“Why this? Why now? And what does this say about the state of the feminist zeitgeist?” That’s the focus of the newly launched #SignsShortTakes. In April, the platform used Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family to address “broader questions of reach and resonance” about work/family policies in the United States. The symposium was hosted by Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, which has been a leading journal for critical examinations of feminist issues since 1975.

A number of reviewers from the Council on Contemporary Families (CCF) joined in the dialogue, with insights that are expanded upon in CCF’s briefing paper series on housework, gender, and parenting.

Several commentators highlighted concern about what was interpreted as an elite target audience for the approaches Slaughter recommends. Nancy Folbre, University of Massachusetts’ economist and a CCF scholar, argued that wealthy women already have “much better family-friendly policies in their workplace than others do.” Improvements secured by privileged women who are most able to demand them might not be enough for low-income women and their families. Calls for women to simply demand time off from an employer, for example, “are premised on the notion that workers are indispensable,” and “wield some leverage in the workplace,” even though “the problem of women’s economic advancement is largely one of working-class women and occupational segregation,” according to Premilla Nadasen. Proponents of what Tressie McMillan Cottom named trickle-down feminism imagine that, “caring about the well-being of elite women means elevating powerful women who will take care of the interests of less powerful women.” Cottom suggested that wealthy white women may be just as antagonistic to the needs of low-income and non-white women and their families as are wealthy white men. more...

Repost from 9/8/2015.

The commercialization of everyday life usually gives me a headache, but I guess I can always take a Tylenol. After all, as Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who directed Tylenol’s recent #HowWeFamily advertising spots, put it, the “family brand” is “helping to dispel the fears around difference,” to “get people to understand diversity” by introducing them to a wide range of families in videos that show that “at the end of the day, no matter the gender of the parents, the color of the family’s skin, the religion that they come from, the background that they come from, all of these families have the same concerns. They want what’s best for their kid, they want to care for each other and create a home that’s safe and happy.” And sometimes, of course, they need a decent painkiller.

The Tylenol spots—of immigrant families, of mixed-race families, adoptive families, gay-parent families, military families, step-families, stay-at-home dad/working-mom families, and so on—are charming, well produced, and surprisingly rich and moving. The parents, some of whom are also celebrities, are appealing and articulate, the kids are cute, and the politics are unapologetically liberal. The introductory video takes direct aim at old notions of what and who makes a family, offering the company’s “modern take on the Norman Rockwell family.” It’s an easy target, but still.

“When were you first considered a family? When you fell in love? When you got married? When you had kids?” a kind woman’s voice asks over soft music and images of straight couples holding hands, getting married, holding kids. Then, over similar images of same-sex couples and mixed-race families: “When did you first fight to be considered a family? When you fell in love? When you got married? When you had kids? Family isn’t defined by who you love, but how.” (Pause, then: “Tylenol.”) Many of the participants challenge the idea of a “normal” family, while also asserting that, as one of them puts it, “We are, at heart, all the same.”

That people have families in a wide variety of ways, throughout history and across cultures, is well established if also still widely ignored. These Tylenol images, along with TV shows like Modern Family, are part of an ongoing demotion of the ideology of One True Family (married, heterosexual man and woman with kids), and an emerging celebration of family diversity, in popular culture —even as the legal system lags behind. That’s great, and certainly better than the stigma, discrimination, and sanctimony which nontraditional families still routinely face.

Still, it strikes me as significant that the Tylenol campaign, like the similar family representations that have been popping up, downplays the ways these families move differently through the world, glosses over the origins of the new kinds of families, like my own, that they celebrate, and focuses on only particular forms of non-traditional family. One might wonder, for instance, about the experiences of the white parent of kids of color in the face of racism, immigrant families in the midst of Trump-driven nativism, same-sex parents whose children participate in a fiercely heterosexist culture. One might wonder, too, why we don’t get sunny videos about women who chose to be, or have found themselves as, single mothers, or about multi-parent-by-design families, or #HowWeFamilyWithoutMoney. One might wonder about the birth families, egg and sperm donors, surrogates, and ex-spouses whose lives, labor, and emotions were part of the family creation process but who are invisible in #HowWeFamily. One might wonder about those marginalized members of our broader family—in the communal membership sense of “family” long used by queer people—who can’t, don’t, or don’t want to benefit from the respectability garnered by participation in conventional marriage and family institutions. One might wonder, that is, whether the demolition of the idea that there is a single “normal” family requires the erasure of the ways social inequality shapes family creation and family life.

We really shouldn’t expect advertising to show that to us, of course. That’s not Tylenol’s job. Sometimes corporate actions contribute to progressive social change—in this case, when their branding interests are served by presenting non-traditional families as symbols of liberal tolerance—and oftentimes not. But we should wonder, and we should talk, about the less comfortable, less pretty inequities that are an inherent part of family-making old and new. That family diversity has become a corporate marketing tool can be flattering to some of us. But buyer beware.

