There was a lot of focus on a dearth of middle-class jobs for men in the United States during the recent presidential election. This discussion centered on the loss of good-paying manufacturing and mining jobs for men, which have been in decline since the 1960s due to automation and globalization. Not much attention has been paid, however, to the declining number of women in the US workforce. This trend is the opposite of trends in women’s employment in other industrialized countries. What explains this difference for women in the United States? While the decline in workforce participation for working-class men began in the 1960s, the slide for women’s participation did not begin until the early 2000s. Patricia Cohen of the New York Times explains that the drop in women’s workforce participation occurred for different reasons than it did for men. During this period, women have been earning college degrees in greater numbers; also, service sector jobs, where women are traditionally concentrated, have been growing. So why have women been dropping out of the workforce? Cohen notes that we do not have the family support policies in the United States that other industrialized countries have. In fact, here “women are still the primary caregivers—for children, aging parents, and ailing relatives.” Women often cite caregiving responsibility as the reason they are unable to hold on to unstable and inflexible jobs. Cohen cites economist Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, who reports, “Hardly any men who have dropped out say it is because they are helping with children or other family members.” Eberstadt goes on to note that a “care chasm” explains the stark contrast between women’s workforce participation in the United States and their participation rate in Europe. He explains that European countries with comprehensive family support policies have seen women’s labor force participation go up since 2000, while ours has plummeted. We need to demand that our legislators support policies for affordable child care, paid family leave, elder care support, and a living wage in the United States. Family support policies are good for all of us and for our economy. Photo courtesy of Univ. of Salford. CC by 2.0 ]]>
Month: February 2017
Who Is a Feminist? What Is Intersectional Feminism?
I became an active feminist in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the second-wave feminist movement. In some ways, what being a feminist means to me has never changed: being committed to making life better for women—all women. At the same time, my understanding of what feminism means has morphed and evolved over the years and is not the same as in the 1960’s and 1970’s. At that time, we white middle-class second wave feminists thought we were fighting to improve the lives of all women, but we were clueless about the issues of women who were not white, straight, and middle class. This cluelessness inflicted serious damage on the credibility of feminism, for good reason. Some of us, myself included, were slow learners. The seeds of distrust between middle-class white feminists and women of color were actually planted long long ago during the first wave of feminism. The white leaders of the fight to get the vote for women, the suffragists, did not allow the issues of black women onto their agenda. They decided to stay focused on the vote and would not include the abolition of slavery in their fight. The plea of Sojourner Truth, an African American woman who had been a slave, to the suffragists at their convention, “Ain’t I a woman, too?” summed up a challenge to the suffragists to be inclusive of black women’s issues in their women’s movement. This plea went largely unheeded. Understanding this history, I was not surprised that many women of color had a strong reaction when the January 21, 2017, Women’s March on Washington (and in three hundred other cities) was announced. Many women of color felt their issues and leadership were excluded by the organizers. While there were some missteps in the language and leadership of the march when it was first announced, these mistakes seem to have been corrected fairly quickly. Still, the damage was done for some who were too angry to participate. When I attended the march, though, I was pleased to see a wide range of issues represented by the marchers, who all felt like they belonged under the banner of feminism. I now understand that there are many feminisms, not just one, and there are both differences and commonalities among them. At the march I saw many signs held by women of all ages and races that said, “I am an intersectional feminist,” and I thought, “Yes! This represents how I think of feminism now.” For me, intersectional feminism means that in order to improve the lives of all women, we must understand the ways that our differences in social class, sexual orientation, immigration status, nationality of origin, race, ethnicity, gender identity, and other differences intersect with our gender to make some issues more important than others for different groups of women. For example, If I am a low-wage worker, earning a living wage and getting access to affordable child care is probably more important to me than closing the gender pay gap. If I am an African American woman, stopping the indiscriminate killing of black women and men by police officers and stopping the mass incarceration of black men probably would be more important than closing the gender pay gap. It’s not that the gender pay gap isn’t important, but we need to understand how the intersections of gender and other differences make our experiences and priorities as women different. We also need to be able to stand up for each other’s issues and speak up for each other’s priority struggles. All of our issues need to be on the change agenda to improve the lives of women. As an intersectional feminist, these are issues that I think belong on the change agenda that we must work on together:
- Black Lives Matter—ending mass incarceration and the killing of black women and men by police
