Sociological Images

Sociologists have observed that employment in the U.S. is largely structured around an assumption that the worker has no family responsibilities.  The ideas that an employee should be able to work during non-school hours, stay late when needed, take off time for their own illness but never anyone else’s, for example, all presume that the workers have either no children or someone else taking care of children for them.

Most jobs, then, are not designed to be compatible with family responsibilities.  Since most people doing primary child care are women, this hurts mothers disproportionately.  Mothers have a more difficult time being the “perfect employee” and also face discrimination from employers.  This translates into some telling numbers.  Women make about 69% of what men make (not controlling for type of occupation), but most of this disadvantage is related to parental status, not sex. Women without children make 90% of what men make, while mothers make 66%.  Ann Crittenden’s book, The Price of Motherhood, lays out these numbers starkly.

These issues are at the heart of this well-crafted Ampersand cartoon by B. Deutsch, which prompted this post in anticipation of Mother’s Day in the U.S.:

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

In this three-minute clip, sociologist Shelley Correll discusses her research on the “motherhood penalty.”  The phrase refers to the finding that being a mom specifically, not just being female or being a parent, leads to lower income. Scholars have begun to realize just how significant this is. As Correll explains, the pay gap between women with and without children is larger than that between women and men:

For more, see the full text of Correll’s paper titled “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty.”

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Yesterday, in honor of May Day, Anna North at Buzzfeed Shift posted a set of photos on the history of women in the (mostly U.S.-based) labor movement. One that I found particularly interesting was this 1918 poster urging women to be both thrifty and productive industrial workers as they play their role in winning World War I:

Note how patriotism is clearly connected to the idea of women having more opportunities:

To woman, the possession of a home, the opportunities of education for herself and her children, the betterment of her own social conditions, should always be the dominating thought.

But the poster simultaneously warns them against using their freedom for their own pleasure at the expense of the nation:

…restlessness urges the breaking up of home life and the shifting of occupations. It is for her to think well before jeopardizing the future for the sake of temporary gain…it is hers to show industrial stability and check the dangerous tendency to shift about and gamble with the future. America’s women can best serve American by being steadfast — bending to their task and holding it — and by saving all they can from today’s pay envelope for future needs.

So women are encouraged to think of themselves as empowered workers, with increased opportunities available to them, but only to the degree that this makes them reliable, productive workers and thrifty citizens, drawing on ideas of women’s special role in the home. Just as women are the “custodians” of their homes, they must also ensure “industrial stability” by sticking with their jobs for the good of the nation — a choice which might, of course, conflict with a woman’s efforts to improve her own or her family’s social conditions by, say, taking a job that pays more or has better working conditions. The poster encourages women to consider their opportunities, but ties those opportunities tightly to the common good of the nation and the family, ultimately warning women against too much pursuit of individual self-interest.

U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R, Maine) and Representative Carolyn Maloney (D, New York) have both gone on record claiming that having more women employed in the Secret Service would prevent scandals like the one involving Colombian prostitutes.

In classic Daily Show form, Jon Stewart and his “correspondents” respond (thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the link!):

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

A recent Time cover story was adapted from The Richer Sex, a forthcoming book by Liza Mundy. I provided a few numbers for the story (see here). The content is behind a pay wall here, but the cover gives a taste:

It’s an interesting piece on the (very partial) convergence in roles among married couples. Despite the current stall in progress toward equality, I’m glad to see an article with a positive take on the idea of equality (for middle class straight couples, at least) without focusing on the demise of men.

Of course, women are not yet the richer sex, so the evidence in the article is about trends in that direction. The text says, for example:

Assuming present trends continue, by the next generation, more families will be supported by women than by men.

By the time the graphics department got to it, the “assuming…” part was gone, and this was the header:

The numbers that support this are the trend from 24% of wives out-earning their husbands in 1987 to 38% in 2009 (helped considerably by the mancession’s crimp on men’s jobs in 2008 and 2009). Here’s their graph:

Going from 24% to 38% in 22 years doesn’t mean we’ll pass 50% in another generation. It might be OK for rhetorical purposes to say something like, “at this rate it’ll take 300 years for the U.S. to catch Sweden’s welfare state” — but not OK to say it will happen in that time. If that were true, I could show you this graph and say, “the Earth will be a ball of human flesh expanding at the speed of light in less than 1,000 years!”

