Here’s a reprint of my column on family medical leave, originally posted at GirlwPen; today’s post includes updates of additional studies further highlight the need for paid leave that extends to all workers.

Over 20 years ago Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, and President Bill Clinton signed it into law two weeks after his inauguration in 1993. Remember the optimism? Under the FMLA a qualified employee can take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a sick family member or for pregnancy, newborn, newly adopted, or for care of a new foster child. In a good-news bad-news sense, one of the notable features of the FMLA was that it was gender-neutral: men and women equally had no funding for their job-protected leave for up to 12 weeks per year. Otherwise, this policy for helping families has been the weakest compared to other rich countries. At the time, the FMLA was the “foot in the door” for improving the situation of working families. A hint for how FMLA is doing today was offered by Girlwpen’s Susan Bailey earlier this year.

So…how’s that foot in the door now? Several recent studies offer new tools for analysis. In “Expanding Federal Family and Medical Leave Coverage,” economists Helene Jorgenson and Eileen Appelbaum investigated who benefits from FMLA using the 2012 FMLA Employee Survey conducted by the Department of Labor. About one in five qualified employees has used FMLA leave within the past 18 months, according to a new Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) report. The authors found an extensive amount of unmet need for family and medical leave. UPDATE: In June 2014, Jorgensen and Applebaum published “Documenting the Need for a National Paid Family and Medical Leave Program: Evidence from the 2012 FMLA survey.” They reported that,”One-in-four employees needing leave had their leave needs unmet in the past 12 months. Not being able to afford unpaid leave (49.4 percent) and the risk of loss of job (18.3 percent) were the two most common reasons given for not taking needed leave. Employees with children living at home and female employees had the greatest need for leave, but also had the highest rates of unmet leave.”

Several key limitations of the FMLA mean that, in practice, the law doesn’t apply to a large share of the workforce. The FMLA does not cover workers in firms with fewer than 50 employees. As a result, 44.1 percent of workers in the private sector (49.3 million workers) are excluded from protected leave for caring for their sick or vulnerable relations. The FMLA also excludes employees who have been at their current job for less than a year or have worked fewer than 1250 hours in the past year.

Not everyone with needy kin works in mid-to-large size firms nor has regular employment. So, those limits on access to FMLA do not affect everyone equally. Young workers and Hispanic workers had lower rates of eligibility than other groups. Education level was the strongest predictor of eligibility. People with less than a high school degree were 13.6 percentage points less likely than those with “some college” to have access to unpaid leave for family and medical concerns. Meanwhile, those with a college degree were 10.7 percentage points more likely than those with some college to have access to FMLA leave.

Have there been improvements in the past two decades? Another recent study from CEPR and the Center for American Progress, “Job Protection isn’t Enough: Why America Needs Paid Parental Leave,” by Heather Boushey, Jane Farrell, and John Schmitt, points to no. Analysis of data from the Current Population Survey over the past 20 years revealed two key things: First, women take leave way more than men despite the gender neutrality of the policy. Men have increased from a very low rate, but the ratio in the last five years studied is about nine to one. In addition, over the past two decades there has been essentially no change in women’s rates of leave-taking.

Also, per Boushey and colleagues, guess who is most likely to benefit from leave? Women with college degrees and those in full-time jobs. Commenting on their statistical analysis, the authors state, “Better-educated, full-time, union women are more likely than their otherwise identical counterparts to take parental leave” (p. 12). Not everyone can be in a job that qualifies them for FMLA leave; however once qualified, not everyone has the financial security to use that leave.

These authors—like Jorgenson and Appelbaum—applaud the FMLA and the opportunities it has provided to qualified workers—but their data show that the 1993 Act did not generate a cascade of family-progressive policies for men, women, and families. But one can hope. Jorgenson and Appelbaum demonstrate that a policy that reduced the firm size from 50 to 30 and reduced the hours worked in the past year from 1250 to 750, an additional 8.3 million private sector workers would be eligible for family leave under FMLA. UPDATE: In an April 2014 study, Jorgensen and Applebaum zeroed in on FMLA’s exemptions–such as small firms. They calculated that,”If the FMLA were amended to cover all firms and worksites regardless of size, an estimated 34.1 million private-sector employees would gain access to job-protected family and medical leave, if they otherwise meet the eligibility requirements relating to length of tenure and hours of work.”

