The Mismeasure of Woman

This NYT editorial adds to the discussion on women & justice in the labor force. The article is based on The Shriver Report that was released a few weeks ago. The report provides updated statistics but the message is quite similar to the past.


The New York Times

October 24, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
The Mismeasure of Woman
By JOANNE LIPMAN

FINALLY! I hear we’re all living in a women’s world now.

For the first time, women make up half the work force. The Shriver Report, out just last week, found that mothers are the major breadwinners in 40 percent of families. We have a female speaker of the House and a female secretary of state. Thirty-two women have served as governors. Thirty-eight have served as senators. Four out of eight Ivy League presidents are women.

Great news, right? Well, not exactly. In fact, it couldn’t be more spectacularly misleading.

The truth is, women haven’t come nearly as far as we would have predicted 25 years ago. Somewhere along the line, especially in recent years, progress for women has stalled. And attitudes have taken a giant leap backward.

I never expected that we would be in this predicament. My generation of professional women took equality for granted. When I was in college in the 1980s, many of us looked derisively at the women’s liberation movement. That was something that strident, humorless, shrill women had done before us.

We were sure we were beyond it. We were post-feminists. After all, we lived equally with men. We felt that when we took our place in society, issues of gender — and race too — wouldn’t be a factor.

Back in college, my friends and I never even had a conversation about balancing work and family. We had never heard of glass ceilings. We didn’t talk about sexual harassment — that was just part of life. As a freshman, I had an interview for a magazine internship in New York City. As I sat down, making sure to demurely close up my slit-front skirt over my knees, the interviewer barked, “If you want the job, you’ll leave that open.”

We felt the same way when we went to work. After graduation, when I first joined The Wall Street Journal, I could count the number of female reporters there on one hand. The tiny ladies’ room was for guests. The paper was written by men, for men. It didn’t even cover industries that were relatively female-friendly, like publishing, advertising and retailing. When the newspaper finally did introduce coverage of those sectors a few years later, most male reporters weren’t interested. So we women stepped up.

Our corner of the newsroom was promptly dubbed the “Valley of the Dolls.” But we gained respect after one of our number won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on the tobacco industry. Of course, when Hollywood made the movie about the investigation, her role was played by a man.

During these years, we were competing with men and we were winning. We learned to curse like truck drivers and work our sources as well as the next guy. We broke major stories. And we dressed the part, out-machoing the men with our truly tragic wardrobe choices — boxy suits with giant shoulder pads and floppy bow ties.

I was promoted to a Page One editor while I was pregnant. When my children were babies, my bosses allowed me to work mostly at home. Eventually, I became The Journal’s first female deputy managing editor. By the time I left the paper in 2005, more than a third of the paper’s editors were female. And when I moved on to create Portfolio for Condé Nast — the magazine company best known for titles like Vanity Fair, Vogue and The New Yorker — half of our top editors were female.

And yet during the last few years, I couldn’t help but notice that the situation for women as a whole wasn’t improving, and was even getting worse.

Consider the facts: When I graduated from college in 1983, women earned only 64 cents for every dollar earned by a man.

Today? Women earn just 77 cents. By other measures, women’s gains have stalled: board seats and corporate officer posts have been flat — or declined in recent years.

More proof: According to the American Bar Association, women in 2008 made up almost half of all associates, but only 18.3 percent of partners. Only 15 women run Fortune 500 companies.

I am still one of the few women to have run a major business magazine. My career was recently summed up in a New York magazine article as leggy.

And I got off easy. During the presidential primaries, while the news media was on their best behavior to avoid racial stereotypes, it was still O.K. to discuss Hillary Clinton’s “cankles.”

Even the positive numbers we’ve heard about during the recession are misleading — the ones that seem to indicate that women have suffered fewer job losses than men. The reason? Women are still concentrated in lower-paying fields, rather than the high-paying industries like finance and real estate that were hardest hit.

So why have we stalled out?

Part of the reason can be traced to the aftermath of 9/11.

Everyone’s life was reshaped by 9/11. Like many New Yorkers, I experienced that day in an intensely personal way: I was in the World Trade Center with a colleague when the first plane hit. And we were just outside the second tower, making our way through burning debris, hunks of airplane seats and far worse when the second plane came in directly over our heads.

In the aftermath of the attacks, Americans pulled together. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, famously declared it was “the end of the age of irony.”

He was right.

And then he was wrong. Because, as so often happens in the wake of a traumatic event, the pendulum swung to the other extreme. The war in Iraq tore America apart. The Internet gave everyone a soapbox. The louder, the more offensive, the better.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that exactly at this moment, women began losing ground — and not just in measurable ways, like how many women make partner or get jobs as chief executives.

