Families at all levels of income are struggling in our economy simply because it does not allow congenial coexistence of work and family life. Lives have become busier and busier and policies have not changed to reflect that. In her book, Finding Time: The Economics of Work-Life Conflict (Harvard University Press), Heather Boushey thoughtfully and comprehensively explains the problems with work-life conflict for women. Her book presents a set of solutions, too, that could make work-life conflict a thing of the past. While the story leads with the tale of what happens to women, Boushey takes the very issues that working women with families face and shows how these dilemmas are not about being a woman, they are about economics, and are shackling our entire economy. A valuable contribution is her portrait of contrasting work-life conflicts across income groups and family composition. She uses data as a skilled economist—which is her discipline—yet builds sensitively from history and social theory in a compelling book. Ultimately, her grounded arguments deliver detailed explanations as to why family policy needs to change and change quickly. Boushey, who is Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, has decades of work bringing careful research to bear on key policy issues—and is successful at making the research and policy issues understandable to people who are really affected by the policies.

DUAL EARNING FAMILY DEPENDENCE

Boushey sets the table with locating economics in social context. The deal with capitalism is that by design the economy is ever-changing. Since the 1970s it has become heavily dependent upon women’s earnings. Families can no longer get by on the earnings of just one parent as they could before around 1979. So if our economy is so dependent upon a dual income family, then why aren’t there policies that support families’ need to manage work and family care? In Boushey’s words: “The hodgepodge of work and family policies that has evolved over the years does not address how people can have the time to deal with conflicts between work and home life” (p. 250). Finding Time explains the factors that determine what needs to change and how that change can happen.

COMPOSITION OF THE FAMILY IS CHANGING

The composition of families, Boushey reminds readers, are a lot different now than they used to be. While in the past families typically consisted of a mother, a father, and children, families now are more complex and could be classified in a burgeoning array. Single parent families make up about 27 percent of families today, for example. While in the past families could survive off of one parent being the breadwinner, that is nearly impossible now, especially for single parent families. She explains that single parent families are more likely to be low-income than families that have two (married) parents. Where are U.S. policies that make single-parent families able to thrive? Yes, they are already at a disadvantage with only one income, but policies that work will empower single parents to earn money and do the carework, which are two key things parents need to do.

WHO WILL BE THE “SILENT PARTNER” NOW?

Boushey makes a great point when she explains that women have always been the “silent partner” to businesses. Starting with the 19^th century “family wage” and ending somewhere after the 1950s boom, men could go to work and not have to worry about their family because they knew their wives would be taking care of it. Businesses never had to take family into account because men never had to worry about theirs. In Boushey’s phrase, women were the “silent partners” to business. However, now that women’s incomes are key to family survival, the country is still not doing anything to lessen the burden of the work-family conflicts. Meanwhile, businesses reap benefits from having more capable workers in a larger labor pool, for whom wages are stagnant.

HOW CAN WE BE HERE, THERE, PROVIDE CARE, AND MAKE SURE ITS FAIR?

Women do not have a “silent partner.” But Boushey has a recommendation to fix this. She found that there is not one sure-fire way to fix the work-life conflict that families are facing. She argues that we need solutions in four areas that she calls Here, There, Care, and Fair.

Here: Policies for when women need to be Here (in the home). These policies include paid sick leave for medical needs and other time that would need to be spent with children.

There: Policies to make sure that the amount of hours that women are working leaves room for managing their family so that they do not always need to be There (at work).

Care: Policies regarding high-quality Care for children and aging family members.

Fair: Overall, policies need to be fair for everyone. This means that no matter what your income or familial composition is, you are still afforded the same work-family policies and no added responsibilities should hinder that.

Not only would adding this support make it less stressful for families to balance work and life, but such supports decrease costly turnover rates and increase productivity.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Women (and men!) need family policy as our silent partner to help us provide for our families. The “family policy” men had in the past was a housewife—and this policy is out of date. The economy has grown with the growth of women’s participation in the work force. It is time, Boushey demonstrates, that this growth should extend to benefits for women and their familial responsibilities.