There are some pretty great examples of places in the United States where better family leave policies have been put in place and have worked well. California passed a paid family leave act in 2002, and after twelve years, the program has been highly successful. Appelbaum and Ruth Milkman reported in 2011 about the social, family, and economic benefits of the program. Washington State passed similar legislation in 2007 but it has been help up since then. New Jersey did so in 2008, and Rhode Island’s law was implemented in January 2014. Another review of the California paid leave program demonstrates the growth in uptake since its initiation, but reports that uptake continues to be low because while the leave is paid one’s job is not protected.

We just celebrated 50 years of the Civil Rights Act. Last year we celebrated 50 years since the Equal Pay Act. Retrospectives on such landmark legislation includes successes as well as persisting shortfalls. We are at 21 and counting with FMLA. These studies remind us that with FMLA we need to do more to have more success than shortfalls.

The following is a repost in honor of the 51st anniversary of the Equal Pay Act. You can download this essay as part of CCF’s Equal Pay Symposium(.pdf).

Gender inequality within families is reciprocally related to gender inequality in the paid workplace. That is why one of the legacies of the Equal Pay Act, which brought scrutiny and sanctions to bear on gender discrimination at work, has been growing egalitarianism within families as well. Research consistently shows the effect of workplace progress on equality within couples. Most recently, analysis of the American Time-Use Survey confirms that women’s own earnings are associated with the amount of housework they perform. Each thousand dollars of earnings is associated with a 14-minute reduction in daily housework.

In 1962 fewer than one-in-seven nonfarm managers were women, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Women earned less than 10 percent of degrees in law and medicine, and full-time employed women earned just 59 percent of what men made. Not surprisingly, at that time just 7 percent of wives ages 25-54 earned more than their husbands – and wives did almost six-times as much housework as husbands. Their constrained workplace opportunity weakened their relative standing at home. more...

The following is a re-post in honor of the (2014) 50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.

Greater Acceptance, Persisting Antipathy:

Catholic and Jewish Americans Since The Civil Rights Era

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only ushered in stronger federal protections for racial and ethnic minorities and women, but also for religious minorities. Antipathy toward Catholics and Jews in the US was a persistent and prevalent theme through much of American history. It was common for these groups to be labeled “un-American” and even categorized as “non-white.” Members of these religions were often discriminated against in hiring and in admission to institutions of higher learning (this was especially common for Jewish applicants) and excluded from many neighborhoods, clubs, and political positions. From the late 19^th through the mid-20^th century, organized hate groups, most notably the Ku Klux Klan, used the threat of violence to intimidate not only African-Americans but Jews and Catholics as well.

After World War II, these restrictions and prejudices eased somewhat. By 1955 the now-classic essay Protestant Catholic Jew could proclaim that although these three religions were the primary sources of identity in America, they were now “alternative ways of being an American” rather than two of them being seen as Un-American.

Still, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism persisted. In the 1960s, some commentators worried that President Kennedy, a Catholic, would take orders from the Pope. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon was recorded making several anti-Semitic comments. And even today nativist hate groups continue to perpetuate centuries-old hostilities against Catholic and Jewish Americans. But the Civil Rights Act did give these minorities protection against outright exclusion and discrimination, and other religious minorities have also looked to it for security as the American religious landscape has diversified.Even today, nativist hate groups perpetuate hostilities against Catholic and Jewish Americans. more...

June 30^th saw the release of the 65+ in the United States 2010 U.S. Census Bureau Report, the latest overview of how older Americans are faring socially and economically. Brace yourself: “the U.S. population is poised to experience a population aging boom over the next two decades.” Uh oh, right? Despite the fact that longer lives reflect a remarkable public health achievement—the redistribution of death from the young to the old—there’s more hand-wringing than back-patting going on.

Much of the apprehension centers on the “dependency ratio”: the fact that the number of people over 65 is growing and the number of people the workforce shrinking. Fiscal crisis! Social collapse! In fact that ratio’s been falling pretty steadily for over a century. Over the same period national GDPs, along with lifespans, have rapidly increased.