I’m referring to how we are perceived. The conversation online about women, as about so many other topics, degenerated from silly and snarky to just plain ugly — and it seeped into the mainstream.

Recently, before a TV appearance, I did an Internet search on one of the interviewers so I could learn more about her — and got a full page of results about her breasts.

This was hardly an isolated incident. Whether it’s Keith Olbermann of MSNBC calling Michelle Malkin, the conservative blogger, “a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it,” or Glenn Beck of Fox News suggesting that “ugly women” are probably “progressive as well,” women these days are portrayed as either witches or bimbos, with pretty much no alternatives in between.

I’ve been puzzled by these screeds, which are so at odds with the real achievements documented in the Shriver Report and elsewhere. And then it struck me: Part of the reason we’ve lost our way, part of the reason my generation became complacent, is that many of us have been defining progress for women too narrowly. We’ve focused primarily on numbers at the expense of attitudes.

I’ve spent my adult life in business journalism, where we calculate success using hard facts and figures. Researchers have evaluated women’s progress the same way. But in today’s noisy world, that approach isn’t enough. We’ve got to include popular perceptions in the equation as well. Progress in one area without the other is no progress at all.

This isn’t simply a woman’s issue; it affects us all. It isn’t about blaming men, or about embracing feminism, which remains a toxic term for some women. Instead, it is up to all of us to help change the conversation.

How do we get to there from here?

First, we can begin by telling girls to have confidence in themselves, to not always feel the need to be the passive “good girl.” In my time as an editor, many, many men have come through my door asking for a raise or demanding a promotion. Guess how many women have ever asked me for a promotion?

I’ll tell you. Exactly ... zero.

Sure, it’s a risk to ask for a raise. But women need to take risks — and to realize that at some point they will fail. This is an incredibly hard thing to do, especially for women brought up in a culture that celebrates unrealistic perfection in every sphere, from beauty to housekeeping. The biggest professional risk I ever took was leaving a secure job at The Wall Street Journal to create a business magazine at a company known for glossy fashion titles — and that at a time when all print was struggling.

There were plenty of naysayers, and I got to see myself portrayed as both a witch and a bimbo, a twofer! But I believed in our mission.

At the end of the day, Portfolio couldn’t survive the economic collapse. Still, we had created a magazine we were proud of that provided a venue for talented writers and editors, many of them women who hadn’t had that kind of chance to shine before in the macho world of financial journalism.

Which leads me to another piece of advice — have a sense of humor. Believe me, it’s needed.

Case in point: My favorite Christmas card ever came from Martha Stewart — while she was in prison in West Virginia. It was beautiful, on heavy paper stock, and showed a gorgeous wreath. And on the inside, homey as could be, it was engraved with holiday wishes from “Martha Stewart, Alderson, West Virginia.”

One final suggestion: don’t be afraid to be a girl.

Women do have a different culture from men. And that can give us some tremendous advantages. Women are built to withstand hardship and pain. (Anyone who has given birth knows what I’m talking about.) That’s a big benefit at a time like this, with the unemployment rate at 9.8 percent and rising.

Women define success differently; for some it may be a career, for others the ability to stay home with children. They also define themselves differently. I’m in the unfortunate position of witnessing many friends and colleagues laid off over the past year. But the women are less apt to fall apart — and this goes even for the primary breadwinners — because they are less likely to define themselves by their job in the first place.

Certainly, when you look at the numbers, women have made tremendous strides over the past 25 years. But in the process, we lost sight of something important. After focusing for so long on better jobs and higher pay, maybe the best thing — the enduring thing — we can do is make sure respect is part of the equation too.

If we can change the conversation about women, the numbers will finally add up. And that’s what real progress looks like.

Joanne Lipman, a former deputy managing editor at The Wall Street Journal, was the founding editor in chief of Condé Nast Portfolio magazine.


Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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Evaluating Women's Success in the Labor Force

Th e NYT article I posted touches on a lot of topics we have covered in class and analyzes the increasing number of women in the labor force during the recession. Recognizing the historical movement of women recruited in and pushed out of the labor force is significant. Identifying the jobs women are taking are not the higher paying positions or those with benefits. This impacts families and women workers.

The New Gender Gap

The New York Times

October 4, 2009
The Way We Live Now
The New Gender Gap
By LISA BELKIN

At first blush, the history of women in the workplace seems a trajectory of success. From the assumption that they would be secretaries to the expectation that they can be C.E.O.’s, they have crashed through ceilings (though not enough of them), made workplaces more flexible (not completely, but significantly) and transformed the face of work. They have gone from holding 34.9 percent of all jobs 40 years ago to 49.8 percent today. They are on track to hold more than half of them any moment now; it might have happened while you were reading this.

