The Challenges of Raising Cinderella

It wasn't until I read Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture that I truly became terrified of the idea of someday giving birth to (or adopting) a pair of X chromosomes. The main question Orenstein tries to answer is how do feminist (or at least, non-misogynist) mothers deal with the explosion of gendered children's culture? It turns out that the answer to that question is far from easy.

Orentsein describes her journey through confronting the new girlie-girl culture with her own daughter. Princess culture, it seems is rather new to childhood, and was mostly just dreamed up by a Disney executive who couldn't stand to see little girls twirling about in homemade princess costumes. Now, lots of marketers have caught onto this trend and it's becoming increasingly difficult to find gender-neutral toys. This point seems pretty obvious when you view this breakdown from Sociological Images of a Christmas toy catalog: While you occasionally see marketers place girls with gender-neutral or even "boy" toys, you never see boys playing with "girl" toys. Today Sociological Images ran competing word clouds of marketing language in commercials for boys' and girls' toys. It seems you no longer have children; you have boys and you have girls.

Determined not to have her daughter grow up with the mindset of girlie-girl culture, Orenstein did her best to protect her daughter from the tyranny of the princesses. She failed. As much as she didn't like it, it wasn't long before her daughter was demanding tiaras and tutus.

The problem Orenstein ran into is that rejecting girlie-girl culture sends a message that's almost as bad as embracing it: If things that girls like are bad, that diminishes the value of girls in our culture. Telling little girls that they shouldn't like the tutus and princess wands they might be attracted to through a combination of marketing, peer pressure, and even a bit of "nature" tells them that girlie equals bad and that they only have value if they like "boy" things.

It seems parents who want to raise their girls in a way that doesn't reject girl culture but still pushes girls to explore "boy" interests—anything from toy trucks to light sabers—leaves them in a difficult position. After all, just because a girl wears a tiara in childhood doesn't mean she can't go on to become a Ph.D.'s in astrophysics. But it's also true that increased emphasis on "pretty" girls can have adverse effects on body image, self-esteem, and ambition. The notion of trying to navigate these waters is terrifying.

Though Orentsein's work is fascinating, I'm left wondering how parents can raise their girls in such a culture—and, furthermore, how they can raise their boys. After all, if we suspect girlie-girl culture that there's a risk in girlie-girl culture for girls, imagine what it might do to boys who are taught to resist engaging with it.

How MIT (Sorta) Solved Its Gender Problem

(Flickr/Infinitely Curious)

As Monica Potts notes at The American Prospect, there have been a number of stories about women's leadership this week:

No fewer than three news articles this week detail how hard it is for women, both students and professors, at elite campuses. The New York Times reports that MIT, which made an effort some years ago to correct for a lack of female professors on campus, has made gains in recruiting and honoring female professors. But that's created a weird dynamic in which women who win accolades question whether their gender plays a role and feel they have to navigate gender stereotypes on campus. The Daily Beast writes about a study that shows women trail men in campus leadership positions as students, and another Beast article interviews the presidents of UPenn and Brown, both women, about how there's a similar leadership gap at their colleges.

Though the Times story Monica links to leads with the remaining problems of cultural sexism, what I think is interesting about the MIT situation is this: MIT story is that the school found a problem, studied it, and made steps to correct it. And it worked! MIT made significant gains in female representation among professors. It even has a female president, Susan Hockfield. It's a very MIT way of going about it, when you think about it.

Of course, that didn't eliminate all problems of women in academia. As the Times reported, problems remain: there's still a perceived problem that women are unfairly favored (even though MIT took steps to ensure qualified candidates would be hired), and the school still struggles (like all higher ed institutions do) accommodating academic couples.

What this illustrates is that schools really get down to business and recognize that institutional sexism is a problem that needs fixing, there are steps they can take to get there. And recognizing that there's a problem is an important first step.

Women's Occupy Just 27% of Leadership Jobs in Media

Joyce Slocum is the interim CEO at NPR.

Via Bloomberg:

Women represent less than one third of the main decision makers at news companies worldwide as gender inequality leaves top management and governance dominated by males, the International Women’s Media Foundation said.

Women occupy about 27 percent of the leading managerial jobs such as chief executive officer and about 26 percent of governing board positions, according to a survey of 522 newspaper, radio and television companies by the Washington-based advocacy group. Women hold 39 percent of the senior management positions that include managing editor and bureau chief, the two-year study released today shows.

This taps into tons of earlier discussions about women's representation in media. Still, it's startling to see the numbers.