People don’t turn into economic dead weights when they hit 65. As the Census Report documents, they’re participating in the labor force in ever-greater numbers. It also notes that “the dependency ratio does not account for older or younger people who work or have financial resources, nor does it capture those in their ‘working ages’ who are not working,” and that many caregivers are over age 65. Because it’s unpaid, this work is omitted from our national accounting. Millions more older Americans would like to continue to contribute, but are prevented by age discrimination in the workplace, which relegates them to jobs that don’t take advantage of their skills and experience—if they land one at all.

The “approaching crisis in caregiving” that the Census Report calls out is real and growing more acute. But people are healthier as well as longer-lived, and are not an inevitable sink for healthcare dollars. According to the ten-year MacArthur Foundation Study of Aging in America, once people reach 65, their added years don’t have a major impact on Medicare costs. As the Census Report details, the number of Americans aged 65+ in nursing homes declined by 20 percent in the last decade, “from 4.6 percent in 2000 to 3.1 percent in 2010.” That’s three percent of Americans over 65.Chronic conditions pile up, but they don’t keep most older Americans from functioning in the world, helping their neighbors, and enjoying their lives.

The Census Report includes an oft-cited statistic: “An unprecedented shift will occur between 2015 and 2020, when the percentage of people aged 65 and over in the global population will surpass the percentage of the very young (aged 0-4) for the first time.” This means that by 2020 there’ll be one older adult for every child—far better for children’s welfare than the inverse, as well as for the women who once had to produce enough of them to survive famines, wars, and epidemics.

It’s also helpful to keep in mind that the projections that have Americans so worked up are largely the result of a specific historical phenomenon: the cohort effect of the baby boom growing old—the proverbial bulge in the python. This effect will peak by midcentury, although, tellingly, few graphs extend far enough out to show the downturn. Much was made of the first boomers turning 65 in 2011, but a 2013 milestone went largely unremarked. That’s when millennials first outnumbered baby boomers. The number of boomers will continue to decline.

Even countries that are rapidly aging can produce “youth bulges”, as demographer Philip Longman pointed out in 2010, describing them as looming disasters “with all the attendant social consequences, from more violence to economic dislocation.” Can’t win for losing. In that same Foreign Policy article Longman warned of a “’gray tsunami’ sweeping the planet.” Journalists jumped on this frankly terrifying metaphor, and “gray tsunami” has since become widely adopted shorthand for the socioeconomic threat posed by an aging population.

What we’re facing is no tsunami. It’s a demographic wave that scientists have been tracking for decades, and it’s washing over a flood plain, not crashing without warning on a defenseless shore. This ageist and alarmist rhetoric justifies prejudice against older people, legitimates their abandonment, and fans the flames of intergenerational conflict. If left unchallenged, ageism will pit us against each other like racism and sexism; it will rob us of an immense accrual of knowledge and experience; and it will poison our response to the remarkable achievement of longer, healthier lives.

Ashton Applewhite blogs at This Chair Rocks where she also frequently updates her page Yo, Is This Ageist? Reach her on twitter at @thischairrocks.

Nearly 50 years ago, in the 1965 Griswold v Connecticut case, the Supreme Court declared birth control legal for married persons, and shortly afterwards in another case legalized birth control for single people. In a famous study published in 2002, “The power of the pill,” two Harvard economists reported on the dramatic rise in women’s entrance into the professions and attributed this development to the availability of oral contraception beginning in the 1960s. Several years ago, the CDC reported that 99% of U.S. women who have ever had sexual intercourse had used contraception at some point. So the recent controversial Hobby Lobby case no doubt appears somewhat surreal to many Americans who understandably have assumed that contraception—unlike abortion–is a settled, non-contentious issue in the U.S.

To be sure, some conservatives, fearful of a female voter backlash in November, have tried to claim the case is about the religious freedom of certain corporations, and not contraception. But the case is about contraception. The Majority in Hobby Lobby made this clear, claiming the decision only applies to contraception and not to other things that some religious groups might oppose, such as vaccinations and blood transfusions.