Under other circumstances, that would be cause for celebration. But women have gained this latest bit of ground mostly because men have lost it — 78 percent of the jobs lost during this recession were held by men. So not only is it unseemly to rejoice over a larger share of a smaller pie, it is also unsettling to face the fact that so much of the history of women in the workplace (both their leaps forward and their slips back) is a reaction to what was happening to men.

That was the case in the 1930s, when working women were dismissed so that they didn’t take jobs from able-bodied males with families to support. During the 1940s women were invited back in, a replacement work force when the men went to war. By the 1950s and into the ’60s women lost their higher-paying blue-collar jobs and took lower-paying ones in the expanding retail and service sectors or returned home; in the 1970s the most ambitious among them rebelled — a period when women truly commandeered the train and drove it forward, often sacrificing dreams of children to get ahead. By the 1980s mothers worked because of the growing feeling that households needed two incomes, and the realization dawned that the workplace was designed to fit the life of a man with a wife at home rather than a woman juggling work and family.

The next two decades brought adaptations — words like “telecommuting” and “flextime” entered the vocabulary — and because times were good, companies saw the benefits of going along. Also because times were good, some women who could leave did, opting out of a system that fit women only marginally better than before.

Now they seem to be returning. Women will soon be the majority of workers because some are opting back in, and many others, who never left, are more likely to find and keep their jobs than men. Once again, the reasons for this are not a function of the clout of women but of the predicament of men and less a sign of how far women have come than of how far they have left to go.

“The things that traditionally hold women back in the work force are working in their favor now,” says Heidi Hartmann, a labor economist and president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “but those obstacles remain.”

Primarily, women are still cheaper. They earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by a man, and in a flailing economy employers see that as an attractive quality. Women who are returning to the work force after several years at home raising children are particularly cheap. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, has estimated that the penalty is 10 percent of income for every two years out of the job market, a loss that is never recouped. From the hiring side of the table, that may be a good bargain.

In addition, women are concentrated in lower-paying industries, like health care and education, where there have been fewer layoffs, rather than in higher-paying realms, like finance, construction and manufacturing, which have contracted. Why this is true has long been an economic chicken-and-egg question — are these professions less lucrative and prestigious because they are predominantly held by women, or are they predominantly held by women because men are less likely to take them given their lower pay and status? But whatever the cause, the end result is that the “female” professions have not suffered as much this past year.

Women also benefit from some employers’ presumptions that they will settle. When choosing among overqualified applicants for a position, employers often seem more comfortable hiring a woman for a step-down job. Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute, says women might be seen as less resentful about taking a job with less money and authority, and they might also be less likely to bolt if something better comes along. Especially “if a woman is coming back to work and has had difficulty finding a job, the assumption is she is going to be more grateful than the man,” she says.

The point that the increase of women in the workplace is not somehow a victory for women is driven home by the fact that the most successful and highly paid women are losing their jobs at the same rates as successful and highly paid men.

There is also the fact that equality in the workplace has not translated into equality in the home, where women still do decidedly more of the work, on average, than men. That may change as more men are domesticated by unemployment, or it may become an additional burden of this new economy, because there is a different kind of tension in a home where a man is out of a job.

Adding to that tension is the fact that the scaffolding that women have struggled to build to help manage their lives over the years is eroding. The most recent numbers from the Society for Human Resource Management show that families are getting less help from their employers — in the form of flexible work options and other work-life benefits — at a time when workers arguably need them most.

Cataclysms are often classrooms. What we are learning from this one is that women have not reached parity, no matter what next month’s jobs data say. It is not good news when women surpass men because women are worth less. Perversely, real progress might come when we reach the place where a financial wallop means women lose as much ground as men.

Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer and the author of the Motherlode blog. She last wrote for the magazine about women and philanthropy.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

New York Times article

Recession Drives Women Back to the Work Force
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

The Great Recession is pushing many highly educated women who had left work to stay at home with their children to dive back into the labor pool, according to several nationally recognized experts on women in the workplace.

Many of these women are sending out job applications for the first time in years because their husbands were laid off, fear being laid off or had their salaries cut or because their family’s investments plunged in value.

Last February Trudi Foutts Loh felt compelled to find full-time work, some 20 years after she quit her job to care for her two children. Her job back then as a lawyer and three hours of daily commuting made balancing everything impossible.

She occasionally worked as a political consultant and writer, but numerous economic worries made her conclude that that was not enough.

She pointed to investment losses “in the healthy six figures,” along with “some very high medical expenses for a family member and having two daughters in college. And then the value of our home and pension plan has taken a tumble.”

She feels lucky because a law school friend hired her at a prestigious firm in Pasadena, Calif.

