Kristen Springer, a sociology professor at Rutgers, presented some very cool research on men’s health at the recent Council on Contemporary Families conference, and a related paper in the journal Gender & Society (abstract only) is out now. She was looking at men who earn less than their wives. You need to know what she discovered next time you are trying to figure out what to make of those articles in the New York Times or wherever about the “troubling impact” on the changing economic status of men and women. See this post for background in the “new economics” of marriage.

Springer asked if men who earn less (specifically less than half) than their wives have worse health than men who earn the same or more. The simple answer: yes. But hold up! Don’t go yet. There’s more, and it is important.

Because Springer asked why. She looked at whether it was because of who gets to make decisions in the couple, and came back with the answer NO.

She looked at whether it was because of marital unhappiness among these couples, and came back with the answer NO.

In other words, there weren’t couple issues or any kind of home front “war between the sexes” being played out here.

No, it looks like, instead, there is a war within the sexes going on.

She looked at a high fallutin’ but also very powerful concept that folks in the biz call “hegemonic masculinity” — that is, the “most honored way of being a man” in a given society (see Connell and Messerschmidt 2005 if you wanna read up).  In the US, men’s breadwinning is a central component to this. This means that men’s earnings puts them on top of the heap, over other men (as well as over their women).

Here is what she found: For men who were not earning less, the more money he and his family earned, the healthier he said he was. This is your basic wealth equals health situation. (In the figure below, this means the blue bars are higher at the rich end, lower at the poor end.)

But for men who were earning less than their wives, the guys at the top of the heap were the only ones to report significantly worse health relative to guys earning the same or more than their spouse. The guys at the top, for some reason, were especially stressed by the inequality. The study didn’t have direct measures of men’s beliefs about the situation, but it looks a lot like only for men of the upper ranks is there a sense that earning less than their wives constitutes a failure. (In the figure the red bars are lower for the rich guys.)

Springer’s key graph looks like this:

(click here for the full version)

What’s the take home from this? First, beware of stories that bemoan what is happening to men in the face of women’s growing presence in the job market and the economy. The health hardships for the men at the bottom of the ladder are not about gender inequality, they are about the hardships of inequality, full stop (the blue bars). Second, recognize that when we are anxious for men (or they are anxious for themselves) about being breadwinners this isn’t about being a man; it is about social class. It is almost as if the better-off can “afford” to have gender strife, just as in decades past they could afford to have a stay-at-home wife when everybody else required two earners. Finally, don’t be taken in by the notion of the immutable organization of gender in families (nor by the notion that social class doesn’t exist or doesn’t have a meaningful cultural as well as economic impact).

Springer recommends a whole bunch of policies that create more economic justice for all by creating more family friendly policies that can in the end help to eradicate “hegemonic masculinity.” Well that won’t be a slogan you’ll use with your Member of Congress, but just wanted to call it what it is.

–Virginia Rutter

A long time ago I got a call from a reporter asking what I thought of “viagra for women.” I said a bunch of different stuff, but mainly I pointed out that any clinical trial on interventions for women’s orgasms really ought to include a men-doing-housework control group. My how times have not changed.

To wit: Meika Loe–a sociology professor at Colgate–posted at Ms. on “Female Viagra” Up for FDA Review.  Loe, author of The Rise of Viagra: How the Little Blue Pill Changed Sex in America, has followed the search for pink viagra since 1998 when Viagra was first approved by the FDA. Read her post: it gives background and context and a powerful argument about what this all means.

Want to learn more? Visit newviewcampaign.org. They are an organization founded in 2000 to counter drug industry efforts to simplify and distort women’s sexuality in order to sell drugs.

You can read/sign a petition against FDA approval here.

–Virginia Rutter

Working too many hours is more common in higher paying jobs than lower paying jobs. Down the pay scale, people are struggling for hours, up the pay scale, not so much. So experience and scholarship has shown us that the pressure to work! work! work! and never leave that Blackberry unattended creates a work/family conflict that can affect women workers more so than men–though it isn’t easy on anyone.

But new research in the April 2010 American Sociological Review examined how “spousal overwork” affects who does what in families. The article, “Reinforcing Separate Spheres: The Effect of Spousal Overwork on Men’s and Women’s Employment in Dual-Earner Households” by Youngjoo Cha asks whether excessive work hours by one partner can influence the decisions another partner makes about work and family life.