Besides projecting from the trend, the other reasonable way to make guesses about the future is to look at young people. For that Liza Mundy reuses a statistic that Time first used in 2010, showing that among those who are single, child free, under 30 and living in metro areas, women have higher earnings than men.

Great, you’re thinking, stay young and single, and don’t have children, and equality is yours!

I do believe our children are the future, but predicting the future from this subset is not a safe bet. The original Time piece is critiqued here and here, although the New York Times hit on this formula for gender equality in 2007 (critiqued here). The basic manipulation here is limiting the comparison to men versus women within a group where women are more likely to have completed college but not yet experienced the wage-diminishing events that now largely begin in the late 20s (marriage, children, and slower earnings growth). It’s an interesting comparison, but shouldn’t be used for projecting the future — or even characterizing the whole present.

Anyway, interesting story.

Cross-posted at Compassionate Societies.

This week the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a series of new gender indicators, covering the presence of women in top corporate jobs and parliaments, the gender wage gap, and entrepreneurship.

Despite efforts in many countries to promote their participation on boards, women are still under-represented in top corporate jobs.  On average, women make up 10% of board members. The United States is only 2% higher at 12%. Quite a few countries do better. The highest is highest is Norway, at close to 40%, due to a mandatory quota introduced in 2006. In Sweden, France, Slovak Republic and Finland the proportion of women on boards is between 15% and 20%, while in Germany, Japan and the Netherlands, it is less than 5%.

The percent of women in the U.S. congress and senate is 17%, which is about 10% lower than the average of OCED countries parliaments.  In the past ten years, the average proportions have increased slightly, but significantly.

The overall wage gap in the U.S. has been declining, but at 19%, it is three times greater than it is in Hungary. And it is about twice as large as most European countries.  Overall, the gap has been declining:

Entrepreneurship is still highly gendered.  The percent of women has been rising, but this is largely due to an overall decline in male entrepreneurs during the past 11 years.

If one considers lack of participation in power positions of business as well as government to be indicators of injustice due to social processes like glass ceilings that prohibit advancement, then the U.S., as well as the rest of the OECD countries analyzed here, have a long way to go to reach gender justice, both informal and formal.

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Ron Anderson, PhD, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, has written many books and hundreds of articles, mostly on technology. In his retirement, he is doing research and writing on compassion and suffering and maintains the website CompassionateSocieties.org.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

The Carsey Institute’s Kristin Smith has written a brief on the plight of home care workers — the home health aides and personal care aides that play a growing role in our patchwork network of care work.

The news now is that these workers are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act — which offers the protection of minimum wage and overtime pay — but the U.S. Labor Department has proposed to bring them under its aegis.

According to the Department of Labor:

Many of these workers are the primary breadwinners for their families. Of the roughly 2 million workers who will be affected by this rule, more than 92 percent are women, nearly 50 percent are minorities, and nearly 40 percent rely on public benefits such as Medicaid and food stamps. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, home health care aides earn about $21,000 a year and many lack health insurance.

Smith’s analysis uses 2011 federal data. She shows that home care workers are more likely to work overtime, and more likely to work part time, than direct care workers in hospitals and nursing homes:

And they are more likely to be working part time for involuntary reasons:

Finally, their median wages — and the wages of those in the bottom quartile of the occupation — are lower than those of hospital and nursing home workers:

Smile, you’re a home health care worker! (or you’re fired)

As Nancy Folbre as explained, the economics are bad here. Besides the bad hours, bad pay, bad working conditions, lack of unions and lack of state protections, there are some structural problems. Paid home health care is competing with unpaid family care. That means the decision about whether to pay for professional care weighs against the value of a (usually female) family member’s unpaid work. That drives down the cost of home health care — which means more than a million women get lower wages, and women’s work is devalued. And so on. Breaking that cycle requires either a wage increase (sadly, that includes bringing them under the minimum wage law) or government subsidies.*

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*One attempt to beat these economic odds and support long-term care, the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act (CLASS Act), was supposed to be a premium-based long-term care support program, and it was passed as part of Obamacare. However, with the rule that it be self-funding, and solvent, while paying a cash benefit for life to eligible beneficiaries, theadministration said it couldn’t be done after all. Actually paying for care isn’t cheap.