Joshua Gamson (@joshgamson) is Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco and a Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. His most recent book is Modern Families: Stories of Extraordinary Journeys to Kinship.

One of the consistent findings of sociological research in recent decades has been that couples who had a child before getting married had substantially higher odds of divorcing than couples who married first. This held true even when researchers controlled for other factors that tend to distinguish such couples from those who marry directly—education, family background, race and ethnicity. But considering the tremendous increase in premarital cohabitation and childbearing over the past quarter century, and in light of new evidence that many other longstanding “laws” of marriage and divorce have been overturned (e.g., see “It’s Not Just Attitudes: Marriage Is Also Becoming More Egalitarian”; Are Individuals Who Marry at an Older Age Too Set in Their Ways to Make Their Marriages Work?), we set out to investigate whether this particular sociological “rule” still applies. more...

For all of its craziness and scariness, the 2016 election campaign has hammered home for millions of Americans the degree to which massive inequities permeate our daily lives and threaten our democracy.

Unfortunately, understanding how inequalities affect us has yet to permeate the education policy world. While the transition from narrow, punitive No Child Left Behind Act to the Every Student Succeeds Act represents real progress, there is still a widespread belief that schools are the main drivers of achievement gaps and that they can, and should, be responsible for closing them. Correcting this fallacy is critical to getting the education system we need – one that is both equitable and excellent – and will help correct some of those larger inequities as well.

In reality, the same systemic forces that have sucked most of the income and wealth from the bottom half of our population in recent decades and channeled it into the top one percent have substantially widened income-based achievement gaps. Without intentional measures to direct a broad range of educational and other resources to reversing that trend, gaps will continue to grow. And because big disparities in parents’ – and society’s – investments in children begin at birth, those resources need to be channeled early.

Many of us know that students from poor families, and especially low-income students of color, are often two to three years behind by the time they begin high school. What is far less widely known is that those same students began school that far behind. In other words, our highly inequitable school system, which consigns students with the greatest deficits to the least credentialed and experienced teachers, is doing more to maintain gaps that children brought with them on their first day of kindergarten than to create them.

A study by my colleague, Emma Garcia, finds that, in fact, students in the bottom social class quintile lagged their highest-social class peers by a full standard deviation in both reading and math at kindergarten entry. Those same students were about half a standard deviation behind on such social emotional skills as persistence, self-control, and social interactions, which are equally critical to academic, and life, success. Mind you, education researchers typically translate that “standard deviation” into two or three years of schooling. Let that sink in: one in five students start kindergarten one to three years behind, whether behaviorally or academically.

When we looked across racial groups, the gaps were smaller, and could be explained substantially by social class. Given that nearly half of black five-year-olds who started school in 2010-11, and almost two thirds of English-Language Learner Hispanic children, versus just 13 percent of their white peers, are living in poverty, however, shifting the comparison groups doesn’t improve those students’ real life contexts.

Schools didn’t start these problems. And the evidence tells us that schools alone can’t fix them.

Early fixes that will work.

Luckily, there is also some very good news on this front. Unlike fixes for our bigger, broader societal inequities, strategies for closing these early childhood gaps are well understood, extensively documented, and, miraculously, have fairly wide support across the political spectrum. A paper just published by five EPI researchers lays out both the multiple societal problems created by our failure to make the needed public investments in quality early child care and education, and the broad set of benefits to be reaped from righting that wrong.

First and foremost, an ambitious national investment in early childhood care and education would help get all our children to the starting gate in much better shape. Another recent study, conducted jointly by the National Institute for Early Education Research and the Center for American Progress, suggests that universal pre-k alone would narrow math gaps by between 45 percent and 78 percent (black- white and Hispanic-white gaps, respectively) and virtually eliminate pre-kindergarten reading gaps.

But the benefits to the investments we propose extend much further. Ensuring a living wage for child care providers would not only improve their quality of life and enhance their contributions to the economy, but help stabilize the workforce and, ultimately, benefit the children they care for. Because child care is such a burden for young families – as expensive as rent or more so in many cases – making high-quality child care available would provide a benefit of about $11,000 annually for Florida families with an infant and a preschool-aged child who are earning the state median income. And removing this barrier to women’s workforce participation would help bring American women in line with their international peers, with potential gains to the gross domestic product of as much as $600 billion annually.

As the election comes closer, we must continue to push all candidates in both parties to focus on the severe problems working Americans face. Let’s make the early childhood investments we suggest front and center. By our analysis they are low hanging fruit—politically and economically.