Killing the 'Literary Wife' Memoir Subgnere

(Flickr/UK Pictures)

I recently listened to Marueen Corrigan's review of feminist writer Anne Roiphe's new memoir, Art and Madness. I haven't read any of Roiphe's work—not even her highly acclaimed second novel, Up the Sandbox, which has been hailed as a "feminist classic"—but Corrigan's review certainly piqued my interest to read it. What I found most fascinating about Corrigan's review, though, was her thoughts on where Roiphe's new book fell in the sea of literature:

Art and Madness is a particularly hard-boiled addition to a distinct subgenre of female autobiography — memoirs written by women who came of age in the 1950s and who sublimated their own ambitions by attaching themselves to literary men. I'm thinking of testaments like How I Became Hettie Jones by the eponymous former wife of LeRoi Jones, later Amiri Baraka; Manhattan, When I Was Young by Mary Cantwell; and the especially magnificent Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson, onetime girlfriend of Jack Kerouac. Educated at Seven Sisters colleges or their like, these young women wanted to live for Art — which, in the 1950s translated into living for a man who thought of himself as an artist. They found a place for themselves in the New York boho scene of the time, pouring drinks or tending to the other appetites of the resident drunken geniuses.

Roiphe is, after all, the erstwhile wife of Jack Richardson, a playwright who during the 1960s was called one of the most promising playwrights of his generation. But Roiphe clearly resents this connection, and, according to Corrigan's take on the book, is ruthless in her depiction of her younger self. She admonishes her former self for attaching to someone else's genius rather than exploring her own.

Though women today might feel more liberated to pursue their own craft and careers, Roiphe's critique clearly speaks to a perception about how men and women's work is perceived differently—and that's a sentiment that still remains true today.

Writers, like all people, are attracted to people like themselves. A 1993 American Journalism Review article addressed the question of married journalists and pointed to some prominent (at the time) examples:

[...] former Washington Post Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee and Sally Quinn, an erstwhile Style staffer at that paper. Or Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn of the New York Times, who shared a 1989 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on China. Or Ann Devroy of the Washington Post and Mark Matthews of Baltimore's Sun, married competitors. Merrill McLoughlin and Michael Ruby, who are married, are co-editors of U.S. News & World Report.

Of the couples called out in the AJR article, the male journalists are arguably more famous an influential than their partners. It's hard to say how literary couples of today, many of whom are still young and coming up in their journalistic and literary careers, will turn out. They will either challenge this paradigm or reinforce it.

After thinking through the many journalistic couples I know of today (an admittedly unscientific sample), I could name just one in which the female partner far outpaced her partner or husband: Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman. (Please, if you know of any other couples that might be in this category, leave them in comments.)

And it's no wonder. One need only briefly glance at the much-discussed Vida graphs to understand there's a dearth of female bylines to suss out why so many male journalists might be outpacing their partners in prestige.

Of course, we still have the potential to turn that idea—that "literary wives" will live in the shadows of their husbands or partners—on its head. Today in her farewell post at Feministing, Ann Friedman, in her tireless campaign to get more women to win at the literary prestige game, wrote about how women need to be more encouraging to other women. Such a message would be powerful if it especially came from a male partner.

Perhaps someday women will no longer be accessories to the "resident drunken geniuses" Corrigan described in this subgenre of memoir. Indeed, let's make sure the "literary wife" memoir is one that will be written about the past.

Happy 100th Birthday, International Women's Day!

(Flickr/Downing Street)

Today is International Women's Day—the 100th such one, in fact. There are two things that strike me about this day. First, that women around the world are in a much, much better place than they were 100 years ago. The second is that women have a long way to go in terms of gender equality, feminism, gender justice—whatever you want to call it.

After all, women are still making leaps and bounds in breaking into predominately male industries and challenging what's "masculine" and "feminine" all the time. But despite all that, women still routinely make less than their male peers, women are the minority of political leaders, and women are still the minority voice among opinion makers. Not to mention some of the really horrendous human rights violations that are happening against women throughout the world.

It gets really exhausting for the women who fight to correct these injustices day after day. And that is, perhaps, why the lie that we don't "need" feminism anymore or that we've already reached gender equality. It's much easier to accept that where we are is the best we'll ever get than it is to correct these problems.

The world is a really bad place sometimes, but it is especially a bad place for a lot of women around the world. That, I think, is the takeaway is from a day like today. We should never forget that, and we should keep fighting for what women deserve: equality.

Graphic Ladies, Or Women Make and Write About Comics Too

(Flickr/Loren Javier)

Props to Erin Polgreen on making Graphic Ladies, a new blog that highlights the work of female comics and critics. Here's what Erin has to say about why she started it:

The Los Angeles Times debuted a new book award for graphic literature—but only one woman, C. Tyler, was nominated. The judges were all men. Last summer, Fantagraphics released an anthology of the Best American Comics Criticism—but only one woman writer was featured. Now, The Comics Journal, arguably the leading chronicle of the industry, just relaunched, and the number of female contributors is not encouraging. Only one lady author was published at the time of launch, with plans for 6 women (of 29 mentioned authors) to contribute at later dates.

Taking a cue from Ann Friedman's project Lady Journos, which highlights the great work of female journalists to show there's no excuse for a lack of women writers in highbrow literary magazines, Erin started Graphic Ladies to show that women both make comics and write comic criticism, and that there's really no excuse for such pitiful gender ratios.

So follow her on Twitter and Tumblr. Do it. You'll feel better about yourself.

Why I'll Never Be a Stay-At-Home Girlfriend

(Flickr/mrrobertwade (wadey))

The "Stay At Home Girlfriend" (I guess the "SAHG" acronym was intentional since it was in the headline, but something pronounced "sag" -- really?) piece on Brokelyn caused a lot of ladyblogs to protest and mock it.