This book was a great read. Along with clear explanations of economic concepts, Boushey uses her personal experience growing up in a working-class, union family in Washington State along with her knowledge of economics and history to show that to grow our economy and bring us out of the doldrums, working women need family-friendly policies. As a young woman looking ahead to a life of work-life conflict, I gained clarity and direction for my own work. Work-life conflict is a topic that needs recognition and Boushey is helping to spread knowledge and awareness. Boushey’s book still left me wondering how race may factor into this work-life conflict, maybe in a future addition we will be given some insight!

Originally posted 7/29/2016

Molly McNulty is a former CCF public affairs intern at Framingham State University. She graduated in May, 2017, as a Sociology and Education major.

Ashton Applewhite is a Council on Contemporary Families expert and has been recognized by the New York Times, National Public Radio, and the American Society on Aging as an expert on ageism. Her new book, “This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism,” was just published in April 2016. She blogs at “This Chair Rocks,” where you can follow her ongoing insights, speaks widely, and is the voice of “Yo, is this ageist?” Ashton’s work is a call to wake up to the ageism in and around us, embrace a more accurate and positive view of growing older, and push back. She agreed to answer a few questions for us:

Q: First, a challenge: what’s one single thing you “know” with certainty, after years of research into modern families?

AA: One of the biggest obstacles to the well-being of modern families is the all-American myth of self-reliance—that people can and should “go it alone”—and we don’t call it out enough. That myth, which equates needing help with physical frailty and weakness of character, serves none of us well—least of all caregivers, people with disabilities, and older people (increasingly overlapping circles on the Venn diagram of life).

The myth exacts an immense personal cost: it downplays life’s challenges, it needlessly exhausts, and it shames us when, inevitably, we fall short. The social cost is high too: a culture that idealizes self-reliance serves the anti-welfare agenda of proponents of small government, because it silences and deflects questions about the structures that strand us. This go-it-alone ethic is one reason that care for the very young and very old is not publicly funded, which typically leaves family members holding the bag. Another reason is ageism, the last socially sanctioned prejudice, which disproportionately affects people at either end of the age spectrum.

Q: Give us the “Twitter” version of your current research — in 140 characters (give or take), what are you working on now?

AA: I’ll give you two tweets worth: I’m an author, speaker, blogger, and activist working to make discrimination on the basis of age as unacceptable as any other kind of prejudice. It’s time for a radical age movement, and I hope my new book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, will help catalyze it.

Q: How would you encourage a scholar of family life to work to get their research into public life, affecting policy and challenging assumptions about “average families”?

AA: Consider self-publishing. Jane Friedman’s site is a good starting point. I’ve been published by four of the big five publishers but elected to bring this book to market myself, partly because of their general cluelessness about the new digital landscape and partly because of my subject matter. Self-publishing means more control, more work, and more reliance on the network of friends and colleagues that social media enables. Like many of your publications, my book is a call for progressive social change—in this case to mobilize against ageism as we have against racism, sexism, and homophobia. Hence my slogan: Self-publish together! It’s different, and a lot more congenial, to ask for help from readers who share a goal that benefits many. People respond to a persuasive case that an issue requires collective action. I’m getting real traction, and I think many of my CCF colleagues would too. Self-publish together to change the world!

It is still June, still “wedding month,” still the month of Bastille Day, too. Here’s a revisit to a GirlwPen column from a few years ago.

Mary Wollstonecraft, a founding grandmother of liberal feminism who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), focused on how to improve the status of women (middle-class, white British women, that is) by revising education and transforming marriage. She writes of love,

Love, the common passion, in which chance and sensation take place of choice and reason, is, in some degree, felt by the mass of mankind; for it is not necessary to speak, at present, of the emotions that rise above or sink below love. This passion, naturally increased by suspense and difficulties, draws the mind out of its accustomed state, and exalts the affections; but the security of marriage, allowing the fever of love to subside, a healthy temperature is thought insipid, only by those who have not sufficient intellect to substitute the calm tenderness of friendship, the confidence of respect, instead of blind admiration, and the sensual emotions of fondness.

Down with romance, says Wollstonecraft. To liberate women and men, marriage should be stripped of passion. She argued, in effect, that doing so would offset the way that marriage starts as a cartoon of manly men adoring delicate women of great beauty and not much more (because of the limits of women’s education that Wollstonecraft deplored). To wit, the hero of her unfinished novel, Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman, is remembered above all for her line, “marriage has bastilled me for life.” (Bastille being the 1790s equivalent of Occupy today.)