Results are clear: when a husband works more than 60 hours per week, a wife was 42 percent more likely to quit her job (compared to those whose husbands work fewer than 50 hours per week). The same was not true for husbands. Among professional workers, the wife’s odds of quitting when her husband worked 60 hours per week was 51 percent (versus 38 percent for non professional workers). Think of it this way: up the social ladder, people are more likely to talk the talk, but less likely to walk the walk when it comes to gender equality.

And what if kids are present? The answer provides no surprises. Professional mothers were 3.2 times more likely to quit when their husbands worked 60 hours per week (compared to non mothers in the same situation). Is this a set up, or what?

Youngjoo Cha argues that overwork reintroduces “separate spheres” – the pattern of assigning domestic work and childcare mainly to women and market work mainly to men – and can even help explain the slowing of progress towards gender equality.

Overwork just seems kinda American. We work hard because we are of the nature to work hard. Well, a policy of inequality since the 1970s may be why we are of the nature to work so hard, so long, and with so little to show for it. One thing we do seem to have to show for it is the persistence and maintenance of gender inequality in families. I suppose that is kinda American too.

-Virginia Rutter

We’ve got a diversity initiative on campus currently, and so I’ve been thinking a lot about “affirmative action for white guys.” You start to notice it when bits of bad behavior that come from some people are tolerated more than bits of bad behavior that come from others. A colleague has coined the phrase “gentle sexism.” But some of the bad behavior isn’t as gentle as shirking your duties or exerting a kind of “oopsie, look what I did” male privilege. Yet a look at some darker forms of it can put our irritation about lighter forms of it into perspective.

The Milwaukee/Vatican case is the most recent of escalating revelations of what affirmative action for white guys looks like. We learned this week that the Vatican and Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) suppressed prosecution of a priest, Lawrence Murphy, in a case where “as many as 200 deaf students had accused him of molesting them, including in the confessional, while he ran” a school for deaf children (as described by the Associated Press). Oi vey.

The news coverage explains how, despite efforts to prosecute Murphy, the Vatican office in charge of this mess–headed at the time by Ratzinger–“axed” it. By the time the investigation finally came around, the Vatican was convinced, Murphy was old, ailing, and only wanted to live out the rest of his life in the “dignity of the priesthood.” Christian compassion prevailed—by which I mean compassion for Murphy.

Though the actions of the “victimizers” in the church cases are heinous, and appear with the accumulation of evidence to be endemic (see the documentary Holy Watergate [2005] for one of many accounts; and see Andrew Sullivan on the distinction between “sin” and “crime”), I wonder what makes the tolerance of this possible?

But here’s the deal: I don’t think it is exceptional. I think tolerance of these outrageous sex abuse cases is on a continuum of a practice of affirmative action for white guys. The Vatican’s forgiveness in case after case, in the interest of “human dignity,” doesn’t extend to a whole host of people, like women or gays or people who are pro-choice or whatever. Church leaders find that it feels okay, passes muster within their community of other white guys, to engage in affirmative action for white guys. It feels comfortable. It makes sense.

There are lots more examples, small and large. The Vatican’s actions remind me of the wild tolerance we have had for the current financial meltdown, really our financial “scandal.” It feels okay to give the boys on Wall Street a pass (there are girls on Wall Street too! I know!)–they are “elite for a reason”—and other elites understand this. Even though they got it wrong, they have something special, and they couldn’t be dishonest because they are one of us.

So the thing that unites the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church and the financial scandal in Wall Street is the way that bad behavior from some is tolerated. There is continuity between the logic of the “dignity” that Joseph Ratzinger wanted to grant Murphy, and the logic used by Tim Geithner when he made decisions and promoted policies as if bankers would never be “too greedy” or unlawful. Here’s the thing that blows my mind: the hallmark of affirmative action for white guys isn’t just giving extra consideration for a protected class for the same behavior as others. It is about giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming the best even with clear and convincing evidence of the worst.

Lighter forms of this–every day gentle sexism, for example–are worth being more wary of than we typically are. That irritation is for good cause.

-Virginia Rutter

Three cheers for health care reform. It isn’t enough, but it is more than we’ve had. And in case you were wondering just how bad we’ve had it lately, I submit to you this graphic reminder. The Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Hye-Jin Rho and John Schmitt analyzed national data for Health Insurance Coverage Rates for US Workers, 1979-2008.

