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Today being the day our monthly “Man Files” column posts and all, I thought I’d share this round-up of links on, well, MEN. Or rather, men and masculinity. From a feminist perspective. Definitely check out:

Our very own Shira Tarrant’s “Guy Trouble” in the current issue of BITCH in which she asks are young men really in crisis or are these boys just done being boys?

Rebecca Traister of Salon and Emily Bazelon of Slate discuss the recession’s effect on gender and housework in a New York Times bloggingheads video called “Unemployed Husbands”

And Tony Dokoupil has a piece in this week’s Newsweek titled “Men Will Be Men” in which he blows by some of the more progressive changes in masculine behavior and concludes that men continue to define masculinity in market terms.

(Crossposted at Recessionwire)

When Marco got laid off in January, friends who knew of our family-launching plans asked us whether we’d continue or put things on hold. I just turned 40. Marco is seven years older than me. Our biological clocks are not in sync with the dipping of the Dow.

Sure, it occurred to us for half a second that this might not be the wisest time to be spending my grandmother’s inheritance on fertility treatments not covered by health insurance, but it’s expensive to adopt, too. And we really, really want a child.

An extreme optimist—or pragmatist—might argue that there’s no time like a recession to get knocked up. You spend the first four months nauseous, hence eating less: money saved! Girlfriends give you their hand-me-down maternity clothes, your hips expand; hence, shopping impulse curbed! You don’t have energy to go out at night, so restaurants and movies become less manageable: more money saved! Of course, all this is conjecture. I’m not there…yet.

Instead, I live in a state of limbo fueled by hope, longing, and our intense desire. The hardest part, I find, is trying to “relax” and “stay calm” — instructions that are difficult to follow when your laid-off husband is sticking a two-inch needle in your black-and-blue behind every day, the markets are tanking, and your hormones are running wild. I try to remind myself that stressed out couples have had babies in worse times than these. “Think of all the babies born in Europe during World War II!” my mother says, trying to cheer me up.

When my parents had me back in 1969, they earned $400 and spent $115 of it on rent. My mother’s words of encouragement pour in weekly over the phone: “You can’t stop. The economy will change. It’s not going to be like this forever. You have to be optimistic about it. You have to pursue your dreams.” Having gone through rounds of fertility treatment herself, the woman learned a thing or two.

And it’s true. You can’t give up all your dreams just because the economy is rotten. Marco and I are even going forward with plans to find a little more space and move. As we wandered Brooklyn open houses the other weekend, imagining the kid’s room and checking the front hallways of buildings for room to hang a stroller, we felt giddy. It didn’t seem to matter that on every block a half-built building stood suspended mid-construction. We figured those bulldozers would be active again within a year.

“In racing, they say that your car goes where your eyes go.” My mother reads me this passage from a book she’s reading, about a race car driver and his dog, called The Art of Racing in the Rain. She sends the rest via email: “The driver who cannot tear his eyes away from the wall as he spins out of control will meet that wall; the driver who looks down the track as he feels his tires break free will regain control of his vehicle. Your car goes where your eyes go. Simply another way of saying that which you manifest is before you.”

That which you manifest is before you. I’m trying to make that my new mantra. This morning, when Marco approached me with the hypo filled with my daily dose of progesterone, I found myself daydreaming about pushing a stroller in Park Slope, forgetting about the Dow, and riffing on the lyrics of that noxious Britney song: “Stick me baby, one more time.”

(Is it still liveblogging if it’s the next day?!  I had no Internet access while I wrote this, so am posting it here today.  Crossposted soon at The REAL Deal, too.)

I’m sitting in a very crowded auditorium at 3 World Financial Center, home of American Express, and the sun is pouring in on one of the coldest days of the year.  We’re about to be warmed by the annual panel that takes place the afternoon of the National Council for Research on Women’s evening-time gala, the Making a Difference for Women Awards.

This year’s panel, “An Immodest Proposal: Advancing a New Era of Social Justice” (kudos on the title, NCRW!) features Co-President of the National Women’s Law Center Marcia Greenberger, Chancellor and President of Syracuse University Nancy Cantor, Accenture / Microsoft / PepsiCo Director Dina Dublon, and Columbia University law professor and Nation columnist Patricia Williams.  The Takeaway co-host Adaora Udoji, whose voice I wake up to each morning, will be moderating.