Now to my story: Today [9/30/2012] in the New York Times, Matt Richtel develops his thought experiment for how to liberate marriage from that bastille experience. He proposes to a set of family researchers the notion of a 20-year marriage contract in “Till Death, or 20 Years, Do Us Part.”

Seems like everyone he interviewed thought marriage—and ideas about marriage—could use some revision. Pepper Schwartz ripely noted, “We’re remarkably not innovative about marriage even though almost all the environmental conditions, writ large, have changed…We haven’t scrutinized it. We’ve been picking at it like a scab, and it’s not going to heal that way.” The upshot was that marriage still is Occupied, and in important ways a prison for our imaginations.

My own proposal focused on getting rid of a lot of marriage fantasies that are represented in the commercial hype around marriage—very Wollstonecraft-ish, right? There might be something to that: wedding hype seems to bring out a lot of the gender cartoons that Wollstonecraft railed against. But is that anti romantic? Not in the way that I mean it.

I don’t think that getting rid of old-school marriage fantasies means not being romantic, not being hopeful, not being tender, committed, loyal, tolerant of bad days, exuberant about good days. What interests me are ways to cultivate romance and commitment in a context where partners recognize that the choice to participate in marriage, to remain, day in and day out, is something that makes it more fantastic, not less. Marriage, in this view, becomes mindful. And the reality is that marriage is a choice day in and day out, for a lot of reasons cogently reviewed in Matt Richtel’s column.

Same-sex partners, who until recently haven’t had access to marriage, have often been forced to forge more imaginative, more mindful unions. Now, as we edge towards marriage equality, everyone gets to see unions that take the sweet traditions of marriage, the fun, the legitimacy, and the somber commitment of it, but perhaps less often encumbered with the baggage of the bastille Wollstonecraft spoke of in heterosexual marriage.

As for me: I’m not married. When I was married, my vows included none of that “till death do you part” stuff; instead we pledged to remain interesting to each other. And we did. Till the day my husband died. And then some.

-Virginia Rutter

The term “millennial,” according to Frank Furstenberg, is an overly simplistic blanket term frequently used to describe the generation born anywhere between 1980 and 2004. This leads to confusion when we see debates in the media about where millennials fall on either side of the conservative or liberal binary, even when research shows significant complexity in millennial attitudes and behaviors. This month, I asked Barbara Risman, Professor of Sociology at University of Illinois at Chicago and President of the Board for the Council on Contemporary Families, about new research for her forthcoming book Where Will the Millennials Take Us: Transforming the Gender Structure? The research is in Social Currents. Risman’s findings suggest that as gender itself challenges binaries, so do millennials’ negotiations with the gender structure. Rather than a clear-cut conclusion about “millennial” approaches to gender, Risman finds four unique typologies that situate millennials within the gender structure: the true believers, innovators, rebels, and straddlers.

Q: In your typology, I was intrigued by the gender rebels: This is the millennial group that seems most different from previous generations. They emerged in your investigation when you demarcated material and cultural dimensions of the gender structure. Can you tell us more about how you came to recognize the gender rebels?

BR: I agree with your assessment that these gender rebels are perhaps the one group in my research that appear to be an invention of the millennial generation. Gender rebels are very much like a group I call the innovators; both could be described as trying to walk the walk of feminism, even if feminism is so in the air they breathe, they sometimes do not use the word. At the individual level of analysis, both groups reject being constrained to stereotypically feminine or masculine personality traits, both reject the cultural expectations that men and women should live different kinds of lives, and both are ideologically opposed to gender inequality. They are very similar in their cultural rejection of gender at the individual, interactional and macro ideological levels.

But when it came to the material aspects of gender, not ideas, but bodies and the class between their bodily presentations and the organization of social life, rebels and innovators couldn’t have been more different. The rebels rejected the notion that just because they were born female (or in one case, male) that meant they should present their bodies as feminine (or in one case, masculine). These rebels rejected the material expression of gender with their bodies. At the individual level they were androgynous, or if female, they presented their bodies in ways traditionally associated with masculinity. This had repercussions for how people treated them, with gender policing especially dramatic for men who challenged gender norms, but also for women who challenged how they presented their bodies once they reached puberty. At the macro level of organizational design, anyone who falls between the binary of male and female faces constant oppression as they do not fit within standard social categories. As you suggest, my distinction between cultural and material dimensions of the gender structure help us to understand why the experiences of rebels are so different from those of innovators.   