So why are Americans still fighting about something that elsewhere in the industrialized world is a taken for granted part of reproductive health care? As Jennifer Reich and I discuss in our forthcoming volume, Reproduction and Society, contraception has always had a volatile career in the U.S., sometimes being used coercively by those in power, and at other times, like the present, being withheld from those who desperately need it.

The contraceptive wars started with the notorious campaign in the late 19^th century of the Postmaster General Anthony Comstock, who successfully banned the spread of information about contraception under an obscenity statute. Margaret Sanger, who starting in the early 20th century, sought to bring birth control information and services to American women, was repeatedly arrested, before her eventual success in starting Planned Parenthood.

Gradually, after the Supreme Court cases mentioned above, the discovery and dissemination of the pill and steady increases in premarital sexuality, contraception became far more mainstreamed. Indeed, among its severest critics were feminist health activists of the 1970s, concerned about the safety of early versions of the pill and IUDS, as well as the use of Third World women as “guinea pigs” for testing methods. Federal and state governments became actively involved in the promotion of birth control: Title X of the Public Health Act of 1970 became the first federal program specifically designed to deliver family planning services to the poor and to teens. This legislation in turn drew angry protests from some activists within the African American community who, pointing to the disproportionate location of newly funded clinics in their neighborhoods, raised accusations of “black genocide.” (Title X exists to this day, albeit chronically underfunded and always threatened with being defunded entirely).

For a fairly short period after the Roe v Wade decision in 1973, contraception was seen as “common ground” between politicians who were proponents and opponents of that decision. But as the Religious Right grew more prominent in American politics, contraception became increasingly attacked for enabling non-procreative sexual activity, as epitomized in the statement of the presidential candidate Rick Santorum, promising to eliminate all public funding for contraception if elected: “It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

Moreover, many anti-abortionists have come to reframe some forms of contraception as “abortafacients.” Indeed, much of the Hobby Lobby case can be understood as a profound disagreement between abortion opponents and the medical community as to what constitutes an actual pregnancy and how particular contraceptives work. For the former, pregnancy begins the moment that sperm meets egg and fertilization takes place; for the latter it is the implantation of the fertilized egg in a woman’s uterus (the first point at which a pregnancy can actually be ascertained). The four contraceptive methods at issue in the Hobby Lobby case—two brands of Emergency Contraception and two models of IUDs–are deemed by many conservatives, including the plaintiffs in Hobby Lobby, to cause abortions, while the medical community has gone on record as saying these methods cannot be considered in this light, as they cannot interfere with an established pregnancy. According to medical researchers, these methods work by inhibiting ovulation, while one of the IUDs in question may prevent implantation in some circumstances.

Numerous other challenges to contraceptive coverage in Obamacare are expected to come before the Court, and some will seek employers’ right to deny all forms of contraception. What the outcomes of these cases will be and what success President Obama and Democrats will have in finding the “work-arounds” that they have pledged to pursue are not entirely clear at this moment. What is clear, however, is who suffers most from Hobby Lobby — not only the huge pool of women directly affected, but their families as well. Though we typically think of contraception as a “women’s issue,” in fact it plays a huge role in family well-being. A massive literature review by the Guttmacher Institute reveals the negative impacts on adult relationships, including depression and heightened conflict, when births are unplanned, and also shows the health benefits to children when births are spaced.

But the most effective contraceptive methods are the most expensive ones. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in her scathing dissent, the upfront cost of an IUD can be a thousand dollars, nearly a month’s wages for a low income worker. And many women who can’t afford an IUD apparently want one. One study has shown that when cost-sharing for contraceptive methods was eliminated for a population of California patients, IUD use increased by 137%. In light of this, my depressing conclusion about the Hobby Lobby case is that it follows a familiar pattern of American policies about contraception, and indeed of this country’s social policies more generally: the poorest Americans always seem to get the short end of the stick.

Carole Joffe is a professor at the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco, professor emerita of sociology at U.C. Davis, and the author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients and the Rest of Us, and co-editor, with Jennifer Reich, of Reproduction and Society: Interdisciplinary Readings.