For Lisa Hughes, a mother of two, it was an unexpected layoff that shoved her back into the labor pool.

A former corporate lawyer, she moved from Montclair, N.J., to California last year, after the World Poker Tour recruited her husband to be its chief operating officer. Then, squeezed by the recession, the tour laid him off, pushing Ms. Hughes to pursue full-time work for the first time in 16 years.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine he would be unemployed a year later,” she said. She plans to start a solo practice because “it’s hard to find jobs after 16 years.”

According to some economists, these women, once part of a privileged minority that could afford not to work, are now collateral damage of the recession — not forced out of work, but back into it.

“What’s happened is 78 percent of the people who lost their jobs in the recession are men,” said Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. “That has brought home to many families that having one income places you in a very vulnerable position. Some women who expected to take a long time out of the work force suddenly felt they needed to re-enter, in some cases much more quickly than they expected.”

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics found preliminary evidence of affluent women returning to the labor force. When it comes to women with a college education who are 25 to 44 years old and living with a spouse, the proportion of those working or looking for work increased to 78.4 percent in the first half of 2009, from 76 percent in the first half of 2007. Economists say this is surprising because the percentage of people in the work force usually drops as unemployed workers grow discouraged and stop looking for work in a recession.

Over the same period, the proportion of men of the same age and circumstance inched down, falling from 97.4 percent to 97.1 percent.

It is too early to tell whether those numbers reflect an increase above and beyond the long-term growth of women’s participation in the work force.

Examining women’s work force participation — and especially women with children — has been one of the battlefields of economics.

In the last several years, some researchers have suggested that many affluent working mothers chose to leave the work force during the boom times of the 90’s and early this decade, saying there was a trend of women opting out of careers once they had children. The suggestion — highlighted in an Oct. 26, 2003 New York Times Magazine cover article — prompted a huge controversy.

Critics responded that most women had no choice but to work and that only a small affluent minority could chose not to. They said many working mothers left the labor force not because they were opting to, but because they were forced to by workplaces that made it too difficult to balance family and work. Separately, some economists argued that the decrease in women working was not caused by opting out, but by the 2001 recession that was followed by years of weak job growth.

Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the liberal Center for American Progress and a fierce critic of the notion of opting out, said her studies showed little difference in how often mothers and women without children left the labor force.

Ms. Boushey nonetheless agreed that the current recession was pushing women who had stopped working for whatever reason to re-enter the labor force.

She said this helped explain why the percentage of women aged 20 and above in the work force has remained relatively flat during the recession, while the percentage of men has fallen slightly. “This does indicate that some women are opting back in,” she said.

One of them is Patricia Smart. She quit her banking job 14 years ago when her son was born. But last April, her husband received a layoff notice. “It was a cosmic kick in the butt,” said Ms. Smart, who had toyed with returning to work for years. “It forced me to do something.”

After a quick job search, she landed a job in July as a full-time manager at Wachovia Bank in Charlotte, N.C.

Carolyn Bednarz was not as fortunate. The former lawyer at Milbank & Tweed spent nine years at home raising three children, but she became frightened for her family’s future after her banker-husband endured four rounds of layoffs and reduced bonuses.

Ms. Bednarz started looking for work. After a 10-month search she couldn’t find a paying job.

“I probably applied for 30 jobs on Craigslist, and hardly anyone writes back,” she said, complaining that many employers aren’t interested in hiring someone who has not worked in years. “This is just the most humbling experience.”

In the end, she took a position as an unpaid intern at a law firm in Marin County, Calif., north of San Francisco.

Several studies have found that two different groups of women are likely not to return to work after giving birth: affluent ones and poor ones unable to afford child care.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York, an independent research group, and several other economists and experts argue that there is an unmistakable trend toward women returning to the labor force — and not just professional women.

“Women are at a watershed moment,” Ms. Hewlett said, pointing to the recession’s squeeze on incomes.

Anna Bresnahan of Spokane, Wash., says she would not have returned to work if she and her husband had not started worrying that the bank where he worked might fail. “I decided I could start looking. He said, ‘That would be nice.’ ”

Ms. Bresnahan, who quit a marketing job in 2001 after her first child was born, found a position with an accounting firm in December, although at a lower salary. (Studies have found that for every two years a woman is out of the labor force, her earnings fall by 10 percent, a penalty that lasts throughout her career.)

Karen Boon felt pressured to return to working full time after staying home for five years to raise her two children. Her husband’s job for Boston Scientific, a manufacturer of medical devices, was shaky and the family’s investments had plunged.

Ms. Boon regularly visits the Opting Back In chat room, sponsored by the Hastings College of Law, where lawyers with new jobs trade stories, tips, hopes and complaints.