Q: What do you see as the practical/policy implications of your findings about the complexity of millennial gender typologies for the advancement of gender equality?

BR: There was one response that didn’t differ across groups. It didn’t matter if someone was a true believer in essential gender differences or a rebel, everyone, male or female, or somewhere in between, expected to work throughout their lives. That has great policy implications. We need to change our workplace policies to reflect the reality that all people in this generation expect to work in the paid labor force, and thus, workplaces have to be re-designed to be more family friendly. In this and no doubt future generations, employed adults will also be caretakers of young children, sick relatives and aging parents. We must use social policy to re-design the world of paid work to make this possible. Every society needs both economic activity and caretaking, and if the same people do both, social organizations have to reflect that reality.

A second policy implication reflects the needs of the rebels. Now that we have people who refuse the label of man or woman, and gender categories themselves are under siege by at least a small group of millennials, we have to begin to allow for gender variation in our social world. If there are people who are neither women nor men, then we need bathrooms that anyone can use. One policy implication is to move beyond single-sex bathrooms. Why not continue to require all stalls to have doors, and perhaps add curtains for urinals, and allow everyone to use every bathroom, and wash their hands next to people who are their same sex and those who are not? Why gender products? Why do we need different colored razors for men and women? At the end of my book, I call for a fourth wave of feminism that seeks to eradicate not just sexism but the gender structure itself. Only then will people who are constrained by gender, all of us, will be free.

Q: Your qualitative research makes a strong argument for the heterogeneity of millennials’ relations to the gender structure. That heterogeneity is very important to understanding things as they are, but sometimes in media the message gets lost. What advice do you have for researchers communicating nuanced findings to public audiences, when many in popular media depict millennials as falling on one side of a progressive/not progressive dichotomy?

BR: This is a problem for both qualitative and quantitative researchers. For qualitative research, I suggest creating catchy names for groups that differ, and insisting that the range of responses be covered. For quantitative researchers, I think a suggestion often given by Stephanie Coontz is right on target, and that is to discuss both means and standard deviations, especially when there is great variation around the average, and so people are really having different experiences.

Braxton Jones earned his MA in Sociology at the University of New Hampshire, and serves as a CCF Graduate Research and Public Affairs Scholar.

Reprinted from Equal Pay for All – the Official Website administered by the State Treasurer of Massachusetts – See more here:

June is traditionally LGBT pride month, and Massachusetts has a lot to be proud of. In 1989, we became the second state to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation (gender identity took longer). In 2004 we became the very first state to have marriage equality for same-sex couples. In spite of these victories for legal equality here and elsewhere, though, LGBT people continue to face wage gaps and other forms of economic inequality.

Employment discrimination still happens and is disturbingly common in the United States. In a 2013 national survey, 21% of LGBT people reported experiences of unfair treatment by an employer. Studies that send identically-qualified LGBT and non-LGBT people’s applications for jobs find that LGBT applicants have to apply for many more jobs just to get an interview.

These kinds of discrimination are likely contributors to the gay wage gap. A recent review of studies found that gay and bisexual men earned 11% less than heterosexual men with the same age, education, and other qualifications.

Perhaps surprisingly, lesbian and bisexual women earn about 9% more than similar heterosexual women. A lesbian wage advantage?  Not exactly–it’s more like a slightly smaller gender wage gap, since lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women all earn less than straight or gay men.

Lesbians do some things differently from heterosexual women, which might reduce the gender disadvantage. Mainly we see higher earnings for lesbians who were never married to men. Lesbians who were married to men at some point have earnings more like heterosexual women’s, maybe because they made similar kinds of childrearing or labor market decisions while living with a male spouse.

Lesbians also work more hours and weeks, so they might be accumulating more experience over time, which helps to raise wages. And lesbians appear to be less deterred by male dominance in an occupation, holding jobs that have more men in them than heterosexual women do.

The gender wage gap bites into lesbians’ economic resources, though. Lesbian couples have two women’s incomes, and studies show they have less income to live on than a male-female couple or a gay male couple. That’s one big reason why lesbian couples have higher poverty rates than different-sex couples and gay male couples. The poverty gaps are even larger for African American same-sex couples and for transgender people.