In February, I edited a Council on Contemporary Families three-day online symposium marking the 50^th anniversary of the signing of the Civil Rights Act. This week on July 2, we celebrate 50 years since its enactment. The section of the symposium that focused on changes in racial-ethnic relations included papers that addressed the emergence of Latinos as the largest “minority” in the United States, the approaching eclipse of the white majority, the increase in interracial marriage and multiracial families, and the progress that has and has not been made in lessening the inequities historically associated with non-white status. Download the .pdf here from CCF.  Here are a few highlights.

New Demographic Realities

In 1964, race relations, like television shows, were still largely viewed in black and white. As author Raha Forooz Sabet notes in “Changes in America’s Racial and Ethnic Composition Since 1964,” at that time, 85 percent of the population was white and 11 percent black. Latinos were less than four percent of the population, and fewer than six percent of U.S. residents were foreign-born.

Today half of all children under the age of one are ethnic and racial “minorities,” and within 40 years, non-Hispanic whites will account for just 47 percent of the population. There are now as many foreign-born as black Americans.

By 2060, according to University of Texas-San Antonio researcher Rogelio Sáenz, the single largest component of the child population of the U.S. will be Latino. In his paper, “The State of Latino Children,” Sáenz discusses the characteristics of these Americans, who will soon become the most numerous single group of students, voters, workers, and consumers. Latinos overall have below-average levels of educational attainment, in part because of low levels of preschool enrollment. However, it is a myth that Latino youth are not learning English. Three-fifths of Latinos aged three to 17 are bilingual, speaking Spanish at home but also fluent in English. Only four percent of all Latino children and less than 12 percent of those who are foreign-born are unable to carry on a conversation in English.

More than one-third of Latino children live in poverty. Having two married parents is less protective for Latino children, in terms of income, than it is for white and black families. Nearly one-quarter of children in Latino married-couple families are poor.

But Sáenz highlights an “epidemiological paradox” in the Latino community. Despite higher than average poverty rates, Latino children are healthier than average and have a longer life expectancy at birth than either white or black babies. Sáenz argues that determining the source of this cultural advantage is as important as finding ways to help Latino children overcome their educational and income disadvantages.

The Good News: Old Prejudices are Lessening and Many Old Boundaries Have Been Broken Down

Discussing the changing prospects of African Americans (“Are African Americans Living the Dream 50 Years after Passage of the Civil Rights Act?”), Velma McBride Murry and Na Liu of Vanderbilt University note real breakthroughs for a significant portion of that population. The number of elected black officials in the country has skyrocketed, from about 100 in 1964 to 10,000 in 1990, and today we have an African-American president in his second term. There is now a substantial African-American middle class. Indeed, one in ten black households earns $100,000 or more a year.

One dramatic change, Kimberlyn Fong points out in “Changes in Interracial Marriage,” is the revolution in attitudes toward interracial marriage. When the Civil Rights Act was enacted, less than five percent of Americans approved of interracial marriage. Today 77 percent approve of such marriages, an all-time high. Since the early 1960s the number of new marriages contracted each year between spouses of a different race or ethnicity has increased sixfold.

Fong documents interesting differences among racial-ethnic groups in the extent of interracial marriage and in its gender makeup. Among recent marriages, the most common interracial matches are white/ Hispanic couples. The second most common is between whites and Asians. However, Asian women are more than twice as likely as Asian men to marry outside their race.

The sex ratio skews in the opposite direction in marriages between blacks and whites. But black-white marriages remain the least common interracial marriage, accounting for 12 percent of new marriages in 2010. And that brings us to the bad news.

Despite the Movement of Some Blacks into the Upper Echelon of Political and Economic Life, the Majority Still Bear a Heavy Legacy of Disadvantage

African Americans have experienced significant declines in poverty and increases in access to middle-class jobs. Yet through almost the entire half century since passage of the Civil Rights Act the black unemployment rate has consistently remained twice as high as that of whites, and the poverty rate has been more than twice as high.

After declining in the 1970s, school segregation has increased again. Residential and economic segregation also remain strong. Among Americans born between 1985 and 2000, 31 percent of blacks, versus only one percent of whites, live in neighborhoods where 30 percent of the residents are poor.

African Americans have greatly increased their educational achievement over the past 50 years. But at every educational level, blacks earn less than whites with the same educational credentials.