“If my husband had been laid off, it would have been a world of hurt,” she said.

In April, she found a temporary job as counsel for a Bay Area company that oversees surgery centers, replacing someone on maternity leave.

She said it was a pleasure to be working with adults again.

Still, she added, “It is really hard to do two jobs at once — the kids still need to be fed and the laundry still needs to get done.”

Ms. Bednarz, the former Milbank lawyer turned intern, also participates in the chat room. “The women who lead the chat room say, ‘Don’t jump into something until you find something that’s just right,’ ” she said. “That’s all well and fine, but some of us have to find something right now. It’s not like we have that luxury in today’s job market.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Assignment Reminder

Happy Labor Day, Everyone!

I encourage you read Robert Reich’s Blog entry for Friday, September 4th, on The Real News About Jobs and Wages -- An Ode to Labor Day
You can find it at: http://robertreich.blogspot.com/

I want to remind you that the first interview assignment (Employment, Care, Work & Justice Interview & Gender & Class Analysis Paper) has two due dates. You need to send me information about the women you selected for the first interview. The woman must have had a child during her working life. This woman does not necessary need to have children currently at home but must have worked at sometime while she had children. Your interview subject may be single, married or divorced. A one page description is due on September 13th at midnight. Please e-mail me the one page as an attachment.

Professor Romero

Are You Being Too Efficient?

Here is an essay questioning some of the unintended consequences of being too efficient. By trying to be a “supermom”, the author questions her quality of life and her ability to be her best. She offers interesting points to ponder in our writings on balance work and family.

Motherlode - Adventures in Parenting

Are You Being Too Efficient?

By Laura Vanderkam

Even in a slack labor market, Americans waste a lot of time. Case in point: are you reading this at work? If so, don’t sweat it. Reading a blog post only takes a few minutes. The real vampires — meetings and phone calls that didn’t need to happen, trips that didn’t need to be taken, excess layers of supervision — can steal whole days.

As the Johnson & Johnson commercial says, though, having a baby changes everything. When full-time working women become full-time working moms, our tolerance for anything that wastes our time plummets. Over the past six months I’ve interviewed hundreds of people about their time management techniques. Moms in particular have told me about how they squeeze minutes out of the day. One professor, a mother of two small kids, explained that she takes the stairs because she hates waiting for the elevator. Another sets a kitchen timer for 30 minutes and challenges herself to race — undistracted — through her assignments.

We change the way we work. We change the way people work with us. Parents boast of getting more done in less time than they ever thought possible.

In general, that’s a good thing — for the economy and our jobs. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering: In our quest for efficiency, do some of us take things too far? In our efforts not to shortchange our children, are some of us unnecessarily shortchanging our careers?

Since I work for myself, I’ve never had to deal with the office woes many other women have, but still, after my son Jasper was born in May 2007, I found my work habits changing. In order to spend time with him, I — like many moms — crunched my schedule to quit by 5pm. I dropped projects that I didn’t think were advancing my career. I planned out my weeks and days based on my top priorities. I spent a lot less time in political chat rooms. I let unimportant emails pile up during the day, then I’d take a few minutes to mass-delete ones I didn’t intend to deal with.

My day-to-day assignments got done. Once I started adding a two-hour shift some weeknights after Jasper went to bed, I even added a few new clients.

But in my zeal to be efficient, I noticed that I’d stopped doing things that maybe weren’t the wastes of time they appeared to be. I love to write fiction, but I wasn’t reading any fiction — and hence not picking up new ideas to improve my craft. I didn’t spend much time surfing the web, but that made it harder to come up with story ideas. I wasn’t promoting myself, because I felt busy enough. And I rarely left my home office to meet people in person or attend networking events. Traveling takes time — getting there and making myself look presentable — and anything that happened outside Jasper’s usual childcare hours required the kind of logistical feats that made it easier not to bother.

Periodically though, I’d be a little inefficient — and be amazed at the results. A quote from Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto turned out to be perfect for something I was writing. A casual mention of a project at a PR event led to just the source I needed. I’d give myself an hour to daydream and would come up with a column idea.

So how do you strike the right balance? How do you keep the upsides of working motherhood — like garnering the courage to extract yourself from a weekly meeting that doesn’t matter — without being so efficient that you cut yourself off from opportunities?

I’m still trying to figure this out as I prepare to welcome a new baby into my life this September. I now set “inefficient” goals for myself, like going to one professional meeting or event outside the office each week and reading one novel a month.