Interestingly, we’re learning that gay men are also affected by gender inequality. For example, one study shows that anti-gay discrimination is particularly pronounced in jobs looking for applicants with stereotypical male characteristics, like assertiveness, aggressiveness, or ambition.

So how can we move LGBT people closer to actual equality in economic outcomes?

Businesses have been allies in promoting policies and practices to reduce discrimination and to make workplaces more welcoming of LGBT employees. Some examples include putting sexual orientation and gender identity in the company nondiscrimination policy, discussing LGBT issues in diversity training, supporting LGBT employee groups, and developing clear gender transition guidelines.

Employers make a business case for LGBT equality—they need to recruit and retain the best employees, including LGBT people and non-LGBT people who want to work at companies that value diversity. Research backs up the business case claims, showing that companies with LGBT-supportive policies have higher stock prices, productivity, and profits.

Strengthening the scope and enforcement of nondiscrimination policies would help, too. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission considers discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity to be a form of sex discrimination, so LGBT people can file employment discrimination charges everywhere in the U.S. But it would also be transformative to have a comprehensive federal law like the proposed Equality Act, which would ban discrimination not only in employment, but also in credit, housing, public services, and other areas.

Some other policies would help lift LGBT people out of poverty, in particular. Raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would cut gay men’s poverty by a third and cuts lesbians’ poverty in half. Finding a way to eliminate the gender wage gap would erase the gap in poverty for lesbian couples, and cutting racial wage gaps would reduce the poverty gap for African American and Hispanic people in same-sex couples. Plus those policies have the advantage of helping everyone, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Finally, we need more data and research on LGBT people to better understand what’s making LGBT people economically insecure. Massachusetts and other states should join California in moving toward more inclusive data collection on sexual orientation and gender identity within state agencies, including health and human services, education, and employment.

While we have reasons to be proud of LGBT people’s victories in the push for legal equality, we will all be prouder when we’ve also achieved economic equality.

M. V. Lee Badgett is a professor of economics and the former director of the School of Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also a Williams Distinguished Scholar at UCLA’s Williams Institute and a board member of the Council on Contemporary Families. Her latest book is The Public Professor:  How to Use Your Research to Change the World.

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families Online Symposium on Gender and Millennials, originally released March 31, 2017. 

When a person is sent to prison they leave a community behind. And few of the studies of mass incarceration in the U.S. examine the prison system and families. Consider, for example, how incarceration triggers the termination of an incarcerated parent’s parental rights.

What is the extent of the problem? Data on the punitive impact of child welfare policies on families of incarcerated parents are either overly broad or just plain old and outdated. For example, some of the most recent research states that there are between 29,000 and 51,000 children in foster care who have incarcerated parents. But seek more information and the picture gets hazy. More research, even just constructing a database from data kept in separate state systems, would help.

I discovered this when I started to study the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act. From 1995, before the Act, to 2004 adoption rates in the U.S. doubled. This may be due to the financial incentives offered by the federal government to states that had increased their number of adoptions. But the provision in the Act stating that if a child has been in state care (i.e. foster care) for 15 of the last 22 months the state must move to terminate the parent’s parental rights has had a harsh effect on incarcerated parents, leading to untold numbers of family termination.

You see, non-incarcerated parents (“outsiders”) have access to exemptions to the time-based termination provisions. For instance, outsiders, who can regularly visit their child, are empowered to use that as evidence of connection. But incarcerated parents are not in control of whether or not they see their child.

The Act’s time limit provisions that trigger adoption were passed at the same time that incarceration rates were growing. The War on Drugs that began in the 1970’s turned drug abuse, which was once a public health issue, into a law enforcement issue. Cue the rise of mandatory minimums. In the early years of mandatory minimums, possession of five grams of crack cocaine (a drug that happened to be more common in low-income areas, which often have a large minority population) got you a minimum of five years.

Today, under federal policy 100 grams of a substance containing heroin results in a mandatory minimum of five years. However, if a defendant meets certain criteria (e.g. fully cooperated with the government and is a first time offender, etc.) they could get a reduced sentence. Yet, even a reduced sentence would still be between twenty-four to thirty months. If parental rights are challenged when a child is in state care 15 of the last 22 months, and the mandatory minimum is five years (24 to 30 months if you’re lucky) what chances have these policies given families?

