s. Working mothers, even more so than homemakers, are the ones working past 5 and, as Mint put it, being “taken for granted by [their] family members.”

Mint might not be wrong in its discussion of homemakers, but it is certainly dated. Even the Washington Post’s parenting blog implicitly acknowledges this: Alongside Janice D’Arcy’s discussion of the Mint estimate is a picture of a 1950s mom vacuuming in an apron and dress, happy toddler at her side. Rather than just a vacuum, I would have instead hoped for a blog that called to mind a woman with a vacuum in one hand and briefcase in the other.

Book of the Week: Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children

2012-02-03T20:14:43Z

In a book published posthumously last month, psychotherapist and author Elisabeth Young-Bruehl posits that American society has failed children to the point that prejudice against them deserves its own “ism.” That’s right, along with racism and sexism and homophobia (not a literal –ism, but a figurative one), we need to add childism.

I was skeptical, given that parents today are so likely to be scolded for overparenting—that we’re helicopter parents, that we’re too indulgent, that we keep our kids overscheduled. At the same time, I suspected that the book had to have a bit more heft than was implied by a snarky Jezebel post headlined “Not Letting Kids Have Their Way is Destroying America,” which implied that Young-Bruehl believed bedtimes are bad, children should be given pet dinosaurs, and “everyone should ride gleaming white horses with pink manes to work instead of cars.”

But rather than advocating parents raise their kids to be Veruca Salts, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children is primarily concerned about child abuse—violence against children, sexual abuse, and neglect.

Young-Bruehl points to the social breakdowns of the 1960s and early 1970s as the advent of this –ism. I wondered, though, why Young-Bruehl targeted such a recent start date. If childism, as she puts it, happens when people “mistreat children in order to fulfill certain needs through them … or assert themselves when they feel their authority has been questioned,” if childism is when adults treat children like property, why not point to the 19^th century, when slave children really were property and child laborers worked in factories during the Industrial Revolution?

Best I can tell, the answer to that question is that Richard Nixon wasn’t president back then. Young-Bruehl begins her book with a didactic, chapter-long definition of prejudice, and then tells the heart-breaking story of one of her patients, a child of divorced parents who was bounced between homes as a child and was sexually abused by an older stepbrother. Only a little bit later do we see what Young-Bruehl is getting at. If only Nixon hadn’t vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act in 1971, the United States would have had universal daycare in the 1970s, which could have kept children safe from abuse by baby-sitters. Similarly, Ronald Reagan, through his tax cuts and efforts at privatization, was almost singlehandedly responsible for the 1980s’ urban decay, the de facto resegregation of inner-city schools, and an “era of frantic prison-building and incarceration—including the incarceration of youths and even children, especially African Americans.” (Wow, I don’t remember the federal government ever being efficient enough to wreak so much havoc so quickly.)

Young-Bruehl’s book is not merely a diatribe against conservative politics. She expresses disdain for the drugged-out, free-love permissiveness of the late 1960s that left some children being raised by selfish, neglectful baby boomers. And she’s no particular fan of the way that Social Security has lifted the elderly out of poverty only at the expense of future generations. But her solutions are predictable and overly simplistic: more social programs, more government involvement in the family life. Child abuse is a serious problem, and Young-Bruehl deserves credit for taking a serious look at it. But her solutions are mere wishful thinking.

Komen Apologizes for Pulling Funding From Planned Parenthood—Will It Help the Foundation in the Long Run?

2012-02-03T17:01:00Z

After several days of blowback for the decision to pull grant money from Planned Parenthood, the founder and board of directors from the Susan G. Komen for the cure breast cancer charity has apologized and vowed to amend their rules. For those of you not following the controversy, news surfaced earlier this week that Komen pulled grants from Planned Parenthood because they were under an investigation by Congress. However, that investigation is clearly politically motivated: it is led by Florida Rep. Cliff Stearns, who is deeply pro-life and a backer of anti-abortion pregnancy resource centers. Here's the language from the Komen press release about their new policy:

We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not. Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

The result is that Planned Parenthood will be eligible for future grants and the Komen foundation will fulfill existing grants. Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards responded to the Komen change with her own press release in which she says:

We are enormously grateful that the Komen Foundation has clarified its grantmaking criteria, and we look forward to continuing our partnership with Komen partners, leaders and volunteers. What these past few days have demonstrated is the deep resolve all Americans share in the fight against cancer, and we honor those who are at the helm of this battle.