Their report shows that US workers’ rate of health insurance coverage declined by 10 percent over the past 30 years (ahem, just as women’s share of the workforce has been increasing) and low wage workers (with higher concentrations of women workers) have been losing more than anyone else: The rate of low wage workers with no health insurance has more than doubled to 37 percent in 2008.

And that’s a pretty graphic reminder.

–Virginia Rutter

See this beautiful woman. Like many remarkable women—including GWP readers—she is smart, competent, skillful, empowered, full of grace. But things happen, and our energies get focused in ways that we can’t always control, and they did for her. Helene Jorgensen is a labor economist formerly at the AFL-CIO. In 2003 she caught Lyme Disease–an infectious disease spread by a tick bite–while hiking in Montana after an academic conference.

Even though Lyme Disease’s symptoms include (among many others) exhaustion and difficulty focusing, Helene has written a riveting book, Sick and Tired, about dealing with her illness while navigating our irrational health care system. She’s a PhD in economics and has written a page-turner that got a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly.

Along the way, Helene’s book highlights the ways that women in particular can be bullied and jerked around (and not believed, especially with hard-to-diagnose illnesses). At one point, for example, Helene’s doctor was convinced that she had syphilis (after 10 years of very stable marriage). While we are all hassled by “not being listened to” in the health care system, there is the additional experience of having her voice discounted as a woman. Helene’s book is just out this month, and I asked her what is on people’s minds at her recent book events. Here’s what she told me:

1. We often don’t know how to do it, but sick patients must become consumers and shoppers. Helene explains, “If you are really sick and need medical care, the last thing you want to do is to call a bunch of doctors and haggle over price, as if you are a tourist souvenir shopping in Cancun. Even so, if you don’t have health coverage or your plan does not cover certain services/drugs, it pays to price shop. Pharmacies charge very different prices, and discount pharmacies such as Costco and Sam’s Club are significantly cheaper (and you don’t even have to be a member to fill prescriptions).

“Many health care providers are willing to negotiate lower prices. A 2008 study found that 66 percent of patients who negotiated with their doctor lowered their costs; and 70 percent who negotiated with hospitals got a better deal. With the rise of high-deductible health plans, patients are increasingly expected to act like consumers. As I discuss in the book [pp. 42-43], it is envisioned that high-deductible plans will lower health care costs as patients-as-consumers will shop for the highest quality of services for the lowest price, and providers compete for patients by increasing efficiency. But patients do not make good consumer decisions. After all who wants to go to a discount surgeon? (Patients use price as an indicator of quality.) Secondly, patients don’t have the medical expertise to make good decisions.”

2. Doctors can have mysterious conflicts of interest. According to Helene, “There is a huge controversy over the treatment of Lyme Disease, and two standards of care have been developed. When I was first diagnosed, I was referred to an infectious disease doctor at a leading research hospital. I assumed that I was going to get the best of care. I was terribly wrong. Patients often don’t get the best of care because of doctors’ conflicts of interest, such as consulting and investment arrangements with drug companies, health insurance companies, medical device companies, laboratories. In the book [p. 45] you can read the story of spinal surgeons who invested in a spinal device company, and the return on their investment was dependent on how many devices they implanted in patients. Here’s the catch: As a patient, it is almost impossible to find out what conflict of interests your doctor has.”

3. Health care reform is crucial. Helene explains that “private health insurance companies do not make money off sick people like myself. Republicans want to increase competition in the insurance market, but no amount of competition will make patients like me profitable. The Democrats’ plan calls for setting up insurance exchanges and banning discrimination against pre-existing conditions. But that is not going to make insurance companies want to insure sick people. Insurance companies will continue to engage in all the same tactics they use today to get out of their responsibilities to pay for medical services for sick patients. Health insurance companies regularly deny coverage for covered services, in the hope that patients are too sick to contest the denial. Since patients who are the sickest also have the highest medical bills, this is a very effective way for insurance companies to shift costs onto patients.“

4. Empowerment is key. Helene is a “sick and tired” (literally) heroine of empowerment, and while she’s interested in changing our health care system, she also has advice about how individuals can help themselves. She explains, “You have to educate yourself about your medical condition. You have to demand the best care from your doctor, and if you are not getting it, find a new doctor; and you have to fight your insurance company to pay for your care. This is very hard to do when you are sick, and having a support system is important. A woman at my talk yesterday suggested that if you don’t have family or friends who can help you, your local church (if you have one) may provide such support.”