As of March 2016 2.3 million people were in some form of corrections facility in the United States. New policies, aiming to create more reasonable sentencing laws, have been introduced in Congress such as the Mandatory Minimum Act of 2015. However, such bills still need to get through the House, the Senate, and the President. Given the uncertainty of the President elect’s intentions, and the clear racial animosity he and his coalition have displayed throughout his campaign, sentencing reform is now precarious. Meanwhile families remain and continue to become separated. Early commentary suggests that sentencing reform is dead. My question is what steps, if any, will we take to help mend the families separated due to the combination of The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 and unabated mass incarceration? Because it is clear that mass incarceration is family policy.

Megan Peterson is a 2017 graduate in sociology from Framingham State University and a Council on Contemporary Families Public Affairs and Social Media Intern.

In the extensive discussion of crime and race in the U.S., Asian/American experiences are rarely considered. Asian/Americans—a diverse group—are neglected in studies, analyses, and media representations. A new book, Asian/Americans, Education, and Crime: The Model Minority as Victim and Perpetrator, edited by Daisy Ball and Nicholas Hartlep, aims to address this gap. A chief issue is the distortion generated by the “model minority” stereotype.

As Professor Ball discussed in our short interview, growing up under the shadow of a stereotype—those seemingly positive as well as negative—shapes the experiences of Asian/Americans. The pressure to live up to a stereotype can lead to strain on families. Indeed, individual Asian/Americans get more coverage when they fit the stereotype, and this deters a full understanding of the diverse and divergent realities of Asian/Americans. My conversation with Daisy Ball, a professor of sociology and coordinator of criminology at Framingham State University, brought this all into focus.

TC:  Your book focuses on Asian/Americans’ criminal involvement as well as how they are treated by the police. Why did you decide to investigate this topic?

DB: The idea for this book comes from two main sources: The first source was current conversations regarding race and crime, including police use of force and the responding #BlackLivesMatter movement. My co-editor, Nicholas Hartlep, and I follow these conversations closely. As the discussions increased and the voices of activists became louder (which we were thrilled to hear), we noticed conversations regarding Asian/Americans’ criminal justice involvement were absent.

As Stacey Lee (2009) notes, Asian/Americans are typically cast as the “model minority”: good students, conformist, and law-abiding. Unlike African Americans and Latinx, Asian/Americans are a racial minority group in the U.S. that are decidedly not associated with crime. Instead, they are associated with educational and economic success. Through our book, we seek to add to the current conversation regarding race and crime by focusing specifically on Asian/Americans and criminal justice involvement. In reality, Asian/Americans are the victims and perpetrators of crime as well as victims of unjust criminal justice practices.

Second, the idea for this book stems out of my greater body of research, specifically my examination of the aftermath for Asian/American undergraduates at Virginia Tech following two horrific crimes: the 2007 Virginia Tech Massacre (the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history), and a beheading that took place on campus eighteen months after the massacre. In both cases, the perpetrator was of Asian descent. Following these crimes, the community spoke out—via emails, letters to the editor, and blog posts—against people of Asian descent studying at Virginia Tech. The conversation became so hostile that then-president of the university, Charles Steger, published an open letter to the campus community in which he asked for tolerance towards Asian/Americans and Asian nationals studying at Virginia Tech.

In my examination of the aftermath of these sensational crimes, I am interested in how members of a group typically stereotyped as the “model minority” respond when faced with a much more negative stereotype, that of “criminal threat.” So you can see how my book on Asian/American criminal justice involvement from various vantage points is linked to exceptional ways of looking at Asian/American experiences in these other sensational contexts.

TC: As mentioned in your book, there are a lack of studies, media representation, and analyses surrounding Asian/Americans which ultimately leaves them being misunderstood and misinterpreted. Do you believe this leaves a daily impact on Asian/American families? 

DB: Certainly. As I mentioned, although our society devotes considerable attention to criminal justice issues, Asian/Americans are largely absent from such conversations. This is problematic: although Asian/Americans are the victims of crime, they are often not consulted about their victimization by the media, or by the police. Oftentimes, when police arrive at the scene of a crime, they assume the Asian/Americans present do not speak English, and therefore turn to whites for information about what has occurred. At the same time, we know that Asian/Americans, in addition to being victims of crime, are the perpetrators of crime. Yet their histories, perspectives, and accounts from their family members rarely make the news to the same degree that members of mainstream culture do.