Elaine Weiss is the National Coordinator for the Broader Bolder Approach to Education, where she works with four co-chairs, a high-level Advisory Board, and multiple coalition partners to promote a comprehensive, evidence-based set of policies to allow all children to thrive in school and life.  Major publications for BBA include case studies of diverse communities across the country that employ comprehensive approaches to education. She has also authored two studies with EPI economist Emma Garcia on early achievement gaps and strategies to reduce them.

Why are families less economically secure today? After all, there’s been four decades of families seeming to have the opportunity to earn more and do better—this largely due to women’s movement into the U.S. workforce. According to a new report, women’s increased earnings and hours have been vital in the American family’s search for economic security. How has that search gone? Heather Boushey and Kavya Vaghul’s new report “Women have made the difference for family economic security” offers some answers.

Boushey, Executive Director and Chief Economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and research team member Vaghul used data from the Current Population survey to focus on changes in family income between 1979 and 2013 for low-, middle-, and professional-income families. They delved into the difference between men’s and women’s earnings regarding greater pay, as well as women’s earning as a function of more hours worked. They also looked at other sources of income between 1979 and 2013. more...

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). more...

“New Maternalisms”: Tales of Motherwork (Dislodging the Unthinkable). Edited by Roksana Badruddoja & Maki Motapanyane (Demeter Press, 2016).

When academics focus on a concept that is rooted in a fundamental human experience, they often retreat to detached and aggressive scholarly postures. This natural defense against graying the lines between personal and professional can lead to the driest literature. The authors included in New Maternalisms clearly reject this approach, choosing instead to get their hands dirty while grappling with the sticky task of conceptualizing motherhood. Contributor Isabel Sousa-Rodriguez defines maternalism as a field of study, that ‘strives to explain the complexity of “mothering” – subdividing motherwork according to biological and social reproductive functions.’ This definition contrasts with that of the OG political movement , lending double entendre to the concept of a ‘new’ maternalism. Despite its jargon rich title, this collection of essays is personal and accessible.

The editors, (former CCF Boardmember) Roksana Badruddoja & Maki Motapanyane note academia’s historic failure to recognize the voices and agency of mothers. In response, they bring together a diverse collection of essays that explore the ways in which societal structures and culturally grounded ideologies prescribe definitions of good mothering and limit women’s agency. In turn, these works illuminate the perspectives, strategies and resilience of marginalized motherhood.

The list of authors could be considered a list of invitees to a maternalist scholar’s dream dinner party. Layering the voices of emerging scholars, expert practitioners from the field, and skilled theorists the collection of essays reads like a conversation among kindred spirits across disciplines. The editors’ openness to including scholars with diverse academic experience and personal backgrounds is a kindness not only to the emerging scholars included in the collection, but to the reader. At times fearlessly raw, the authors admit to and struggle with the limitations to their own views of mothering while exploring examples of motherhood across a diverse array of cultural contexts. The effect is refreshing.

The contributions challenge both patriarchal and feminist concepts of mothering. They do this by presenting the realities of mothering within the contexts of marginalized demographics (e.g. mothers who are undocumented, same sex, homeless, indigent, and/or who have disabilities) and marginalizing experiences (e.g. mothers who carry genetically engineered children, work in the sex industry, have their children conscripted as soldiers, or feed their babies formula, as opposed to breast feeding). The issues raised are at once timely, given recent Supreme Court cases (e.g. constraints experienced by mothers living in mixed immigration status families and mothers in single sex marriages) and timeless, such as mothers struggling with identity after the loss of a child.

In short, the editors give us an education in what Badruddoja names in her own contribution to the collection, “the unschooling that is deeply needed around our cultural imaginations of motherhood”. Transitioning through the chapters, I found myself relating to, sympathizing with, and being irritated by the authors. In other words, I found the collection both engaging and challenging. Based on my, admittedly, limited experience as an educator – and my shamelessly extensive experience as a student – that is what I’d call pedagogical gold.

Amy Thompson is a recovering policy wonk and a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work. She is currently immersed in her comprehensive exams on the development of agency in migrant children – some of whom are mothers (biological and/or structural).

It’s Almost Mothers’ Day: Why is pay for caregiving work so low relative to other jobs with similarly low requirements for formal education?

Two of the lowest paid groups of employees in the American economy are child care workers and personal care aides, according to a report just released by the US Census Bureau on February 25, 2016, providing the latest (2014) figures on how much men and women earn in each occupation.

Many of the organizations and political leaders honoring International Women’s Day last Tuesday have made a “pledge for parity,” promising to promote gender equity in pay. When most people think about what parity means, their “go to” question is whether men and women earn the same when they work in the same job and perform equally well. But we should also think about whether differences in pay between occupations are equitable. To keep the focus just on between-occupation differences, let me give some figures just for women.Soon it will be Mother’s Day, and we will be inundated with testimonials of appreciation for the devotion, skill, and hard work that women put in to caring for their own children.

