Gender, Work and the Economy

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, full-time working women earn, on average, 75.5 cents for every one dollar earned by men. There are two sides to the “pay gap” debate. One side believes that the country needs to make more efforts to narrow this inequality gap:

Heidi Hartmann, President of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research stated, “No progress on the wage ratio has been made since 2001, and women actually lost ground this year. Falling real wages for women indicate a decline in the quality of their jobs. The economic recovery continues to disadvantage women by failing to provide strong job growth at all wage levels.”
Dr. Barbara Gault, IWPR Director of Research, stated, “To address the continuing disparities in pay between women and men, we need to raise the minimum wage, improve enforcement of Equal Employment Opportunity Laws, help women succeed in higher-paying, traditionally male occupations, and create more flexible, family friendly workplace polices.”
(Image courtesy of tungphoto/FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

The other side of the pay gap debate does not view the situation as inherently sexism. Rather, they see it as a matter of women not wanting to take on riskier roles or not coming back to work after having children.

To better understand this perspective, click here to view a clip of the ABC News Nightline Special “The Pay Gap: Sexism or Something Else”. (Click on “Preview Clip” once at webpage) http://www.shopware-usa.com/id/12399/The_Pay_Gap_Sexism_or_Something_Else.htm

WOMEN AND WEALTH ARTICLE
Recent studies have found that today’s wealthy women mostly consist of those who inherited their wealth. In the past most women who were considered wealthy obtained their wealth from their husbands or due to financial advisors and investment decisions. In a recent study of 555 women (worth a net worth of $1 million or more) conducted by Asset Management Advisors it was found that 36% of these women inherited their wealth, 29% obtained their money from their husband’s employment, and “7% made their fortunes from their own businesses. Less than half of the women were employed full-time.

FEMINIZATION OF POVERTY
The feminization of poverty is defined as the trend in which those families in poverty are more likely to be composed of a family headed by a single woman with children. The major causes of this trend are:
• “Limited opportunities for women in the labor force” (M. Andersen) and lower wages paid to women (pay gap, glass ceiling, and sticky floor)
• Births to single women (including teen parenthood)
• Divorce (mother custody is more common than father custody, hardships on the single parent; issues of unpaid child support)
• Lack of adequate child care as well as other social support networks
• Lower education levels as a cause of poverty (although women comprise of a majority of the college students those women in poverty are unlikely to have a college education)

SINGLE WOMEN WITH CHILDREN AND SOCIAL NETWORKS

Social support networks for single women are the key to overcoming obstacles and poverty. Studies have shown that single women who come together to help one another feel much less of the strain caused by poverty. In her well known study, “The Flats”, Carol Stack observed single, African American women living in poverty (specifically living a housing project). She found that these women were able to survive and “get by” due to their very functional roles and responsibilities to one another. Each of the women identified as being a “blood mother” (to their own children) as well as being an “other mother” to the other women’s children. Stack actually stated that it was difficult in many instances to determine which child belonged with which mother; these children essentially had many mothers. The families also had “shared physical boundaries”, the “my house is your house” mentality. If one of the mothers temporarily lost her home she would be able to move in with one of the other families until she got back on her feet. These families also provided one another with assistance whenever needed (money, car rides, childcare, food, etc). The Flats is considered a very functional community and is noted as being a community’s response to solving a major social problem in our society.

ARTICLE: “She Works, He Doesn’t” (Peg Tyre and Daniel McGinn, 2003)
• 54% of Americans know a couple where the woman is the major wage earner and the man’s career is considered secondary
• Unemployment rates have increased for white-collar men due to corporate downsizing while many of the “female occupations” have grown (health care and education)
• 5.6% of men live the “Mr. Mom” lifestyle
• 25% of respondents stated that they feel it is ‘not acceptable’ for a wife to be the major wage earner
• 34% of men stated that if their wife earned more money, they would consider quitting their job or reducing their hours
• 41% agreed that “it is much better for everyone if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family”
• Stay-at-home dads who identify with traditional gender roles are more unhappy with their situation than men with nontraditional gender role ideologies
• Men do less housework when they stop working – working women do more housework than their male, stay-at-home, counterparts

WORKING MOMS – THE DEBATE
Many working moms often state that going back to work was a difficult decision. Working moms oftentimes feel torn and feel like ‘…they never get anything done quite right”, they suffer from guilt, and struggles to balance their work with their family responsibilities. The United States lags behind other industrialized countries in terms of paid maternity leave, paid child care, and flexible schedules for working mothers.