I’m also learning to relax about how many hours per week I work, total. Often, moms who work full-time think that our work is somehow taking time away from our children. We think that moms who work less are spending vastly more time with their kids. But as I’ve been studying the American Time Use Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I’ve learned that this isn’t necessarily the case. There are 168 hours in a week. If you work 50 of those hours (as I do; I’ve kept logs) and sleep eight hours a night (56 hours a week), this leaves 62 hours for other things. The average mom who is not in the workforce and whose youngest kid is under age six, spends less than six hours per week playing or doing hobbies with her kids, and just over two hours reading or doing educational activities. Since I beat this hands down during my 62 waking, non-working hours, there’s no reason to hold myself to a 40-hour work week just so I can have 72 family and leisure hours. There’s definitely no reason to work part-time so I can have 92 hours. In the context of 168 hour weeks, working 40 or 50 hours a week is a lot closer to “balanced” than working 15-20.

Indeed, I am learning that just as putting some limits on your workweek forces you to make better choices, putting some limits on your waking, non-work hours forces better choices there, too. If I know I will see my son three evenings during the work week, I put more effort into those evenings than I would if I had five. We go play on the playground together — really together (yes, that would be me, the woman who’s seven months pregnant and trying to go down the slide). We hunt for street fruit vendors selling “nanas” and then camp outside the window of the nearby doggie day-care and watch the puppies. We read our new favorite book about Louis Blériot’s 1909 flight across the English Channel rather than watch the videos I’d be tempted to use if I had more time.

In other words, it is quite possible that my work hours, and my interactive time with my son, have been rising in tandem. This is not the usual narrative you hear in work-life balance literature, but it’s true for us. And I’ll bet that others have discovered this secret, too — that working a little longer, and maybe not so efficiently, can go a long way toward making life fit better.

* Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Low wage workers are cheated

Here is a NYT article:

September 2, 2009
Low-Wage Workers Are Often Cheated, Study Says
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage, according to a new study based on a survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The study, the most comprehensive examination of wage-law violations in a decade, also found that 68 percent of the workers interviewed had experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week.

“We were all surprised by the high prevalence rate,” said Ruth Milkman, one of the study’s authors and a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the City University of New York. The study, to be released on Wednesday, was financed by the Ford, Joyce, Haynes and Russell Sage Foundations.

In surveying 4,387 workers in various low-wage industries, including apparel manufacturing, child care and discount retailing, the researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss in pay.

The researchers said one of the most surprising findings was how successful low-wage employers were in pressuring workers not to file for workers’ compensation. Only 8 percent of those who suffered serious injuries on the job filed for compensation to pay for medical care and missed days at work stemming from those injuries.

“The conventional wisdom has been that to the extent there were violations, it was confined to a few rogue employers or to especially disadvantaged workers, like undocumented immigrants,” said Nik Theodore, an author of the study and a professor of urban planning and policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago. “What our study shows is that this is a widespread phenomenon across the low-wage labor market in the United States.”

According to the study, 39 percent of those surveyed were illegal immigrants, 31 percent legal immigrants and 30 percent native-born Americans.

The study found that 26 percent of the workers had been paid less than the minimum wage the week before being surveyed and that one in seven had worked off the clock the previous week. In addition, 76 percent of those who had worked overtime the week before were not paid their proper overtime, the researchers found.

The new study, “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers,” was conducted in the first half of 2008, before the brunt of the recession hit. The median wage of the workers surveyed was $8.02 an hour — supervisors were not surveyed — with more than three-quarters of those interviewed earning less than $10 an hour. When the survey was conducted, the minimum wage was $7.15 in New York State, $7.50 in Illinois and $8 in California.

Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis responded to the report with an e-mail statement, saying, “There is no excuse for the disregard of federal labor standards — especially those designed to protect the neediest among us.” Ms. Solis said she was in the process of hiring 250 more wage-and-hour investigators. “Today’s report clearly shows we still have a major task before us,” she said.

The study’s authors noted that many low-wage employers comply with wage and labor laws. The National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small-business owners, said it encouraged members “to stay in compliance with state and federal labor laws.”

But many small businesses say they are forced to violate wage laws to remain competitive.

The study found that women were far more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than men, with the highest prevalence among women who were illegal immigrants. Among American-born workers, African-Americans had a violation rate nearly triple that for whites.

“These practices are not just morally reprehensible, but they’re bad for the economy,” said Annette Bernhardt, an author of the study and policy co-director of the National Employment Law Project. “When unscrupulous employers break the law, they’re robbing families of money to put food on the table, they’re robbing communities of spending power and they’re robbing governments of vital tax revenues.”

When the Russell Sage Foundation announced a grant to help finance the survey, it said that low-wage workers were “hard to find” for interviews and that “government compliance surveys shy away from the difficult task of measuring workplace practices beyond the standard wage, benefits and hours questions.”