Edith Zimmerman in her quintessentially concise way, just said, "LOL, is this a joke?"

Jessica Wakeman, bless her heart, defended the piece, "I don’t think there’s any shame in being a 'stay-at-home'-anything, so long as it works for both partners. A homemaker can still be a feminist. My mother stayed at home and raised five children; she quit her job when she married my widower father, adopted his three daughters from a previous marriage, and stayed at home to raise them so they no longer had to be taken care of by babysitters and relatives."

Sadie Stein over at Jezebel had a thoughtful response, saying that though she would also defend the right of a stay-at-home anything as a legitimate choice, "let's face it: the tone of this is ... troubling."

The piece, written by Quiana Stokes—who, if this is her on LinkedIn, worked at JP Morgan and went to Wesleyan—says this is definitely an unexpected situation and, for all we know, she views this as a temporary excursion into domestic bliss. But I have to agree with Stein. This is troubling. Much of it seems to be pulled directly out of the stuff that Betty Friedan criticized in the Feminine Mystique—right down to the ideas of presenting your man with beer when he arrives at home and keeping "yourself up." (Fun fact: This book was the first ever feminist book I read and I recommend it; I found it all-too-relevant despite the fact it was published nearly half a century ago.)

Like Jessica and Stein, I'll admit that there's no shame in staying at home, but I will say that women feel a unique pressure to stay at home when possible (even though few women could possibly ever afford to do so—ahem, "two-bedroom Greenpoint apartment" that Stokes and her unnamed boyfriend seem to be able to afford on one income), but here are the reasons I'll probably won't ever stay at home while my partner works. If Stokes can lay out tips defending her position, I can lay out some reasons why I'm not likely to jump at the chance to be a SAHG.

Retirement

While retirement seems a loooong way off when you're in your 20s or 30s, all the time you spend not working is time that you're probably also not contributing (or having your employer contribute) to your IRA or 401K—let alone Social Security. This has a serious long-term impact on what you will be able to afford when you're older. Since men generally don't live as long as women, you can't necessarily expect to be supported into the sunset years of your life. You're better off squirreling away for the future now.

Your partner could stop being your partner

This is an uncomfortable and sometimes painful thing to think through for a lot of women. It's awfully sweet to think you'll be with your current boyfriend, husband, or partner (or girlfriend/wife) forever, but the reality is that bad stuff happens. People break up. People get divorced. And, as awful as it is to imagine, people die. My mother was widowed when I was seven, and I've been eternally grateful my mom had her own income to raise us on. If any of those things happen when you're a stay-at-home wife/mom/girlfriend, you are in a much more financially precarious situation. I will continue to be haunted by this Salon essay by a divorced stay-at-home mom lamenting her financial situation now that she doesn't have the income she once shared with her ex-husband.

Diminished long-term earning potential

Let's face it, taking time out of the working world, as the long-term unemployed in this recession could tell you, has a real cost. If you ever need to jump back into the workforce, as the writer for Salon discovered, gaps on your resume look really unappealing to potential employers, especially if you don't have an illness or disability to explain it. Is that unfair to homemakers? Absolutely. It's also something that's really hard to counteract. Staying employed in some capacity is almost always better than just stopping work for long periods of time.

Achieving gender equity in housework

The bits Stokes adds about cleaning and cooking every day so her boyfriend doesn't have to—"I’d much rather pick up behind him"—makes me a little ill when I think about the giant picture of women and housework. Though there isn't much data out there for unmarried partners living together, a well-publicized 2008 study shows married women do a staggering 7 extra hours of housework a week. You don't have to make your personal relationship a battleground for women everywhere, but fair is fair, and it makes sense to split household chores evenly. Or at least as evenly as you can. It's really easy to say women are "better" at housework than men, but you know how you get better? You do it.

Boredom

Granted, Washington, D.C., is filled with lots of semi-employed and and freelance people so if I ever ended up as a stay-at-home something I'd probably have plenty of company. Still, if I was really not working—not even blogging or, I guess writing pieces for Brokelyn—I'd probably end up bored. Eventually I'd start to feel like I do when I haven't left the house for several hours on Saturday because I was too busy watching television. Socialization is good, even if we sometimes have aggravating moments at our jobs.

The problem that has no name

I'm going to go ahead and cite Friedan again. Studies show that stay-at-home wives and mothers tend to be at higher risk of depression than working women. This is something Friedan talked about in the Feminine Mystique at length. Careers stress us out, but they're also good for our overall happiness.

I can't afford not to work

For a lot of women who work, this is the big reason. It'd be wonderful to stay at home with the kids to aid in their learning development or read a novel a day, but lots of us can't afford to not work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that despite recent trend pieces on highly educated women "opting out," this isn't really true. So many families are struggling to make ends meet, even on two incomes, and the recession is leaving a lot more people out of work than before. An even better reason to hang on to the job you've got.

To be sure, this isn't an attack on those that do choose to stay at home. I'm not saying feminism and staying home are mutually exclusive. But for I had to remind myself of the reasons it's not for me. God willing I'm not laid off tomorrow.