There is nothing modest about this crowd of female movers and shakers from corporate, academic, and nonprofit spheres.  The NCRW staff—of which I used to be part—has clearly done an excellent job spreading word.  It’s a dazzling lineup.  Let the conversation begin!

Adaora: First question is for Nancy.  What can you tell us about advancing a new era of social justice in education?

Nancy: The idea of the ivory tower as a monastic place is breaking down.  What that means is we have no understanding of the groups we’re leaving behind.  How do we level the playing field of education?  If we don’t find ways to strengthen our connections to our communities, cities, rural areas, and bring in the population, we’re going to be stagnant.

Adaora: Are we seeing that 50% female leadership in education yet?

Nancy: No, not at all.  What we are seeing at all levels is girls falling off the map as we go up.

Adaora: Why is that?

Nancy: Chilly climate, lack of connections, many reasons…

Adoara: What’s on your radar screen in the legal sphere, Marcia?  With the Lilly Ledbetter case, we now see that you can sue your employer for sex discrimination in pay….

Marcia: We’re talking here today about how we might advance a radical agenda.  But the Ledbetter case shows that much of our agenda is not radical at all.  Much of our agenda is either to restore the rights we used to have, or to try to empower and improve the lot and the good of everyone in this country – it’s not a radial concept at all.  But the implementing of it is another story.  The Ledbetter case explains some of that.  Some elements of the case:

-there was a cap for damages at 300K; other forms of discrimination, there is no cap
-because of statue of limitations, she could only appeal for backpay for a limited number of years

But in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court had ruled that a lower court decision was right, and she needed to have filed her complaint within the first 6 months after receiving her first discriminatory paycheck in order to receive any compensation for damages, and she hadn’t.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act challenged all that.  All the Democrats and all four Republican women in the Senate voted for it, as well as one Republican man.   It passed. There were many tears.  It was quite a victory, the result of a lot of coalition efforts.

But what did it really do?  Get us back to where we should have been all along.

Adaora: Dina, when you think about advancing more fair social contracts, how is it possible to advance equal participation for women in corporate governance and leadership in business?

Dina: I don’t have a silver bullet.  I wish I did.  When you look at the Nordic countries, it was legislated.  Once legislated, you had to figure out how to get there, and you got there.

Adaora: You mention Nordic countries.  Which ones?

Dina: All three.  There was legislation that said you had to have 50% representation of women on corporate boards.  There was pushback.  But it happened.  Do I see this happening in the US?  No.  But we are generally moving in the right direction, I would argue.  It’s definitely better today than it was five years ago.  In certain aspects, though, we have stalled.

Adaora: Where have we stalled most?

Dina: Corporations feel very self-congratulatory.  Once they reach 25% representation by women, they feel they don’t have to do anything more.

Adaora: What opportunities exist for women under the Obama Administration that might not have existed under the Bush Administration?

Dina: Obama is legitimizing a different voice.  I definitely sense blacks in America feeling empowered, just by who he is and what he represents.  Having said that, change will come from the collective actions of all of us – all of us meaning those of us in positions of power, but from the bottom or the top, I mean all of us.

Nancy: It’s the collective purpose that we have to speak to.

Adaora: Nancy, what obligation do you think you have, and others running universities have, to prepare male students to believe that good ideas can come from any corner?

Nancy: You know, we tend to think of ourselves as so progressive.  But if we put ourselves in an intercultural dialogue, we’ll see how uncomfortable we actually are.   There’s a long way to go.

Adaora: What is next on the agenda, Marcia, what priority should all of the groups that galvanized to pass the Fair Pay Act now agree on and push forward?

Marcia: Nothing happens without coalitions, but those coalitions will shift from issue to issue, and the nature of the agreement will vary from issue to issue and from time to time.  Our challenge is to look for common ground.  In the case of Ledbetter, a case presented itself and demanded attention.  In the case of the country, the issue of health care presents itself now.  We hope to come around to make changes around health care reform, but we will not be in lock step.  The hope is to find enough momentum to be able to move an agenda forward.

Adaora: 30 million more children are now eligible for health care, and it’s being paid for by additional tax on cigarettes.  This is a case of the private sphere rendering funding for a public initiative.