The report found that 57 percent of workers sampled had not received mandatory pay documents the previous week, which are intended to help make sure pay is legal and accurate. Of workers who receive tips, 12 percent said their employer had stolen some of the tips.

One in five workers reported having lodged a complaint about wages to their employer or trying to form a union in the previous year, and 43 percent of them said they had experienced some form of illegal retaliation, like firing or suspension, the study said.

In instances when workers’ compensation should have been used, the study found, one third of workers injured on the job paid the bills for treatment out of their own pocket and 22 percent used their health insurance. Workers’ compensation insurance paid medical expenses for only 6 percent of the injured workers surveyed, the researchers found.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

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Welcome Post

Welcome to Jus 420!

I hope everyone has been able to navigate their way through the blackboard site and set-up completed their blogs. I found your bios extremely interesting and look forward to reading your blogs this semester. If you wish to write an additional blog on a current event, please do so.

The first unit presents the framework that is useful in locating difference between women and men’s experiences in the labor force. Traditionally, women are identified with the home or the private sphere and men with working outside the home and engaged in public. For most women, this is no longer the case. Both men and women are employed or own a business and are engaged in paid labor.

The balance of work and home has always been a working women’s issue but more recently, men have also taken up the issue. The double day that working women with families has had an enormous impact on their working lives, as well as the way that the larger public perceives them. Union organizers displaced women for years because of their lack of presence of meeting. However, these meetings were organized around men not women. Women rush home to take care of children and to prepare dinner. Certainly, a lot of this has changed but women’s commitment to their careers continue to be questioned and this has real consequences on their raises and promotions.

Care work of children, elderly parents and sick relatives tends to fall on the shoulders of women. Care work also covers the tasks involved with maintaining the family, such as doing the laundry, cooking and planning holiday dinners with relatives. Many women try to arrange their employment around carework. Consequently, working women (particularly mothers) are less likely to have flexible schedules to work overtime, travel out of town, become actively involved in unions or engage in outside work activities where important mentoring takes place. This takes a toll on working women’s careers, paychecks and their health.

We are fortunate that this class is taking place during one an historical debate about health care. This debate includes the support that working women can hope for their own health, their family, and the support they can receive for doing unpaid carework (caring for sick family members). The degree to which these issues are addressed tell us about the degree to which working women’s concerns are on the list of concerns.

The work-home balance may also be the framework used to decide a woman’s future in a career. Having a family or being married may discourage employers in giving women employees the opportunity to learn new skills, consider them for promotions and place them in leadership roles. If women are perceived as less serious worker and not as committed to her career than a male employee, this certainly has consequences to moving women into managerial and professional positions.

One of your classmates discussed the under representation of women in technology. Inside Higher Education recently published an article about a program that Grinnell College has to try to increase the diversity in the science.


Inside Higher Education

Diversity in Science
August 26, 2009

Katie Lee, 22, loves surgery -- performing it, that is. Studying biology at Grinnell College, she discovered that the procedure gives her "intrinsic joy."

Yet she views the logical next step, a career as a surgeon, with uncertainty. As a woman, she's been told she lacks the "don't feel, just do" personality that seemingly characterizes the male-dominated field. As an Asian-American, she is considered a minority on campus but not, others have told her, in the sciences.

Lee, who graduated in May, spent four years confronting those obstacles as a member of the Grinnell Science Project, which has encouraged women and members of minority groups to pursue science and engineering since 1992. The Iowa liberal arts college has since seen double-digit leaps in the number of traditionally underrepresented students in those fields, which the project's directors attribute to their outreach programs, revamped curriculums and new laboratories.

An average of 45 women a year earned science degrees from Grinnell during 1990-2, according to data from the Office of Institutional Research. That average jumped to 71 a year during 2006-8, a rate that outpaced the growth in women enrolled overall. The increase means that nearly every year since 2000, the number of female science graduates has matched or surpassed that of their male counterparts.

While minority students who major in science are still relatively few -- there were 25 out of last year's class of 408 -- the number has steadily grown over the years. The average number of those students per year during 2006-8 was double the average per year during 1990-2. That growth slightly outpaced the 44 percent increase of minority students overall.

Starting in the late 1980s, some faculty noticed that women and members of all racial minority groups were strikingly absent from biology, physics, chemistry, computer science, math and related departments. "The problem was that many minority students were interested in careers in the sciences, particularly professional careers ... and they would come in with a lot of enthusiasm to try and major in these fields and then run into all sorts of [academic] difficulties in the first few years," said Mark Schneider, a physics professor and the first director of the Grinnell Science Project. "They ended up changing majors to something outside of the sciences and actually doing fine and graduating from Grinnell."