Update: I'm not sure why I didn't put this in my original post—probably because it's too obvious—but I should also add this last point:

Men don't sit around and talk about how awesome staying at home is

This is another big reason why I'd never do the stay-at-home thing. Men don't think about this. They just don't. True, some men think about what they'd do if they were really wealthy and didn't have to work, but because we live in a culture that's so imbued with the male breadwinner mentality that women are by default the ones that think about not working or staying home. Women just seem to make this "choice" a lot more than men do. And women are often in a compromised bargaining position—women still often make less than their male peers, women face hard choices about career and children, and women aren't usually promoted as quickly as men. I have a hard time with entertaining the notion of stay-at-homeness when it seems to be taken on disproportionately by women.

SXSW's Comedy Gender Gap

Rita Houston and Margaret Cho (right) at SXSW last year. (Flickr/wfuv)

Hey, you should read Andrea Grimes on the kerfuffle over the lack of female comics at SXSW. She's funny and totally angry about it. Maybe next time they'll see fit to put her on the bill.

When Women Run for Office

(Flickr/jypsygen)

Via Andrea Grimes, this analysis from the Dallas Morning News of possible candidates to replace Dallas mayor Tome Leppert is fascinating. Can you spot the sexism?

POSSIBLE CANDIDATES

ANGELA HUNT
Dallas City Council member, Dallas lawyer

Pros: High name recognition and ability to get votes across the city. Could be dangerous if matched up against the right candidate.

Cons: Considered the enemy of some in the business elite. Ability to run an aggressive campaign could be affected by her new family. Can she raise enough money to compete? [emphasis added]

JIM MOORE
Defense attorney

Pros: As the only announced candidate in the mayor's race, he has an opportunity to get some early momentum.

Cons: He has to build recognition as he is virtually unknown throughout the city.

RON NATINSKY
Dallas City Council member, Dallas businessman

Pros: Got out the gate early and appears to be in position to get support from various Dallas business leaders. With consultant Carol Reed already on board, Natinsky has access to campaign dollars.

Cons: Could have difficulty getting southern Dallas support. Some business leaders looking for an alternative.

MIKE RAWLINGS
Park Board president, former homeless czar

Pros: Long considered to be a viable successor to Leppert. Strong ties to city's business elite and could get votes in the south.

Cons: Does he really want it? Has no campaign experience.

BRINT RYAN
Dallas businessman

Pros: Has enough money to self-finance his campaign and attract solid consultants. Could be appealing to those looking for a pro-business candidate.

Cons: Still relatively unknown to much of the city. Has to overcome being known as the guy who spent $1 million on an unsuccessful council race.

Hm, one of the female candidates seems to have a con that the male candidates don't.

Women Spend Less Time on Research in Academia

(Flickr/Marshall Astor - Food Pornographer)

Via Inside Higher Ed, Academe is publishing a new study that finds women in academia are routinely given more departmental service duties -- duties that often aren't considered when considering promotions. The study examined 350 faculty members at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and found:

Although associate professors of both sexes worked similar amounts of time overall—about sixty-four hours a week—the distribution of work time varied considerably. Men spent seven and a half hours more a week on their research than did women. Even if these differences in research time occurred only during semesters, not during summer or holiday breaks, this would mean that men spent in excess of two hundred more hours on their research each year than women. On the other hand, women associate professors taught an hour more each week than men, mentored an additional two hours a week, and spent nearly five hours more a week on service. This translates to women spending roughly 220 more hours on teaching, mentoring, and service over two semesters than men at that rank.

In other words, when it comes to promotion in academia it's research that matters -- and men are getting to spend more time on research than women. In many ways, it's the equivalent of the housework paradox; women spend just enough more time on household duties than men often translating into less time working those extra hours that might get you promoted.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but this study just confirms what I learned anecdotally from women I've interviewed in academia. Women are often assigned to more administrative and teaching duties while their male peers are left to do more research and publish more studies. It will take some serious cultural changes to alter this pattern.

On Gender Parity in the New Yorker

Edith Zimmerman does the blogger equivalent of rolling her eyes at this open letter to the editors of the New Yorker that complained the last two issues didn't contain enough content from women.

Does this bother you? This doesn't bother me. If you like a magazine, read it; if you don't, don't. Also, if you're mad at a magazine, sounding like a total drag can't be the best way to get what you want (which is, apparently, a refund for that specific issue or a back issue with more women writers). Pick your battles, etc.

Now, I mostly love Zimmerman so I hate to call her out, but I couldn't disagree more with this approach. You know what I bet would happen if enraged feminists just stopped buying magazines that didn't have gender parity in its bylines? Nothing! I'm almost 100% certain the New Yorker will continue publishing! And probably also continue to publish not a whole lot of stuff from women!

I completely understand the frustration with women constantly complaining about byline parity. It's totally annoying. But you know what's also annoying? The fact that men disproportionately get bylines in an ever-shrinking number of magazine pages.