Click here to view information on the “Mommy Wars”

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3284437

Click here to read more information on the “Mommy Wars” and the author Leslie Morgan Steiner

http://www.lesliemorgansteiner.com/newsletter.htm

For more information on the experiences of working moms and stay-at-home moms click on this link to Oprah’s coverage on the topic

http://www2.oprah.com/tows/pastshows/200701/tows_past_20070123.jhtml

“The Feminine Mistake” by Leslie Bennetts

http://www.thefemininemistake.com/

ARTICLE: “The Opt-Out Revolution” (Lisa Belkin, 2003)
Belkin’s research included eight women who had earned law degrees from Ivy League colleges (Princeton, Harvard, and Columbia). They married later and waited to have children. After having children these women experienced the difficulties of juggling to “do it all.” Many of these women stated that they found great nannies and took their breast pumps to work with them each day. Consistently each woman explained how they “…wore myself out trying to do both jobs well” and they explained that the relationships between work and family is different for women than men. When each woman was confronted with the issue of the Women’s Movement they stated that the ‘battle fought for the choice.’ For a combination of reasons including “job-dissatisfaction” and “the pull-to-motherhood” these women decided to “opt out” and quit their careers as attorneys and become stay-at-home moms. These women are calling their choice ‘an extended maternity leave’ as some day they will preparing for re-entry into the workforce.

Data shows that stay-at-home moms has increased about 13% in less than one decade and that the percentage of new mothers who decided to go back to work dropped from 59% in 1998 to 55% inn 2000.

It is also important to note that studies show that women who “opt out” or “stop out” of the workforce for a period of time to raise their children end up making 7% less per child than women who return to work after 6-8 weeks of maternity leave.

HOUSEWORK
Studies have consistently shown that women do more housework than men, this also includes women who work outside of the home. Although data shows that over the past 30 years women have decreased the number of hours per week they spend on housework and men have increased the number of hours per week they spend on housework women spend roughly three times the amount of hours than men on household tasks. Women who work outside of the home do more housework than males who are unemployed. Studies have indicated that widowed men complete roughly the same amount of hours per week on household tasks as women employed outside of the home. The National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH, 2005, heterosexual couple households) found that there is an inverse relationship between women’s earnings and the amount of hours they spend on housework (the higher the woman’s income the lower the number of hours of housework she completes each week).

In a 31 year panel study focused on how women’s employment is linked to the gendered division of household labor. There have been dramatic increases in women’s employment in the latter years of the 20th century. The author notes that women’s paid employment affects the lives of women and men. It was found that “women’s entry into the paid labor force had measurable effects on men’s participation in the kids of household tasks that have historically been performed by women. The wives of the husbands who experienced more years of full-time work performed more of the stereotypically female housework than those wives of husbands who had been working full-time for fewer years. It was also found that there is a correlation between women’s changing position toward egalitarian roles and patterns of housework in the couple. Finally, it was found that the wife’s earnings is related to the change in the division of labor. There is an inverse relationship between a wife’s income and egalitarian division of household labor, that is, as there is an increase in the wife’s income there is a decrease in the amount of “female” housework she does.
(Cunningham, Mick, Influences of Women’s Employment on the Gendered Division of Household Labor Over the Life Course: Evidence From a 31-Year Panel Study, Journal of Family Issues, 2007; 28; 422)

“Real Men Can Do Housework” (Margery D. Rosen, Seven Secrets of a Happy Marriage: Wisdom from the Annals of “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”)
Research from The Institute for Social Research (University of Michigan) has found that this generation of couples completes only half the amount of housework their parents did and that “most of those chores are still shouldered by women”.
Counselors state that couples should:
• Figure out exactly what needs to be done and who’s doing it
• Talk about how things were done when you were growing up and what role models you had for sharing the work at home
• Consider various plans for a fair division of labor
• If you give up responsibility for a chore, you have to give up control over it
• When all else fails, go on strike (do not do the chores)
• Train your kids to share in the chores

Chapter Review Questions:
What were the major changes that occurred when society went from a family-based economy to a family-wage economy?
What characterizes our society as a family-consumer economy?
How has women’s work changed throughout history? How has women’s work remained the same?
How has the ideology of housework changed throughout history?
What is the relationship between gender stratification and class stratification?
How has the change from a manufacturing to a service-based economy affected men and women?
How has globalization affected our society?
How has the labor force participation changed over the past 65 years?
How have women’s participation and experiences in specific occupations changed (professional careers, clerical occupations, blue-collar occupations, and service sector occupations)?
What changes have been made to federal welfare programs since 1996?
What is meant by the concept working poor?
What policies have been implemented to alleviate gender discrimination?
What is affirmative action? What are the misconceptions of affirmative action?

Key terms/concepts:
Social structure of work
Emotional labor
Gender stratification
Contingent workers
Gender segregation
Human capital theory
Dual labor market theory
Glass ceiling
Feminization of poverty
Tokenism
Sexual harassment
The second shift
Care work
Comparable worth

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