The question remains, though, whether or not Komen's actions have irrevocably hurt their organization. I would argue that they have. Though most people will forget the kerfuffle by Monday (We've got the Super Bowl and the GOP primary to preoccupy us), Komen has already been politicized where they were once neutral. Even post-apology, pro-choice donors may be wary of the foundation, and if they're committed to eradicating cancer, will find another organization to give to. Pro-life donors may be infuriated by the walk-back, and, the most thorough of them will find organizations that don't give a penny to Planned Parenthood if they want to make a charitable contribution. TBOGG at Firedoglake has a good explanation about how nonprofits get their donations, and they make the smart point that Komen's biggest mistake is that they've tarnished their previously untouchable image. Before, coming out against Komen could be framed as not caring about women's health (despite the many problems with the organization that have nothing to do with Planned Parenthood). With this controversy, those pink ribbons have a muddier hue.

After Mitt Romney, Glitter Bombing Needs To Stop

2012-02-03T15:23:12Z

GOP Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is often criticized for being a bit bland, so when he mounted a Minnesota campaign stage on Wednesday sporting a jaunty dash of glitter in his usually plain hair, viewers might understandably have taken the glimmers as an attempt at a livelier image and not—as was intended—an act of protest. Indeed, Romney was the most recent target of the emergent protest form known as “glitter bombing,” in which activists disrupt proceedings by showering glitter on the object of their ire. I’ve written about the tactic here before with regard to the case of sex advice columnist Dan Savage, who has been repeatedly attacked for statements that critics consider to be transphobic or otherwise un-PC. But now I’d like to take on the glitter bomb phenomenon directly: it’s time that this childish and ineffective protest stunt be permanently defused.

Most glitter historians locate the start of the “bomb” repurposing in the ambush of Newt Gingrich back in May of 2010, when an a gay rights activist hollered “Feel the rainbow, Newt!” as he doused the man in sparkles. Since then, other outspoken conservatives (as well as the very not-conservative Savage) have received similar treatment, catching the attention of the news cycle for a day or two and then dispersing into the air. Observers have quibbled over whether the bombings amount to physical assault, but thus far no victim has pursued legal action. Meanwhile, supporters of causes the activists purport to represent (gay and trans rights; with Romney, reportedly immigration reform) acknowledge the attacks with little more than a chuckle. Everyone dusts off and goes home.

Back in the beginning, I was generally supportive of the anti-homophobic glitter bombings; they appeared to be a lighthearted, drag-inflected attempt at undermining the moral seriousness of their targets. But as the trend has continued and the operatives grown more self-important, I’ve come to view glitter bombing with increasing chagrin due to its tantrum-like tenor and inability to accomplish more than minor annoyance. In a culture reawakened to the power of civil disobedience by way of Occupy Wall Street, new forms of protest are bound to proliferate; but that doesn’t mean that all deserve to survive.

In the taxonomy of protest types, glitter bombing is an odd bird. Its closest cousin is a category of actions sometimes called “tactical frivolity,” which involves using humor, wit and surrealism to protest or disrupt a politically serious mark; but given the aggressive tenor and pat humourlessness of glitter bombing, that label doesn’t quite fit. And because activists can’t usually manage to get more than a few words out during the hurried delivery of the payload, the act doesn’t reach the level of civil discourse or direct action. In other words, glitter bombing does not speak the same language as a march, occupation or even a petition—it’s just an angry tweet in comparsion to those actions’ grand manifesto.

To be fair, not all protest gestures need aspire to the same level of impact (death by a thousand cuts is sometimes a great strategy). But this is where the actual form of glitter bombing becomes troublesome—what does glitter mean, exactly? When animal rights operatives throw fake blood on fur coats, the symbolism is clear: this life-giving fluid was spilled out of the desire for extravagant clothing. But when gay or trans people are injured by society, do they shed meaningless confetti? Glitter: a party accessory, Ke$ha’s drug of choice, the stuff children dump all over garbage-destined handicrafts; is this superfluous material really appropriate for the protest of such crucial issues?

Sure, glitter may be a chore to clean up, but the association of LGBT and other struggles with annoying specks doesn’t sound like a win to me. Glitter bombing may have been fierce for a minute, but like all protest movements (see: OWS), it must evolve and innovate or else risk irrelevance. When even fellow travelers are tiring of the antics, you know it’s time to put the shiny stuff away.

You Tell Us: Why Don't Women Like Newt?

2012-02-02T20:04:05Z

Newt Gingrich certainly has a woman problem, but it’s not clear any pundit has yet identified why. His lopsided results in Florida – Gingrich secured far more votes from men than from women, while the opposite was true for Mitt Romney – has prompted a rash of stories attempting to offer an explanation. CNN’s Jack Cafferty has speculated that growing revelations about the former speaker’s extramarital conduct disgusted women in Florida. But the accusations from the second of his three wives, Marianne, that Gingrich once requested an open marriage, broke shortly before the South Carolina primary, so if anything you’d expect it would have had an outsize effect in the Palmetto State. Instead, the gap between Gringrich’s male and female support grew from four points in South Carolina to eight points in Florida. Exit polls show that that his gender gap has been growing over the course of the primary season.