There are definitely alternatives to the letter to the editor approach. You could be positive and praise magazines that do a good job of gender parity in their bylines. You could write in praising the work of the women that are published in that magazine. You could even -- pitch the magazine if you happen to be a journalist (since the disproportionate number of pitches to magazines come from men, says just about every editor in the universe). There are tons of ways to approach this problem that don't include just complaining about it in an obnoxious letter -- especially if you are from Massachusetts.

But I think Edith's approach of just not buying the magazine is a bit too much like the "just don't vote if politics pisses you off" line of thinking. Which is the kind of thing that makes me want to bang my head against the wall.

What is often effective is calling attention to the problem in some way, even if you have to be really nice in your tone. Then editors of the New Yorker, liberal media elites that they are, will get really embarrassed. And then they might possibly do something about the problem. Or maybe not. But at least they had to think about it for five minutes while they read your letter.

Update: Jenna Sauers at Jezebel has a good breakdown the dismal gender ratio at other major magazines.

Separate But Equal? ESPN Launches Women's Site

(Flickr/Tulane Public Relations)

Yesterday ESPN announced it was launching a new site called ESPNW:

Presented in a blog format, espnW.com will offer fan- and athlete-centric content geared toward female athletes and sports fans aged 18+. The site, supported by a Twitter and Facebook presence, will incorporate posts by top female sports columnists and bloggers, pro athletes, expert contributors and news from a variety of ESPN and non-ESPN news outlets. This 1.0 version of espnW.com will serve as a precursor to a more robust web site with mobile applications and personalized content that will launch in Spring 2011.

If ESPN is trying to cater more to women with its content, it's about damn time. Title IX will have its 40th birthday in 2012. Women now account for 46 percent of NFL fans, which has sent the NFL merchandising team scrambling to make hay of female fans' purchasing power. American Women in Sports Media, founded back in 1988, boasts a membership of "over 600." And the National Sports Foundation, founded by tennis pioneer Billie Jean King, notes that sponsorships of women's sports have more than tripled from 1992 to 2000 to $1 billion and that two in five high school girls play some kind of varsity sport. While women still aren't the majority of fans or athletes, they're a quickly growing demographic in both sports and sports coverage. ESPNW seems aimed both at promoting both women sports writers and professional and college women athletes.

In some ways, I'm excited to see this new product. As a recently renewed sports fan, I've been looking for fan blogs and sports stories on my favorite teams -- but almost all of them have been written by men, with the occasional misogynist joke thrown in for good measure. The biggest fan blogs and professional sports journalism sites tend to be dominated both by male writers and male commentors. It's refreshing to read sports commentary written by women, but what's puzzling to me is why ESPN felt the need to put it on its own site rather than simply promote women within ESPN.com.

Some of the content found on ESPNW is very similar to the kind of content already found on ESPN's main page, like their recaps of last night's NFL and NBA games. Other stories highlight the achievement of women athletes, like Kara Lawson's "Five Big Reasons to Watch Women's Basketball." None of it would -- or should -- look out of place on ESPN's main page.

ESPN is likely following the trends of other websites that have started rolling out female-only websites to varying degrees of success over the last few years: Jezebel is a subset of Gawker, the short-lived DoubleX stand-alone site for Slate, AOL's Lemondrop, and now the Hairpin is a counter (or supplement, depending on how you look at it) to the Awl. Such a move has been criticized by some, including Ann Friedman in The American Prospect, who argued at the time of DoubleX's launch, "When publishers create separate sites dedicated to women or to black people, they are signaling that they don't see a need to have their main site serve these people as core readers."

It's tough to criticize a new product that probably brought jobs to female sports writers in the middle of a tough economy and while newspapers around their country are cutting sports sections down or completely. But I do hope that if ESPNW performs well -- and who knows if it will -- I hope ESPN will take it as a lesson that they should continue hiring women sports writers and highlighting female athletes.

Disappointment on Fair Pay

(Flickr/liewcf)

Today the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that would have amended federal labor law to strengthen current labor law against pay discrimination on the basis of sex, failed in the Senate by a vote of 58-41. As Shelby Knox said on Twitter today, "#FairPay will likely fail because of 2 women, Sens Snowe & Collins. Lesson: elect pro-equality candidates of both genders, both parties." The disappointment among the feminist community is palpable.

But I'm not actually all that surprised the legislation failed. It has been covered very little in the mainstream press. Since the Nov. 2 elections, just 58 news stories in Lexis Nexis mentioned the Paycheck Fairness Act. By contrast, 220 articles mentioned the DREAM Act, 950 stories mentioned the potential repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," and more than 1,000 news stories mentioned the Bush tax cuts. In other words, the press just didn't see this legislation as worthy of news coverage.

After a rough year for women's rights organizations, many hoped that the Paycheck Fairness Act would be a victory -- and a bipartisan one at that. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which aimed to allow women greater time to sue for lost wages due to discrimination, passed earlier this year and was favored by Senators Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). Not this time.

American Women Need More Than Advice to 'Be More Dutch'

(Flickr/lapstrake)

Jessica Olien over at Slate has been in the Netherlands for three months. After carefully studying some statistics, she has decided that feminists had it all wrong, and that we should give up on feminism and just be Dutch.