Several incidents, including sexual jokes made by male researchers in her lab, have caused Lee to question her surgery aspirations. "It's hard to become a female surgeon just because you're in this social environment where it's still male-dominated, it's still a field that is in many ways masculine," she said. "I've thought about that and whether I'd want to go through that. I don't know."

One of the Grinnell Science Project's major components is a pre-orientation week for incoming female or minority students with a demonstrated penchant for science. The campus invites 60 to 90 students to arrive before classes start in August, familiarize themselves with the campus, meet science faculty and attend mock courses. The week is meant to give them a head start on feeling at home, said Jim Swartz, a chemistry professor. "When the rest of the new students arrive on campus, rather than feeling like they are marginal here, [participants in the program] are actually the experts," he said.

Professors have also restructured introductory courses with the intention of making them more accessible generally, which they say has fostered a welcoming environment for women, minority and first-generation students as an effect. For Clark Lindgren, a biology professor and former director of the Grinnell Science Project, that course has been Biology 150. Officially introduced in fall 2000, the semester-long introductory course must be completed by aspiring biology majors before they advance. Students learn by employing research techniques -- from reading scientific literature to designing experiments -- in sessions that blend lecture and lab work. No course can substitute for Biology 150, not even AP Biology.

"For everybody, this is new and it provides a kind of leveling of the experience for all of the students," Lindgren said. "So it's not disenfranchising certain students who have had a certain background and didn't have the same opportunities to be exposed to more traditional biology."

Similarly, Schneider, the physics professor, departs from the traditional format of three one-hour lectures and a three-hour lab session per week. His version of introductory physics consists of three two-hour slots that combine lecture and labwork, with a focus on contemporary themes including quantum mechanics, thermal physics and relativity.

While he noted that it is "difficult to know for sure what is cause and what is effect," Schenider said he has observed a dramatic increase in the number of women and minority students studying physics. In the late 1980s, there would only be one or two women among the department's graduates every year, and a minority student every five years, he said. Now, he said, the graduates are 40 percent women and include a few minority students annually.

Looking across the nation, Grinnell's situation is hardly unique. Women earned 58 percent of bachelor's degrees in 2006, but only 21 percent of physics degrees and 20 percent of engineering degrees, according to the National Science Foundation. In addition, underrepresented minorities -- not including Asians -- earned just 16 percent of all bachelor's degrees in science and engineering in 2004.

Domestic minority students make up a little over 19 percent of Grinnell's student body overall. Daria Slick, director of intercultural affairs, said that while the college has not experienced racial tension, its rural location lacks the cultural diversity of cities such as Chicago. She added, "As a person of color myself, I know from my own experience -- and I believe this happens at whatever institution an individual attends -- of course there's a culture shock, there's just that initial transition period of being out of one's comfort zone."

Coming from Texas, Desi Romero, 19, adjusted to Grinnell by participating in the science orientation program. An aspiring chemistry major who wants to study soil preservation in China, he said he chose the college for its intimate class sizes: "You can have eight to 12 people at a table. That helps a lot in classroom discussion, where it's very engaging, almost like eating at a dinner table and discussing something."

Those lab tables were built during a $60.6 million-renovation of Grinnell's main science center, starting in 1997. The project made the laboratories smaller, added movable tables and chairs and created open lounge spaces -- all changes that Swartz, the director, said were intended to invite a diverse array of students to the sciences. "It's easier to sit down at a table and work in a corridor than having to open a door and work in a room where you feel like you might not belong," he said.

For women and minorities to feel at home in a classroom, they must be engaged in issues they can relate to and use their knowledge to help their communities, said Joan Lorden, a neuroscience professor and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She chairs the campus's Council on University Community, charged with leading diversity efforts and promoting understanding of related issues among faculty, students and staff. In addition, she said, students tend to feel like they don't belong in science if they don't have mentors they can relate to: "They don't see as many women or underrepresented minorities running laboratories. To the extent that role models matter, that's a big issue."

Sandra King, a 2008 graduate of Grinnell who will begin a Ph.D. in chemistry at Yale University this fall, said she would not have double majored in chemistry and math had it not been for faculty support. "Having met a chemistry professor at the GSP barbeque, I felt comfortable making an appointment with him, and he helped me plan a course schedule that would allow me to keep on track for either the chemistry or physics major," she wrote in an e-mail. "I then became enthralled in chemistry, and four years later, I am currently a chemistry graduate student."

As for Lee, the biology student, the future is less clear. She is considering teaching English in China for a year; dreams of surgery hover in the back of her mind. But should she forgo the latter, she said, it doesn't mean that programs such as the Grinnell Science Project have no value for her or students like her. Quite the contrary -- they're more necessary than ever.


© Copyright 2009 Inside Higher Ed