Women who were child care workers in 2014 had median earnings of only $20,452 for the year. If we assume that means 50 weeks a year and 40 hours per week, those child care workers made just $10.22/hour. Personal care aides earned $21,459 a year. Many food service workers have similarly low salaries. more...

What’s going on in the South?  First a “religious discrimination” bill passed both houses in Georgia (not signed by the Governor), then North Carolina passes HB2 sold as a “bathroom bill” but allows discrimination against LGBTQ people all over the state. And now Mississippi passes a “religious freedom” bill that includes the right to discriminate not only against LGBTQ folks but also fornicators, those radical people who have sex outside the bonds of marriage (you know, the rest of us, at least sometime in our lives). Is there a contest for which Southern state can be most crazy?

North Carolina and Mississippi have suddenly become states to avoid if you care about human rights, if you are LGBTQ people, or if you know or love someone that is. Are there any Americans who shouldn’t be thinking of boycotting these states?

You might think that these new laws passed hurt transgender people only, but you’d be wrong.  These laws allow discrimination and legitimate harassment against anyone who doesn’t follow the typical expectations for how we look, or how we hold our bodies, or who we love, or who or whether we marry. These concerns about looks and bodies relate directly to what sociologists refer to as how we “do gender.” These laws try to impose one fixed and “normal” way to “do gender,” along with whom to partner and how.  But over the past 30 years that I have written about gender, I have seen dramatic changes to what is considered “normal” and whether sex outside of marriage is a crime or just another recreational activity that feels good. Many more people are open about their gender identities, and express them in a variety of ways. Our categories have changed and moved beyond a simple binary where “boys will be boys” and “girls will be girls.”

The dramatic change has been especially clear in research for my new book on Millennials. The changes in how people “do gender” pushed me to write a book I had never planned to write. Indeed, after teaching a graduate seminar where the students and I collected over a hundred life interviews from young adults, I was startled to see the dramatic diversity, and increasing confusion, around gender and sexuality among Millennials.

I talked to two groups of young people who will be much hurt by a law that allows anyone to police who can use what bathroom, or who can love whom and when. Transgender people of all ages will be hurt. In my research, every transgender respondent had stories about the trouble they had going to the bathroom, even in states without laws that require gender discrimination. One transman told me that he often leaves an event and  travels a long way home on public transportation before going to the bathroom. As he told me about life as a transman he said “I wait until we get home. We call it the trans bladder. We can wait for hours before going to the bathroom.” Think of the physical pain, holding back the release of urine and excrement to avoid being bullied. And now realize that the states of North Carolina and Mississippi have just more than legitimized such harassment, they have required it by law. What kind of rude culture legitimates bullying? Is this the new meaning of southern hospitality?

Another group of research respondents will also suffer and have thus far remained invisible in the conversation, young people who reject the binary rules of gender. In my interviews I met people who identify as genderqueer: they do not want to be the opposite gender. Instead, they reject the label given at birth entirely as they reject the categories male and female which are irrelevant to their identities… Most, but not all, of these genderqueer young people grew up girls. They are often mistaken for men, but many continue to identify their sex as female, and their gender as queer. They too report already being hassled in restrooms.  Many avoid bathrooms.  One genderqueer respondent told me that she often faces uncomfortable interactions. “Usually they look at me trying to figure out if I am a boy or a girl…they’re like ‘I can’t tell cause she’s got short hair and she wears boy’s clothes, but those lips look kinda feminine. I think she’s got tits under there.” Another person quoted RuPaul “you’re born naked and the rest is drag” as the basis for androgynous self-presentation consciously designed to be neither masculine or feminine.

RuPaul’s view of the world is good sociology. Gender identity is very powerful but how we use gender—dressing or carrying our bodies–to present how we identify ourselves is complicated, ever changing, and culturally specific.   How we choose whom to love, and whether or not they have similar genitals seems the most intimate of decisions, and not good fodder for public policy. It takes very intrusive big government to want to judge intimate relationships. To legitimate harassment of people because of their gender expression hurts not only transgender and genderqueer people, it hurts us all. To legitimate harassment and discrimination on who you love, and whether or not that love is legally sanctioned by a marriage certificate, is not religious, it is hateful. Why should any couple be subject to questioning about their marital status? Why should anyone have to dress conservatively enough to assure vigilante enforcers that they are indeed male or female? How feminine must I dress to look like a woman?

As President of the Southern Sociological Society, and a woman who raised her child in North Carolina, I am proud that my professional association has voted not to meet in any state that discriminates against any of our members. I hope many more businesses and organizations join the boycott. If anyone is at risk for discrimination, we all are.

Barbara J Risman is currently a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at CASBS. She is a Senior Scholar at the Council on Contemporary Family and  is on-leave from  University of Illinois at Chicago.