Though the Netherlands is consistently ranked in the top five countries for women, less than 10 percent of women here are employed full-time. And they like it this way. Incentives to nudge women into full-time work have consistently failed. Less than 4 percent of women wish they had more working hours or increased responsibility in the workplace, and most refuse extended hours even when the opportunity for advancement arises. Some women cite the high cost of child care as a major factor in their shorter hours, but 62 percent of women working part time in the Netherlands don't have young children in the house, and mothers rarely increase their working hours even when their children leave home.

It's hard not to wonder: Have we gotten it all wrong? In the United States, the race for equality has gone mostly in one direction. Women want to shatter the glass ceiling, reach the top spots in the hierarchy, and earn the same respect and salaries as men do. But perhaps this situation is setting us up for a world in which none of us is having any fun. After all, studies of female happiness in the U.S. find that even as our options have increased and we have become financially more independent than in any previous time in our history, American women as a whole are not getting any happier. If anything, the studies show that we are emotionally less well-off than we were before. Wasn't the whole point of the fight for equality in the workplace to improve our wellbeing?

The rest of her article goes on to speculate that American women are getting pushed to work more and achieve more while Dutch women seem to work less and be happier. While that might be true in the strictest interpretation of the data Olien presented there's a lot she's missing here.

First, though women in the Netherlands may "work less" than their American counterparts, she tends to gloss over the fact that the Dutch have a lot of policies that are helpful to women. In fact, the Netherlands has so many policies that help women out that its often the subject of study when it comes to family-friendly policies.

The chief reason full-time employment is the holy grail in America is that it's usually tied to health insurance. Not only does the Netherlands offers the best version of what American health care reform tried to do: Offer affordable health insurance but force everyone to buy into the system. Add on top of that generous child care subsidies, lengthly vacation time, and flexible working hours. If American women had these options in a way that wasn't tied to employment, there might not be such a rush for full-time employment here -- among women AND men. Granted, as Olien hints, the policies aren't perfect in the Netherlands, but they are leagues ahead of what's offered by the U.S. government. And, as Yglesias points out, while Dutch women do less work than their American counterparts, so do Dutch men.

Olien also doesn't acknowledge that America and the Netherlands are different in terms of demographics. Not only is there more disagreement about what the government owes women politically here, but this country is also much economically and demographically diverse than the Netherlands. A full 79.9 percent of the Netherlands is made up of ethnic Dutch (whites), while America is made up of 64 percent non-Hispanic white. The United states has a lot more people that are relatively poor -- this graph shows that while the Netherlands has only 8.1 percent of the population below the median income, in America it's 17 percent.

Perhaps it's poverty that's getting American women down, since recent studies show that among mothers especially poverty correlates highly with depression. Not to mention that depression treatments are less effective if you're poor and that you're more at risk for depression in the first place if you fall into a low socioeconomic class.

Fundamentally, Olien looks at the Dutch system and concludes that happiness and equality are inherently separate endeavors. But American feminists don't combat the pay gap because they think American women are unhappy. They do it because on average in America, if you're a white man, you will make more than everyone else, and that's fundamentally unfair. The gender essentialism in Olien's piece -- that all women are pressured to climb the corporate ladder but secretly want to pursue hobbies isn't even anecdotally true. I know lots of women that thrive on the high of a workaholic career drive and lots of women whose priorities lie more with their families. Women should have both the option to achieve highly in their careers and to stay at home to support families: Just like men do.

But for the vast majority of women who work in America, they do so not because it's a choice but because it's what they have to do to make ends meet. Setting up the difference between Dutch women and American women as simply choosing to work less isn't right.

I will give Olien credit for correctly identifying a phenomenon that is prevalent in America, perhaps best expressed by Courtney Martin, "We are the daughters of feminists who said, 'You can be anything' and we heard 'You have to be everything.'" But while this is a problem in America, it's often a problem most heavily complained about among the white, middle-class and upper-middle class woman who sighs at having to "do it all." That pressure is real, sure, but many women don't have the luxury to complain about it. Unfortunately too many women in America are just struggling to survive, pay their health insurance, and struggling to figure out what to do with no child care and no sick leave.

So forgive me if I can't muster the energy to sympathize with Olien in her campaign to make American women "more Dutch."

The Pay Gap in Academia

Last week the National Center for Education Statistics at the Department of Education released its "Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2009, and Salaries of Full-Time Instructional Staff, 2009-10" report [PDF], which offers statistics on employment in higher education.

There's a lot in the report that isn't too surprising from a gender perspective, but I will note two things. First, women are starting to make inroads among universities by achieving more full professorships than the last time they conducted the study (in the 2003-2004 school year).

More men than women were employed as professors at 4-year institutions between 2003-04 and 2009-10 ... However, during this period, the percentage change in the number of professors was higher for women. For example, the number of men at public institutions decreased by 4 percent while the number of women increased by 24 percent; at private not-for-profit institutions, the number of men increased by 1 percent and the number of women increased by 26 percent; and at private for-profit institutions, the number of men increased by 50 percent while the number of women increased by 73 percent.