- Protections for immigrant families who fear the breakup of families by deportation
- Economic justice for low-wage workers who need a living wage—the fight for a $15 minimum wage
- Affordable child care for all
- Affordable healthcare for all
- Reproductive freedom by having access to birth control and abortion
- Freedom from sexual assault
- Rights and protections for LGBTQQIA communities
- Religious freedom and an end to discrimination against Muslims
- Equal pay—ending all gender and other identity-related pay gaps
- Passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and the Violence Against Women Act
- End to all types of employment discrimination including discrimination based on gender, race, gender identity, and so on
Invisible Women in Science: Overcoming the Challenges of Race and Gender
“I can’t believe I had to learn about these amazing and brilliant women from a movie! Why didn’t we learn about them in school?” lamented an African American friend and colleague. I felt the same way when I saw the movie Hidden Figures, a true story about the African American female mathematicians, scientists, and engineers who worked at NASA in the early days of the space program in the mid-twentieth century. They pushed against humiliations inside and outside their workplace, including racial segregation in their schools, dining rooms, bathrooms, and work spaces. They worked with lesser titles and large pay inequities to perform calculations of orbital trajectories and to solve engineering problems, making space travel possible. Janna Levin, who reviewed the book by Margot Lee Shetterly from which the movie was made, cites Shetterly as saying, “Women . . . had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations” based on gender and race. Their contributions were largely unacknowledged. Why are women’s contributions to science so invisible to most of us? Levin, who is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College, also reviews Dava Sobel’s book about women astronomers at the Harvard College Observatory near the turn of the twentieth century. Another carefully researched true story, The Glass Universe tells the story of women astronomers hired and mentored by Edward Charles Pickering, director of the observatory from 1877 to 1919. Pickering is credited with hiring these women and mentoring the first female PhDs in astronomy at Harvard. Nonetheless, he refused to pay them the equivalent of their male counterparts. Star protégée Williamina Fleming, a single mother, complained to him about her salary—$1,500 per year in contrast to $2,500 per year paid to the men—and he told her “that I received an excellent salary as women’s salaries stand. . . . Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a family to take care of as well as the men?” Her complaints were ignored. Levin notes that science profited from the women astronomers at the Harvard Observatory, but most of us have never heard their names—Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Cecelia Payne, and Antonia Maury are a few. Leavitt’s work, known as Leavitt’s Law, made Edwin Hubble’s development of his telescope possible. Hubble’s name is very familiar to me but not Leavitt’s. The recent death of Dr. Vera Rubin brings another unacknowledged female scientist to our attention. Lisa Randall explains that Vera Rubin made one of the most important advances in physics in the twentieth century when she presented convincing evidence of dark matter. Rubin’s discovery well deserved the Nobel Prize, but her revolutionary insight was never officially acknowledged with a Nobel. Randall, herself a professor of physics at Harvard, explains that “the elephant in the room is gender. Dr. Rubin was not alone in having been overlooked for the Nobel.” Randall goes on to note that “of the 204 Nobel laureates in physics, only two have been women.” Why don’t we learn about the accomplishments of women scientists? The history books don’t mention them, but we can make their names familiar to the people in our lives—our daughters and sons, our granddaughters and grandsons, our students. Let’s make a point of it! Image courtesy of NASA/GSFC/Debbie Mccallum. CC by 2.0]]>
Women and Minorities in Law Firms: The Glacial Pace of Change
Women have enrolled in law school in equal numbers with men in the United States for the last twenty years, and minority enrollment has also steadily increased during this period. Recent studies, compiled into a series of articles by New York Times reporter Elizabeth Olson show both good news and bad news about the current status of women and minorities in law firms. Olson reports good news based on a study by the National Association for Law Placement (NALP). This study shows that women and minorities made small gains in 2016:
- Women made up 22.13 percent of partners, up from 21.46 percent in 2015.
- Minorities made up 8.05 percent of partners, up from 7.52 percent the previous year. Of these, 1.81 percent of partners were African Americans.
- As associates, women held 45 percent of the positions, a slight decrease from 2009 levels. Minorities made up 22.72 percent of associates, up from 19.67 percent in 2009. African Americans made up 4.11 percent of associates, which is below their 2009 level.
- Disabled lawyers are scarce.
- Minorities are represented at higher levels among summer associates but are not hired into permanent jobs.
- Fewer female college graduates tend to apply to top-ranked law schools, and, when they do, they are less likely to be accepted. Admissions processes at law schools remain murky and lack transparency.
- Fewer women are enrolled in law schools that claim to place 85 percent of graduates in “gold standard” jobs (full time and long-term).
- There is an “old boys’ network” at play because of connections made at prestigious law schools that result in the hiring firm landing more deals for large accounts.
- Men are better at receiving credit for originating big cases that impact annual compensation.