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