To Helene: Thanks for telling this story. To readers: Tell me what you think of Sick and Tired.

–Virginia Rutter

Sitting in the waiting area, topless but for a little robe, waiting to get my annual g-ddam mammogram last Friday, I listened to two women talking earnestly about Tiger Woods’ press conference as it blared on the t.v. “Nobody’s business”-lady debated with “sometimes it matters”-woman. They shared, it seemed, some common sense notion that having sex with another person outside of your marriage is always a problem of the worst kind.

As I later reflected on the topic, I did a Google search on infidelity and saw the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy’s infidelity consumer update that starts with the words…”After the devastating disclosure of infidelity….” Made me remember: eighteen years ago my boss at the time–a family therapist–made the point to me that there are a lot worse things than infidelity. She wasn’t saying that because she was casual about formal commitments or marriage, or about, say, the impact of divorce on children. What she was saying is that, well, there are a lot worse things that happen in relationships than infidelity. You can make your own list–I have mine.

Now my uncle–also a family therapist–would disagree; or at least would pipe in with more detail. But what he would be likely to say is that it isn’t the sex or the affair that is the problem nearly so much as the lying, the betrayal. Whether you are having an affair or discover or suspect your partner is having an affair, the stuff that is painful is the stuff about toying with reality, toying with truth, toying with your life and the lives of others while holding all the cards. He would say it is no way to work on your marriage–or yourself.

But the betrayal thing is complicated, which takes us back to “what’s worse than infidelity?” There are lots of betrayals. “You weren’t supposed to be like this, you were supposed to be like that” … “I thought you knew me” … “I thought you liked me” … “I thought we had similar values” … these are generalities: but I bet you have your own particular stories you think of when I list those. The betrayals against a shared reality accumulate, alongside those everyday resentments about housework and money. When couples lose touch with each other and don’t face up to the minor betrayals, the mountain of betrayal looks big and painful. Screwing around is the least of it. But we get kind of sex obsessed when we hear about this one particular kind of betrayal. Instead of a novel, the sex-tinged drama becomes a cartoon.

I’m not saying that any of the affairs we’ve been served up as dark comedy this past year–John Edwards, Governor Sanford, Tiger Woods–are okay, or are not okay. I’m not saying that the affair you are having, or your colleague is having, or that you heard about, is trivial, or not trivial. But all the histrionics about the “devastating impact” of infidelity actually does marriage, or any other kind of intimate union, a disservice. It turns it into a one-dimensional experience about “ownership” and “entitlement.” Moreover, seen through this lens, marriage takes on all the righteousness of the homemaker/provider arrangement between the sexes. There is this massive imagery of the “wronged woman” full of traditional virtues.

Tiger is a puzzle. But in his press conference Friday, he was responding in part to the dehumanizing (and sometimes simple-minded) way we get worked up about infidelity. Tiger’s case lets us notice that our freak-outs about infidelity are also moments to check on what our own values and taken-for-granted ideas are doing to our relationships.

–Virginia Rutter

Ninety percent of working moms, and 95 percent of working dads in the US report work/family conflict–much higher than workers in other comparable countries. But of course. We work 11 more hours per week than we did three decades ago.  And, compared to other rich countries, we have fewer laws and policies regulating working time, including no federal laws on paid vacation, paid sick days, or paid parental leave. All this, according to a new Center for American Progress report by Joan Williams and Heather Boushey on “The Three Faces of Work-Family Conflict.”

I just got the report, but already there are two things I love about it: first, it focuses on social class. They separately analyze the reality facing three kinds of families: those who are low-income, those who are professionals and managers (one out of five families), and those in the “missing middle” – the 53 percent of families in between. Not surprisingly, work family conflict for those at the top–the ones that New York Times loves, loves, loves to write about in their mythological pieces on women opting-out and about how “daddy’s so baffled at home”–is different from families at the bottom or in the middle. By highlighting the differences by economic groups, the authors help us to recognize that, for example, our Family and Medical Leave Act–that gives people a “right” to unpaid leave–is a policy that only benefits families who can afford it.