The second thing is that there's still a pay gap between what men and women earn in pretty much every instructor level at pretty much every type of school. (One notable exception is that women out-earn men at the lecturer level at 2-year private non-profits, but that could be because there are so few schools that the sample size is skewed. Of course, if others have insight to offer on this point I'd love to hear it.)

The biggest pay gaps occur at the professor level at public, 4-year colleges and universities and private, non-profit 4-year colleges and universities, which are both most likely to be research universities. Based on my previous reporting on women in academia, this doesn't surprise me much at all. Though some of this pay gab can be attributed to both blatant and subtle sexism, there are some institutional reasons why the pay gap appears most prominently at research universities.

The data doesn't do a breakdown by discipline, and men are more likely to dominate the higher-paying professorships at research universities in math, science, and technology. The reasons research universities often give for the premium of paying a physicist more than, say, an English literature professor, is that these people are most likely to be lost to the lucrative private industry.

Many women on the professor track -- especially those in the the "hard sciences" -- find the demand of achieving tenure to be challenging. If a woman is planning to have children at all, the time in her life when she is supposed to be publishing lots of prestigious research and looking toward tenure is around the same time many women are looking to start families.

A few women I've spoken with have gotten around this by not having children or waiting until after they raise children to go into academia. But the pressure of child-raising, so long as it disproportionately falls on women, tends to directly conflict with the timely many aspiring professors must adhere to if they want tenure.

But I'll let the numbers speak for themselves. Below are breakdowns by overall salary differences for men and women as well as broken down by career type (complete with graphs).

Overall

• Public, 4-year institution: Men $83,379, women $67,878;
• Public, 2-year institution: Men $62,298, women $60,020;
• Private, non-profit, 4-year institution: Men $85,087, women $69,448;
• Private, non-profit, 2-year institution: Men $39,333, women $46,037;
• Private, for-profit, 4-year institution: Men $45,790, women $44,397;
• Private, for-profit, 2-year institution: Men $37,660, women $36,155

Professor

• Public, 4-year institution: Men $108,104, women $95,942;
• Public, 2-year institution: Men $73,169, women $69,487;
• Private, non-profit, 4-year institution: $113,639, women $99,454;
• Private, non-profit, 2-year institution: Men $55,028, women $51,510;
• Private, for-profit, 4-year institution: Men $58,642, women $54,772;
• Private, for-profit, 2-year institution: Men $40,849, women $46,537.

Associate professor

• Public, 4-year institution: Men $77,873, women $72,867;
• Public, 2-year institution: Men $60,973, women $59,341;
• Private, non-profit, 4-year institution: $76,635, women $71,875;
• Private, non-profit, 2-year institution: Men $45,040, women $48,871;
• Private, for-profit, 4-year institution: Men $52,658, women $55,139;
• Private, for-profit, 2-year institution: Men $39,454, women $39,680.

Assistant professor

• Public, 4-year institution: Men $77,873, women $72,867;
• Public, 2-year institution: Men $60,973, women $59,341;
• Private, non-profit, 4-year institution: $76,635, women $71,875;
• Private, non-profit, 2-year institution: Men $45,040, women $48,871;
• Private, for-profit, 4-year institution: Men $52,658, women $55,139;
• Private, for-profit, 2-year institution: Men $39,454, women $39,680.

Instructor

• Public, 4-year institution: Men $47,600, women $45,591;
• Public, 2-year institution: Men $64,855, women $63,069;
• Private, non-profit, 4-year institution: $47,472, women $46,878;
• Private, non-profit, 2-year institution: Men $36,535, women $45,645;
• Private, for-profit, 4-year institution: Men $43,029, women $40,726;
• Private, for-profit, 2-year institution: Men $37,608, women $35,682.

Samantha Bee's a Mom, but Do We Have to Talk About It All The Time?

Today the illustrious Jessica Wakeman has an interview with the equally illustrious Samantha Bee -- one of my favorite performers on The Daily Show. The interview touches on something that's hard to avoid: Samantha Bee is a mom. It definitely comes up in the interview, especially in her great answer to the following question.

Did becoming a parent at all affect what kind of humor you found funny? Are some topics off-limits now?

I don’t know that I ever found jokes about rape or murder too funny (laughs), but I guess it depends contextually. But no, I don’t think [becoming a parent] changed my sense of humor at all. I do think that [motherhood] did change my personality a little bit in that I became insanely sensitive to stories about child abuse. I never really personalized those news stories before and now I completely personalize them and I feel homicidal towards people who hurt children. It’s not like I ever supported [child abusers’] cause beforehand, but definitely I’ve taken so much of a harder line on people who are terrible to children. I don’t know where that came from! But I became homicidal-y protective of my children.

Samantha Bee is pretty public about the fact that she's a mom. She did many bits while pregnant and has even worked her pregnancy and motherhood into some sketches. Women out there who are mothers (I'm sure mine included) wouldn't argue with the fact that being a mother really changes you, but I'm always surprised when one of the first questions famous women are asked is about the fact that they're mothers.