Marcia:  Yes, but at the same time a number of adult women—new mothers—have lost coverage, and we need to get some of that back.  Things are always give and take.  But look how the Global Gag Rule changed, allowing health care providers abroad to provide health care contraception.  Things are happening.

An enormous reshifting is taking place with the Economic Recovery Act – childcare, health care, a lot of things women’s groups have been pushing for for a long time.  We’re talking about radical changes in directions.

Adaora: So does that mean that you are you feeling like the iron’s hot, it’s time to strike?   The window of opportunity doesn’t stay open that long.  So how do you set the agenda of the Nat’l Women’s Law Center right now?

Marcia: If not now, when?  If you look at history, times of great crisis are the times you can secure change that you haven’t been able to secure in the past.  And everyone can agree it’s a time of great crisis right now.  What are my top priorities?  So much is up for grabs all at the same time, and so much is interrelated.  We have to look at our tax and budget priorities at the same time that we look at our civil rights infrastructure.  When we’re putting so much money into building job, if we could invigorate our civil rights enforcement, so that when these new jobs are coming, we could have an equal opportunity of filling them.

Nancy: Is it really about “enforcement”?

Marcia:  There are laws—as we saw with the Ledbetter Act—that exist, that need to be fortified.

Adaora: Nancy, how do you leverage this moment of possibility for change?

Nancy: We need a moral act now.  I think that President Obama, Duncan, and others are ready to do that.  We need to collectively care about K-12, about our communities.  HUD needs to do work to see how we translate the capital of universities into community by community.  We need a community barn raising.  We need to get money to the underserved school districts.  Those kids can’t be left behind.  The Recovery Act is very important.  The Dept of Ed will have real money, for the first time, to think about real reform, on a district by district basis.

New York and California are broke.  How do we make sure that the money gets to the under-resourced districts?

There are districts where we’ve left girls and especially girls of color behind.

Adaora: Questions from the audience?

Audience member (Katie): It seems the focus of the conversation so far is on using corporate or hierarchical power to effect change.  Can you talk about other, less hierarchical ways to effect change, like, say, community organizing?

Nancy: The coalitions we build are from the bottom up.  The neighborhood organizations are at the table.

Adaora: It’s a great question.  Dina, what does grassroots mean to corporate America?

Dina: Women’s networks that have developed in corporate America have had an impact—not just in how good we feel about ourselves, but in terms of impacting senior management.  It is slow, but it does bring change and it must continue.  Corporate America has come to recognize that enabling and sustaining those internal networks are effective ways of retaining people who are otherwise feeling like minorities or outsiders at the corporate table.  I do believe in grassroots.  We must work from the bottom up to bring about change.  But maybe because I’ve spent so much time in the corporate world, I have the mindset that top down is a way to effect change the fastest.

Marcia: The only way we got the Ledbetter case passed, or anything else, was through grassroots coalitions.

Audience member: [something about how the environmental movement connects to this conversation]

Patricia Williams [just joined the panel]: Environmental issues are partly a mother’s movement, partly an inner city movement, and partly a movement that has to do with the eugenically, neonatal neglect of certain communities.  They are intricately connected.

Audience member: [something about money interests, regulation]

Patricia: The lack of regulation across all spheres has everything to do with the current crisis that we’re in.  Everything is skewed to money interests.  We’ve just seen brought to light the effect of money on judicial elections as well.

Dina: In part because of the whole approach to the role of government in the US, the agenda is about following the money.  It’s more acute here.

(More Q&A)

Adaora: Final thoughts?

Marcia: It’s about coalitions…

Nancy: It’s no longer about exceptional people doing exceptional things.  It’s about all of us.  And instead of No Child Left Behind, it’s about no group being left behind, and forming those coalitions Marcia mentions.

Dina: I’d like to see more focus on what’s going on beyond the US.

Patricia: I’m concerned about the reinscribing of divisions.  At the same time, the election of Obama makes me optimistic.  He’s our most cosmopolitan president; he has an understanding of the economic conditions affecting women around the world and will make that part of his agenda.  He also understands symbolism.  There’s the image of a grandmother in the White House, of Michelle as his mentor, and of a family that’s happier than the Huxtables.  We will become accustomed to the image of an African American family in the White House and not as surprised as Joe Biden initially was that Obama is so “clean and articulate.”   And we become more appalled by the degree to which we tolerated something else for so long.