And racial discrimination remains widespread. African-American men are far more likely to be arrested and to receive longer sentences than whites who commit the same offenses. A study of the low-wage job market in New York City found that white applicants were twice as likely as equally qualified blacks to receive a callback or job offer. White applicants who had just been released from prison were as likely to get a callback or job as black and Latino applicants with no criminal record!

These examples suggest a growing class polarization within the African-American community, alongside the continuing gap between the average fortunes of blacks and whites, with an elite group pulling away from the larger number of blacks who continue to experience racial profiling and deeper levels of poverty than whites. This raises the troubling possibility that the progress of one sector of the African-American community provides many Americans with an excuse to ignore the historical legacy of segregation and the persistence of racial discrimination for the black population as a whole.

Stephanie Coontz is Co-Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families.

The following is a re-post in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. Click any chart or figure to expand.

Latinos are increasingly driving the demographic fortunes of the United States. Between 2000 and 2011, the number of white children in the country declined by 4.9 million, a decrease of 11%. Blacks and American Indians and Alaska Natives also saw their child populations decline. The nation’s total child population, however, increased by 1.7 million in the same period, largely due to the growth in the Latino child population. The number of Latino children rose by 5.1 million during this period (Figure 1), an increase of 42%. The number of multiracial and Asian and Pacific Islander children also expanded, but much less than the increase of Latino youth.

By 2060 it is projected that the proportion of white children will fall from 53% in 2012 to barely a third—just 33% (Figure 2). Latinos will have replaced whites as the nation’s largest child population, comprising almost 40% of the total. The black share of children is expected to decrease slightly from 14% to 13% during the period. The remaining 16% of children in 2060 will be largely Asian and multiracial youth. more...

CORRECTION: The original version of this post had a major error – the second trend was coded wrong, showing percent married instead of percent single! I’ve correct it, and apologize for the error.

Earlier this month there was a funny segment on Fox and Friends where they took seriously a fake social media campaign, supposedly led by feminists, to end Father’s Day. “More of this nasty feminist rhetoric,” and The Princeton Mom (Susan Patton). “They’re not just interested in ending Father’s Day, they’re interested in ending men.”

Then Tucker Carlson jumped in to ask, “Why is it good for women? I mean, there’s a reason there are more women living in poverty now than at any time in my lifetime, it’s because there are fewer married women. I mean, when you crush men, you hurt women.”

His comment is doubly twisted. First, it supposes that the historical rise of single mothers is the result of feminists crushing men (thanks, Hanna Rosin). The decline in marriage is related to the falling economic fortunes of men, especially relative to women, but I don’t think you can lay much of that at the feet of feminists.

Second, are there really more women in poverty now because of single motherhood? Yes and no. Here are three trends (all based on civilian non-institutionalized women ages 18+, from the Current Population Survey):

1. Poverty is rising among all women (but still hasn’t reached 1990s levels)

Although the proportion of children born to women who aren’t married has increased – doubling in the past three decades – that doesn’t tell the whole poverty story. Because women’s employment opportunities increased during that time (and fertility rates fell), women’s poverty rates are lower now than they were in the 1980s and 1990s peaks.

Zooming in on the period from the low poverty point in 2001, you can see that the recent increase in poverty has affected single and married women, and the proportional increase is actually twice as great for married women (more than a one-third increase).

2. The percentage of poor women who are not married has risen (corrected trend!)

Nevertheless, the percentage of poor women who are not married has risen. During the 2000s recession, the percentage of poor women who are married hit an all-time low of 30%. Over the last four decades, as marriage rates have fallen, women’s poverty has become more concentrated among unmarried women. Single women have much higher poverty rates than married women, and the vast majority of poor women are not married. However, in the last 15 years, as single motherhood has become more common, the percentage of poor women who are not married has been basically flat.

3. The percentage of poor people who are women is falling

Diane Pearce wrote, “The Feminization of Poverty: Women, Work, and Welfare” in 1978, as single motherhood was increasing and women’s wages relative to men’s appeared flat. As the proportion of poor adults that were women approached two-thirds, this shocking term caught on. However, since then — as women’s earnings increased and wages fell for many men — that proportion has fallen to 58%.