I’m not persuaded that female voters’ primary concern about Gingrich is his past behavior as a husband, though it can’t help. A poll taken in early January shows that Gingrich’s women troubles preceded Marianne Gingrich’s accusations. In that poll, in theoretical match-ups among general election voters, Barack Obama held an eight-point advantage among women against Romney and a whopping 18-point advantage among women against Gingrich. Gingrich’s weakness with women was even greater that of Ron Paul, whose candidacy revolves around the support of young men.

In the Daily Beast, Gingrich’s pollster, Kellyanne Conway, suggests that Gingrich did poorly among women in Florida because they’re late deciders who were proportionately affected by the barrage of anti-Gingrich advertising unleashed in the Sunshine State. It’s true that women are indeed late deciders, but Conway’s explanation may not tell the whole story.

The fuller context is that Gingrich had a problem with women before Florida, and it appears to be getting worse. Romney, meanwhile, consistently maintains an edge with women. Why? Some might suggest it’s because women voters generally lean more Democratic and Romney is seen as a more moderate candidate than Gingrich. But that doesn’t really hold water -- folks voting in these primaries are generally right-leaning to start with. And if Gingrich’s perceived conservatism alone put off women voters, you’d expect the same to be a true for a conservative candidate like Rick Santorum. Instead, Santorum does better with women than he does with men.

There’s something about Gingrich that acts as a repellant to women, like the electoral opposite of Axe body spray. As the Associated Press put it in analyzing the results of the Florida primary, “Some of the data from Tuesday's exit poll suggested women's votes were influenced more by a personal distaste for Gingrich than by liking Romney.” Anybody have a theory about why women don’t like Gingrich?

Why the Komen/Planned Parenthood Debacle Blew Up

2012-02-02T18:45:51Z

Rachael, I have to admit that I'm just not a fan of disingenuous manuevering, which is why arguments from anti-choicers about Planned Parenthood needing to be "investigated" for supposed ethics violations mean nothing to me. You and I both know that the movement doesn't give a hoot about making sure that Planned Parenthood is providing top-notch care for women, and that the constant and almost always unfounded complaints stem from anti-choice objections to the very existence of low-cost, pro-choice reproductive health care. At the end of the day, I prefer a clean fight. Anti-choice activists should make their arguments about the sinfulness of abortion and contraception directly. Anti-choicers turn to dirty tricks like bullying, clinic harassment, opening nuisance investigations, and shunning campaigns because they know that making their arguments directly doesn't work. I'm all for a rowdy public discourse. I just hate dirty tricks and deceit. Resorting to dirty tricks like nuisance investigations reads like an admission from anti-choice activists that they know they can't bring an end to comprehensive women's health care by persuading the public to abandon it.

This entire debacle with Komen is a perfect example of substituting dirty tricks for open and vigorous discourse. As Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic discovered, Komen has no more legitimate concerns about Planned Parenthood's ethics than the anti-choice activists that bullied Komen or Rep. Cliff Stearns, who has opened the investigation. The rule about not working with organizations under federal investigation was only created after Stearns opened up the nuisance investigation, and it's clear that it was created to give cover for Komen to abandon Planned Parenthood. It was such a transparent attempt to help destroy Planned Parenthood—and undermine women's comprehensive health care—that one top Komen official resigned over the whole thing.

The anti-choice movement's readiness to do an end run around the hard work of persuading the country to abandon not just safe, legal abortion but accessible contraception and STD prevention/treatment is one reason I take this issue so seriously. This isn't just about women's rights and women's health, though those are both important causes. I just really cannot stand disingenuous or dirty politics. The vast majority of anti-choice politicking is through misinformation campaigns and dirty tricks. Legislators who simply want to prevent women from getting abortions pass abortion restrictions while disingenuously claiming that it's being done for women's health. Contraception and STD funding are being attacked by anti-choicers claiming that it's about "abortion," even though federal funding for abortion is already prohibited. Nuisance investigations are opened on clinics, even though they almost never turn up anything. Anti-choice activists show up at clinics to harass the patients and staff while disingenuously claiming that they're providing "counseling," as if they know the first thing about that. Lies claiming that abortion causes breast cancer and mental illness and that contraception doesn't work proliferate, and often written into law or presented in the classroom. It's maddening.

The reason that people are so up in arms over this Komen situation is just this: Anti-choicers lost the argument against safe, legal abortion and accessible contraception. Instead of graciously accepting that the country doesn't agree with them about women's health care and responding with straightforward arguments for why they don't think affordable and safe reproductive health care is good, they instead use junior high school tactics of trying to isolate the victim (Planned Parenthood) in hopes they'll give up. That kind of tactic is off-putting, no matter who you are. Komen seems to realize now that they look like they're involved in dirty tricks, which is why they're running a five-alarm P.R. clean-up campaign on this. That Komen continues to dissemble and try to defend themselves with statements no one believes is only making it worse.