This just in: the International Women’s Health Coalition just launched a blog called Akimbo about sexual and reproductive rights and health around the world.

They have a bunch of youth partners who are at the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations this week who will be blogging about their experiences there. Check out staff member Chelsea Ricker’s post, for instance, about the embarrassment of being a US-based activist.

The blog will be carrying input from feminist activists from around the world – including video interviews and posts by advocates from places like Nigeria, India, and Brazil.

A hearty welcome from this corner of the feminist blogosphere to new blog Akimbo! So very glad you’re here.

My fellow Progressive Women’s Voices-er, Deanna Zandt (also of WAM! fame) has some great posts up today on how–and why–to Twitter and tweet.  Definitely worth checking out.

My latest Recessionwire.com column is now up. I’d love it if GWPenners once again would post comments over there to this one in particular, as I take on my fellow Recessionwire blogger “Joe the Trader” for some rather gender-stereotyped remarks (and a huge THANK YOU for all your awesome comments past!).

Joe’s column, “Out on the Street,” chronicles life after layoff for Wall Street guys.  In his latest, “Gendernomics”, Joe makes a number of great points (especially in comments!) but he also falls into the she-spends, she-nags vision of things that drives me nuts.  Ok, so maybe it drives me nuts in part because I’ve become a nagger. But mostly it drives me nuts because the underlying presumption Joe (who is now at home) and many men seem to make is that all the yucky housework tasks are a woman’s purview, even in couples where both partners work outside the home.

This recession is sure breathing new life into the ole laundry gap debate.  The eternal optimist in me hopes that this time, perhaps we’ll all get past merely arguing over the laundry.  Perhaps more men out of jobs–while their women continue to work–will ultimately result in a more equitable division of labor at home.  One can hope?!

So here’s my response to Joe:  “A Gentle Response to Joe the Trader”

Thanks in advance for comments, and I’ll see you over there!

Courtesy of my favorite economist, Heather Boushey, at the Center for American Progress:

In answer to the question “what about women? aren’t they losing jobs too?”, here are some December 2008 stats for a reality check:

Construction has lost 22.5 of all the jobs; manufacturing has lost 28.8% (add that together and that’s 50% of the jobs lost.)  These are both male-dominated fields.

Within manufacturing, over 2/3 of the jobs have been lost by men. In manufacturing, at the start of the recession, women were 28.8% of all manufacturing workers.  They’ve since lost 32.9% of the jobs.

Within construction, over 90% of the jobs have been lost by men.

Within the finance and insurance industries, where women actually made up almost 2/3 of the workers, women have lost 1/2 of all the jobs.

But let’s keep this in perspective: The financial industry overall has only lost 8% of the total jobs that have been lost.

Finance jobs lost are nearly 230,000 jobs out of a total of 3 million jobs lost, as of December 2008.

In real estate – the other subcategory in the financial field – women have lost over 100% of jobs, even though they made up about 1/2 of the real estate workers at the beginning of the recession.

All this underscores how important it is to look at industry-specific contexts when talking about gender and jobs.  On net, the men are losing.  Jobs, that is.

Yep, Michelle’s gonna be the cover of March 2009 Vogue!

For the latest from Michelle-Obama-watching Gina McCauley (creator of the Michelle Obama Watch blog), check out the latest at Broadsheet.

“It’s like a mass public vivisection where we project all of our hopes, dreams, fears, neuroses and psychoses on to one person,” says Gina.  Sooo familiar.  Um, Hillary Clinton, anyone?

And speaking of projections, definitely check out the spread on Sarah Palin in the latest issue of More.  More from me on that soon.

A new Love in the Time of Layoff column of mine goes live over at Recessionwire.com today, and in the meantime, I wanted to share this post from another writer over there, Dan Colarusso, former managing editor of Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com until the end of 2008 and current managing editor of The Business Insider. Dan’s post is titled “Recession Recipes: Satisfaction Stew”. A taste:

You’ve been stripped of your big office, fat title, hot assistant and, most important, your paycheck. But being emasculated on the job doesn’t mean you can’t satisfy your significant other at home—with food.

On the Home Depot scale, cooking something impressive and tasty falls somewhere in between changing a light bulb and installing a new shower head—that is, pretty simple. Some quick rules for the new house husband, and a 20-minute recipe…

For the recipe, click here.