These facts are not the whole story of poverty in the U.S. But they should be enough to stop the politically convenient simplification repeated by the Tucker Carlsons of our time. The problem of poverty is not a problem of women’s failure to marry.

Cross-posted on Families As They Really Are

Greetings from the Council on Contemporary Families, and welcome to our new blog!

We’re delighted to join this community at The Society Pages as we create more online opportunities for scholars and clinicians to share grounded, individual reflections on research, open dialogue for questions and debates, as well as to share ideas for instruction and for clinical practice.

The new CCF blog, Families as They Really Are (like our CCF-edited book of the same name) presents a range of views from researchers who aim to provide the most current and best information about American families. The blog features posts on teaching family topics, as well as op-ed style essays about key issues that arise.

Our blog adds to CCF’s outreach of well-established brief reports, fact sheets, and symposia—the ones people often see covered in the press. For the past 18 years, CCF has taken the lead in sharing carefully vetted research in our brief reports which we send out to news media. Now, we will also post new briefs at The Society Pages.

At CCF, we are united by a passion to give the press, public, and students access to solid research and data-based answers about how and why families today are changing, what needs and challenges they face, and how these needs can best be met.

For more CCF updates between blog posts, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Ten of the nation’s top experts on women in the workforce provided history, facts, and analysis of in CCF’s symposium (.pdf) on the Golden Jubilee of the Equal Pay Act last June, 2013, all edited by Stephanie Coontz. For the 51^st anniversary—and coinciding with today’s White House Summit on Working Families—here’s an overview by Virginia Rutter and Stephanie Coontz.

It is now fifty-one years ago this month, on June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, amending the earlier Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, to “prohibit discrimination on account of sex in the payment of wages by employers.” So, how’s that going? The Council on Contemporary Families convened an online symposium last June representing the latest thinking from pre-eminent work-family scholars, top woman executive Sheryl Sandberg, and advocates for low-wage workers and unions.

The good news: Gains in pay, education, and opportunity

• Women’s pay in the United States has gone from 59 percent of men’s in 1962 to almost 80 percent today. Less than 14 percent of women were managers then; three times as many are now. Seven percent of wives out earned their spouses then; 28 percent do now (See Cohen).
• Today, women in the U.S. make up nearly half of the paid workforce (See Milkman)—something not true even in gender-egalitarian Scandinavian countries: Norway and Finland are at 44 percent (See Seguino).
• In education, U.S. women now earn nearly half of all law and medical degrees and a majority of BAs. The good news extends internationally, even to countries with very traditional gender mores: Over the past 35 years, the Arab region saw a remarkable rise in the ratio of female to male secondary enrollment rates, from 59 to 98 percent; in the same time, Africa rose from 54 to 85 percent (See Seguino).
• Women’s earnings influence life at home. Each thousand dollars of earnings for women is associated with a 14-minute reduction in daily housework—and working wives’ proportion of housework has dropped significantly since the early 1960s (See Cohen).

The semi-good news

University of Maryland’s Philip Cohen reports that in 1962 wives did six times more housework as husbands. Today they do only 1.7 times as much. You’d think that if this rate of change continued, before 2023 men and women would be doing exactly the same. But, according to Cohen, that is not how it has worked. There hasn’t been any appreciable change in shares of housework since the early 1990s, and he shows that the stall in housework equity is related to a stall in pay equity.

Looks like a victory, sounds like a victory, but is it really a victory?

The rise in women’s educational attainment has not been accompanied by a proportionate expansion of their political voice. Women hold 18.3 percent of seats in the U.S. Congress. University of Vermont’s Stephanie Seguino profiles representation around the world: “The global average in 2010 was 19 percent, ranging from a low regional average of 8 percent in Arab countries to a high of 26 percent in rich countries. (Sweden stands out amongst rich countries at 45 percent, surpassed only by Rwanda at 56 percent).”

Bias against women continues. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg reports, “Even in the U.S., a recent study found that when faculty evaluated identical lab manager applications, the one with a man’s name on it received a higher starting salary.”

