Catching up on some reading
It’s been awhile. Among other things, I’ve been catching up on my reading.
All of a sudden, people are making a lot of fuss in the news media about people like me. We are educated. We had career paths. Then, we had babies.
And after that, kerplunk is the sound of your successful professional trajectory getting dumped in the toilet.
This pattern has been repeating itself for a long time, but somehow there’s been a burst of reporting on it. Maybe thank you Sheryl Sandberg? Thank you President Obama, who, six years in, mentions the issue in the State of the Union? Thank you derivative news media, which manufactures so many iterations of the same story, once it decides it is “the story.”
So here are some of the stories I’ve been reading recently…
-“Can the U.S. Ever Fix Its Messed up Maternity Leave System,” by Bloomberg, the place that actually gave me a very generous maternity leave (by U.S. standards).
-“What Stalled the Gender Revolution: Child Care that Costs More than College Tuition” in the UC Berkeley alumni mag.
-“Why U.S. Women are Leaving Jobs Behind” in the NY Times.
That Times story says that many American women are dropping out of the workforce – women’s participation peaked in 1999; in contrast, in Europe, where taxes actually pay caregivers to tend to their helpless offspring, more women than ever are staying in the workforce. Imagine that!
A Times/CBS News poll confirms that a lot of non-working women are “staying home” because of family responsibilities. My first impulse when I read this story is completely self-involved: What would I answer if CBS News called me up and asked if I identified myself as a homemaker?
I get scared, like they’re calling right now. Am I a homemaker? My house is always a mess, so I’m inclined to say no. If I make a home, I do it really badly. But do I work outside the home? Well, no. I spend a lot of the time caring for the kids. If I were called to jury duty, I’d surely ask for a childcare exemption (and I love jury duty). And to the extent I work, I have a home office. It’s right up there, upstairs, very messily filled with the books and papers I think are going to spark a career as a writer, but which in actuality I ignore. So no, I don’t work out of the home.
Can I just check “other,” for identity crisis?
Then another thing in the Times article, buried pretty deep, really hit me. It came from a professor, Pamela Stone, at Hunter College. At the ‘upper end’ of the economic ladder, according to Dr. Stone, “the rapid increase in hours ‘has made it tough, and at the same time we are seeing nearly unending pressures on parents.’”
Bingo! (And I am sure she is right about her assessment of the absurd and inhumane demands on women at the lower end, too – I am just writing about what I know).
Here’s the point I would like to make, except I’m not making it in the NY Times and I don’t have a PhD: you know why it’s so hard for so many working parents, and probably especially for working moms, who have so-called good, professional jobs, the ones that probably even give lip service to flexibility? Because at least in the corners of the professional world that I know about, work permeates everything. It’s really demanding – and I’m not just talking about for the hedge fund managers that get paid a gazillion dollars a year. I am talking about the friends I know who work, you know, midlevel jobs in media, architecture, non-profits, health care, education, government… These are people who are making good salaries but, c’mon, not THAT GOOD and who are just working WAY TOO MUCH. So if you divided what they made by the number of hours they actually put in, especially off-the-clock, their salaries would actually look a lot less good. Especially because women are making less than their male counterparts. And then you add to that that they are doing more work on the home front than their male partners (if you are even talking about in-tact, heterosexual households, which I guess for these purposes we are) you might understand why women are dropping out of the workforce, or going on the “mommy track,” or not gunning it for that managerial job.
I don’t have the empirical data to back this up, but I don’t think I am going out on a limb here to say that, over the past 10 or 20 years or so, the minimum expectation of work has changed. It’s high. It’s just too f—ing much. The people I know work way longer hours than my parents and their parents did. In my profession, newspaper journalists used to pack it up when the paper went to press, at 5 or 6 or whatever. Wire service reporters had shifts. Now it’s an all-the-time job: the web updates, the Twittering, the barrage of emails figuring out who’s going to cover this meaningless press release or that sixth update to the story. I have friends who are teachers who quit teaching, or quit working in the classroom, because they just couldn’t balance it – all that post-classroom work, like, for example, communicating with ever-demanding parents after-hours. Even my friends in academia, which I used to think was just the must luxe job in the world, have a million responsibilities. So it is hard to “balance family and career” because you are trying to balance two inherently inflexible variables and one of them pays you and the other one has a beating heart.
I don’t know what can actually be done about this, but I think that yes the government needs to start funding caregiver leave, and yes we need taxpayer-subsidized daycare. But even then, we, collectively, workers of the world (OK I guess I’m not one now), need to figure out how to reallocate our resources (time) from one source (work) to another (family).
And good luck with that.