As several of the chapters in our book demonstrate, the more foreign an Asian/American or Asian national victim is perceived to be—by the community, by the media, by the police—the less coverage, care, and/or attention they receive. For example, in his chapter “Newspaper Portrayals and Emotional Connection Strategies: Commemorating Model Minority Murder Victims,” Alexander Lu illustrates that the more Asian national murder victims conform to the model minority stereotype, the more positive attention their cases receive, and the more they are memorialized by the community in which the crime occurs. In terms of the family, one way family members of victims are impacted by crime is the degree to which they are given a voice after the crime has occurred. Lu compares the murders of Won-Joon Yoon and Deepak Sharma, two young Asian national male graduate students studying in the U.S. Based on his analysis of the two cases, Lu concludes that because Yoon closely fit the construction of the model minority stereotype, he received considerably more media coverage, and was memorialized at several community-wide commemorations. Through media coverage and commemoration of his murder, his family was given repeated opportunities to speak out about Yoon. Conversely, because Sharma did not conform to the stereotype of the model minority, his murder received scant attention, and his family’s voice was essentially silenced when it came to speaking out about Sharma. The only exception was when his father was quoted in a Hindustan Times article about the logistics of transporting Sharma’s body back to India for last rites.

In her chapter, “Anonymous Victims and Invisible Communities: U.S. Media Portrayals of Chinese International Students Involved in Homicide,” Ke Li illustrates that when it comes to news media coverage of crimes involving Chinese international students, the crime is rarely considered from the vantage point of the international student. The Chinese students themselves are not asked, nor are their family members, friends, classmates, and professors, for input about what happened. Instead, more mainstream members of the community, such as police officers and their affiliates, are asked to interpret the crime. What results is an imbalanced portrait of the crime, for the story is only being told from the mainstream (most often white) perspective. This phenomenon is naturally a frustrating experience for grieving family members.

TC: One common stereotype of those who are of Asian descent is “being intelligent.” Your book brings to light how this is part of the way in which Asian/Americans are seen as the “model minority” and how the stereotyping “ignores both the history of discrimination and the contemporary problems faced by Asian/Americans.” Knowing that, how do you think this affects Asian/American families today?

DB: I think that growing up under the shadow of this stereotype, and/or raising children in the shadow of this stereotype, is challenging for Asian/American families today. Although at the outset, the model minority stereotype appears to be positive, much of the literature in Asian/American studies illustrates that this stereotype is detrimental to those to whom it is applied. The “double-edged sword” nature of this stereotype has been widely demonstrated in the literature (for example, see Lee 2009; Zakeri 2015; Feagin and Chou 2016). The assumption that Asian/Americans are a monolithic group, a group whose members are all succeeding, has caused members of this group to be overlooked when it comes to a variety of social services, which has undoubtedly put strain on modern Asian/American families.

Based on several research projects I’ve conducted with Asian/American undergraduates, there is intense pressure on Asian/American students to succeed—from early-on in their academic careers, through graduate school and beyond. Interestingly, many of my respondents deny the fact that parental/family pressure is problematic for them; they first acknowledge that it exists, and then brush it off as an aside, or couch it in humor (“that’s just what parents do, no big deal”). One of the puzzles I’m currently exploring is why my respondents tell the stories they do—acknowledging that the pressure exists, but then contrary to the literature in the field, denying the pressure is anything serious or anything to worry about, or causes challenges of any kind for them. Some possibilities to explore include interviewer effects (i.e. that I am a white woman interviewing Asian/American students); the possibility that the Asian/American studies literature has overblown the detrimental nature of the model minority stereotype; and/or the possibility that the students in my sample are just unique in some way, and that is why their responses do not align with the literature.

***

Note: Professor Ball joins Roanoke College’s Department of Public Affairs faculty in Fall 2017.

Tasia Clemons is a Senior sociology major at Framingham State University, an Administrative Resident Assistant, and a CCF Public Affairs Intern.