And some of the relative gains for women do not represent actual improvement in their wages but declines in men’s wages. “In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent. However, a big chunk of that improvement – more than a quarter of it — happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains,” reports Heidi Shierholz from the Economic Policy Institute. Similarly, Seguino reports that in 96 of the 135 countries where gender employment gaps have narrowed since 1991, the convergence is partly accounted for by declines in men’s employment rates.

With women as with men, elites are taking a greater share of growth in income. In 2010, high earning women made more than 1.5 times as much as the typical man, reports Northwestern’s Leslie McCall, more than in previous decades. But in a new development earnings have been flat for the typical woman over the last decade. This means that women’s success continues to be concentrated at the top of the ladder. Women in the middle and the bottom have been losing relative ground along with men during this period of growing inequality. (Keep in mind, Catalyst reports, women’s gains at the very top have been modest: four percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women.)

The interaction of gender and race inequality produces an optical illusion about the progress of minority women. At first glance it may appear that there is more gender equality among minority men and women than among whites. Jane Farrell and Sarah Jane Glynn, from the Center for American Progress, report that Hispanic or Latina women make 88 percent of what Latinos do and African American women make 90 percent of what their male counterparts make, whereas white women earn just 81 percent of what white men make.

But when we add race to gender, these pay gaps become a veritable chasm. African American women earn 36 percent less than white men and Latinas a mere 45 percent. The gap between the earnings of Asian women and white men is smaller, just 12 percent, but Asian American women earn just 73 percent of what Asian American men make.

Trouble spots: What public sector unions have to do with women’s equality

CUNY’s Ruth Milkman reports how unions—and women in them—spearheaded the campaign for the Equal Pay Act, even though they made up only 18.3 percent of members. Today, women make up 45 percent of all union members, but unions have declined: In 1960 one in four workers was in a union; today, that is down to one in ten. The historic decline hit private sector unions, where male unions used to be strong, first and hardest, says Milkman. But “starting in 2011, a wave of state-level legislation weakening collective bargaining rights for public sector workers has directly targeted teachers and other unionized female-dominated occupations.”  This attack is a real problem since women union workers earn an average of more than $5 an hour more than nonunion ones and have more benefits and job security as well—and nonunion workers in unionized fields benefit from this advantage.

More trouble spots: bias against caregivers

University of Massachusetts’ Joya Misra reports that penalties facing working mothers – but not working fathers — are now the major source of gender pay differences. Stanford’s Shelley Correll explains: “When we compare the earnings of mothers and childless women who work in the same types of jobs, have the same level of education, have the same amount of experience and are equal on a host of other dimensions, mothers still earn five percent lower hourly wages per child.”

Mothers also face difficulties getting hired in the first place. On average, Correll’s studies show, when employers compare a childless woman and a mother with the same qualifications, the mother is rated as less committed to her job, despite the absence of any evidence supporting this perception, and this substantially reduces her chances of getting the job.

University of California, Hastings School of Law’s Joan Williams reports on a number of remarkable cases that highlight a legal strategy for addressing such bias: “One vitally important and fast-developing area of law is family responsibilities discrimination (FRD), which involves pregnant women or mothers, fathers who seek an active role in family care, or adults caring for elders or ill family members.” FRD suits grew 400 percent in the decade before 2008.

What else can we do? Change policy and attitudes

“Motherhood penalties vary substantially cross-nationally, suggesting that social policies can reduce or exacerbate them,” explains Joya Misra. For example, Misra explains, “The per-child wage penalty is 9.5 percent in countries with minimal public childcare for infants and toddlers, but shrinks to 4.3 percent in countries with more expansive public childcare programs.” Availability of leave matters—too little is harmful to women’s opportunities, but so is too much. Misra reports, “Employment and wages also may suffer when mothers are offered very long, unpaid/poorly paid leaves, such as three-year ‘care leaves.’ Here mothers lose valuable job experience, and may find themselves in jobs with little prospect for career advancement.”

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg—who just recently started LeanIn.org–reminds us that women have internalized some of the social prejudices against them, starting with lower salary expectations, for instance, which provides employers with an excuse for offering them less. She argues that wome must cooperate to improve their own self-confidence as well as to change the attitudes of others