Case in point, Bee did an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air last week. It certainly wasn't the first question, but she made sure to ask her, (I'm paraphrasing here because I didn't transcribe and a full one isn't available on the website) "Isn't it hard to be a mother of three children while trying to have a career?"

Bee was hasty to note that The Daily Show is an extremely accommodating employer for her as a mother. While I'm sure it's a sentiment any mother of three (or any number, frankly) could sympathize with, I was still surprised that an interviewer of Gross' caliber would still think to ask the question (with subtext, of course) of how a woman can possibly have both a career and children.

Granted -- for those of you who listened to the whole interview, the question seemed related to the fact that Bee talks about her own family growing up so much, and Gross was couching the question in relation to how Bee's life now -- as a mother working with her husband -- is different from how it was growing up.

Still. I tend to sigh. Not because Bee is open about her place as a mother, but because there is still a part of us that finds motherhood and careers at least somewhat incompatible. In the dozens of interviews I've heard Gross conduct, I've never heard her ask male guests quite the same kind of question.

In any case, I'm a fan of Bee's work on The Daily Show, and I can't wait to read her new memoir, I Know I Am, But What Are You?.

(Flickr/rcousine)

Leaflet of the Day

From Kathe Kollwitz of the Guerrilla Girls:

It's Not So Easy

The Economist has a piece about the changing nature of business for women. Like just about every time the Economist tries to take on gender issues, they don't exactly get it right. The story is largely a trend piece filled with stereotypes.

The author starts with the "tough as nails" female stereotype about women who can't ever be wrong (read: emotional) or they'll never get ahead. The piece goes on to say that "new feminism" claims women are "wired" differently and that women prefer "transformative" leadership styles as well as "matrix structures" in the workplace. (The sentence where the author says, "You need to audit the entire building for 'gender asbestos'—in other words, root out the inherent sexism built into corporate structures and processes" is hilarious, as if workplaces just need a biochemical spring cleaning.)

I can appreciate that The Economist is opening itself up to workplaces that want to explore new leadership styles (and am encouraged by the fact that more "feminine" styles are actually good for business), but I tend to think that this piece about women in the workplace is just as dangerous as the one where women "never admit mistakes." What's more the article was vague, leaving us to wonder exactly what workplaces can do to be more "transformative."

The thing is, feminism, women, and leadership are not monolithic. While many women might benefit from businesses opening themselves up to "female" leadership styles, there are other women who probably do well with hierarchical structures. By painting women and "new feminism" (what is that?) in a cooperative, woman-friendly corner, they're still putting women in a corner.

A Woman's Nation: CAP Report on Working Women

Today [Campus Progress'] parent organization, the Center for American Progress, is hosting a series of panels and speakers to coincide with the release of its report, The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation. Maria Shriver, daughter of Eunice Kennedy Shriver (brother to President John F. Kennedy), wrote an essay in this week's Time magazine to bring attention to something that was happening quietly for years. It is no longer an anomaly that women are working. Today, more than two-thirds of families either have a woman as the sole breadwinner or women who are part of dual income households. Still, women make between two-thirds and three-quarters of what their male counterparts make.

For some of us who grew up in homes where our moms worked (like me) this is hardly surprising. Women have been taking place in the working world for some time now. But although we have a federal law that allows for family leave, employers can decide whether or not that leave is paid. Although it is no longer legal to fire a woman for getting pregnant (or not hire her because she could become pregnant someday), paid maternity leave is still not required by law. In other words, women still get the short end of the stick.

The report includes pieces from awesome feminsts like CAP's own Heather Boushey, Feministing's Courtney Martin, and marriage expert Stephanie Coontz.

Cross posted.

According to Technorati, Blogging Is Male, Old

Technorati released results of their study of the blogosphere today. According to the research they found, by and large, bloggers are male.

It's something that we've seen replicated in other new media paradigms (and some old ones). Men make up the majority of "popular" Twitter users and men have dominated "old media" -- especially among high-level editor positions -- for centuries.

We might be tempted to write this off as The Way Things Are, but I think it reflects some deeper gender stereotypes. After all, many men I know don't think twice about putting their opinions on the web in a professional context and many women are more hesitant.

When I first started blogging, waaaay back in February of 2007, I couldn't come up with a name for it so I named it after myself. That, I figured, wouldn't change. (For all of you out there waiting for me to change my name if I get married let me just pause to assure you that it ain't gonna happen.) My colleague at the time and blogger at Feministing, Ann Friedman, marveled at this. In the feminist blogosphere, many women adopt psudeonyms. Many of the stereotypes and social cues we take about how to act in life translate to other kinds of media.

What's more, it sounds like of the female bloggers out there, they tend to be older women. Only 9 percent of active female bloggers are between the ages of 18 and 24. That's pretty dismal. Research also found that women are more likely to be "personal" bloggers and their style is more likely to be "conversational."

But there is one thing to be optimistic about: Although two-thirds of global bloggers are male, the stats are slightly better in the United States. Here, only 57 percent of bloggers are male. It's still disproportionate, but it's better than in Asia and Europe.

Cross posted.