The birth or adoption of a child, the serious illness of a parent, one’s own health emergency. There are health and medical occasions, both joyous and difficult, which require workers to take time off to care and heal. Yet not all people can take the time they need.

Nearly all industrialized nations recognize the necessity of time by guaranteeing paid family and medical leave. The U.S. does not. Paid family and medical leave policy provides extended partially paid time off from work in the event of workers’ own or a close family member’s serious medical condition. A growing number of U.S. workers have access to paid family and medical leave from state or local polices or through their employers. However, most workers do not have access to any paid family or medical leave.

Although the U.S. lacks national paid family and medical leave policy, it does have national unpaid leave. In 1993 the U.S. passed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), an important law which guarantees twelve weeks of unpaid family and medical leave for qualifying employees who need to provide care for themselves or a close family member.

In the event they need to take family and medical leave, the FMLA provides eligible employees with two primary protections: retention of health insurance (if insurance is provided by the employer) and job protection, meaning that upon return from leave employees are restored to the same or an equivalent position. A key caveat of the FMLA is that most workers do not meet the eligibility requirements necessary to gain access to these protections. At diversitydatakids.org, our research finds that that less than half (45 percent) of all workers (including the self-employed) are eligible for FMLA and that there are inequities in eligibility.

Beyond eligibility, for many families, forgoing pay for up to 12 weeks, even in the midst of serious health needs, is highly unrealistic. Workers may rely on sick days, vacation time, or other types of paid time off, but not all workers have access to these benefits, which are not designed to provide workers with extended time off. Research shows that the financial cost of family and medical leave is a primary barrier workers face as they make leave choices.

Our new fact sheet from diversitydatakids.org explores how paid family and medical leave policy could reduce cost barriers to leave for U.S. working families. This research answers several important questions related to the affordability of family and medical leave.

How much does unpaid family and medical leave cost families in the event they need it?

Taking unpaid family and medical leave, in the event that it is needed, results in a large financial burden for families. Six weeks of unpaid family and medical leave results in a 27 percent loss of family income over a three-month period (i.e. quarterly income) for U.S. full-year workers. The financial shock of family and medical leave is even greater if a worker needs to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave: on average he/she loses well over half of quarterly family income.

Are there alternatives to unpaid family and medical leave that could be implemented in the U.S.?

As an alternative to national unpaid family and medical leave that would bring the U.S. in line with other industrialized nations, the U.S. could offer paid leave through a social insurance policy approach (similar to the approach taken by Social Security programs). Employers and workers would jointly finance an insurance fund which workers would then draw from if they experienced a qualifying health condition and needed to take family and medical leave. While on leave, workers would receive partial wage replacement (maximums would be set for both the benefit amount and the number of weeks of leave). While social insurance does impose a cost on employers in addition to employees, studies of existing state paid family and medical leave insurance programs have found minimal perceived negative impact on businesses.

As proposed in pending federal legislation, a paid family and medical leave social insurance approach that based eligibility on the parameters set by Social Security Disability Insurance would increase eligibility rates for paid leave in the U.S. to 89 percent of the working-age population.

How would paid family and medical leave help families?

Currently four states and the District of Columbia have paid leave insurance laws. If we apply the New Jersey family and medical leave policy to U.S. workers (66 percent wage replacement up to a maximum of $633 per week) income losses would be reduced by half. Rather than lose 27 percent of income for six weeks of unpaid family and medical leave during a three month period, families would lose just 12 percent. Loss of income for 12 weeks of family and medical leave would be reduced from 55 percent of quarterly family income to 23 percent of family income. For middle-income workers the benefits of paid family and medical leave are even greater: it would reduce affordability constraints by almost two-thirds.

Public Policy Options

Recent public opinion surveys indicate broad public support for a social insurance paid leave policy in the U.S.: over three quarters of voters support a federal law establishing a fund that would offer all workers 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave. Paid family and medical leave is a popularly supported program and there is pending legislation in the U.S. Senate that would establish a family and medical leave insurance program to provide for families in times of health crises.

People need support to maintain employment during health crises or when they become parents; it’s about time the U.S. provides it.

Maura Baldiga is a Research Associate and Pamela Joshi is Associate Director and Senior Scientist at the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. Their research focuses on family economic security and access to work and family policies.  

A briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families Online Symposium on Gender and Millennials, originally released March 31, 2017.