Second, the report puts it all in our policy context: The authors explain that the lack of progress in the United States is a result of a conscious choice by our political leadership. Understand: the absence of work/family policies is policy. Let me quote from their executive summary:

“The United States today has the most family-hostile public policy in the developed world due to a long-standing political impasse. The only major piece of federal legislation designed to help Americans manage work and family life, the Family and Medical Leave Act, was passed in 1993, nearly two decades ago. In the interim—when Europeans implemented a comprehensive agenda of “work-family reconciliation”—not a single major federal initiative in the United States has won congressional approval. In the 110th and 111th congressional sessions, the Federal Employee Paid Parental Leave Act, which would provide four weeks of paid parental leave to federal employees, passed the House of Representatives—garnering support from 50 Republicans in the vote in the 110th Congress—but has not passed in the Senate.”

Worfamily conflict sucks. But Williams and Boushey’s report is awesome. So check it out.

–Virginia Rutter

Now for the 411 on “the new economics of marriage” –  a Pew study that is making its way through the media: To me the study is a good follow up on Heather Boushey’s “the new breadwinners” in A Woman’s Nation: The economic status of women has changed irrevocably, and our society generally accepts it. We rely on it too – women are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in 63 percent of families; and 43 percent of family income is from women.

Thanks to Pew, we see what this means for marriage and the balance of power and status. While 40 years ago, 96 percent of men earned more than their wives, today that number is 78 percent. Men out-earn wives, but less so than in the past. In terms of education, back in the day as today, married couples are most likely to have the same amount of education. But in 1970, whenever there was a difference in education, it was more likely to be men with more education (3 out of 10 marriages). Today, only 2 out of 10 marriages have men with more education…and 3 out of 10 have women with more education.

The question everyone is asking is how does this influence the “psychology of marriage”… by which I mean the principles that bind couples together, and the things that make marriages more likely to be happy and to last. The old wisdom is that traditional gender roles hold marriages together: in the past marriages with a more traditional structure were more stable. But that was in the past. With changing economics and culture, so the glue in marriage has changed too.

Well, it has been changing for quite some time. In the 1970s the research showed higher rates of depression for wives who were staying at home. By the early 1980s the more depressed wives were those who were doing a second shift–paid work and then work at home. More recently there has been evidence in how much more stable and satisfying are marriages where partners share housework–I mean really share housework, not this “helping” notion–but real sharing of responsibility for childcare, housework, and the administrative things of family life like list making, event planning, and gift giving. That’s the other change: men have been participating in their marriages differently, being more engaged at home.

The numbers show us that we are talking about narrowing the gender gap–at work, at home. This is a story of narrowing the gap between men and women, not of anyone losing ground–at least not men or women losing ground to each other. I did a radio call-in show with Joy Cardin this morning on Wisconsin Public Radio and the callers were talking more about their embattled families than any war between the sexes:  Where we aren’t narrowing the gap is figuring out how to create public policy–health care, day care, family leave, paid sick leave, paid vacation, or even reasonable banking policy that doesn’t sustain all sorts of inequalities that are bad for families (but I digress)–that gives these men and women the freedom to keep doing their jobs at home and at work without high levels of stress. The new economics of marriage is also the new psychology of marriage, and it has been around for a while. We’re talking about it more now, and creating more egalitarian marriages. Soon perhaps our public policies will catch on and help families as they really are out more.

-Virginia Rutter

You may have seen this: a little story about a girl-with-pen who was able to make a lot more money as men with pens. “James Chartrand” is the pen name for a woman blogger who reports she earned two or three times more under a man’s name than a woman’s.

In the year of the Shriver Report–you know, women hold up half the economy, make up half the work force, oh and also make up nearly half of union membership–we’re still struggling to get a host of humane work policies (uh, health care and “good jobs” with benefits) that isn’t just about material benefits.

The tougher part is the social psychological (and hard to measure) aspect of how “men’s work” and “women’s work” are still remarkably differentiated. As I’ve written here before, gender inequality is sneaky!

So is a lot of other inequality. James Chartrand isn’t just a man’s name. It is a white man’s name. The New York Times reminded us last month that “In Job Hunt, College Degree Doesn’t Close Racial Gap.” At 8.4 percent, the unemployment rate in 2009 for black college graduates has been nearly twice that of white college graduates (4.4 percent). An American Economics Review article highlighted how this works in their paper “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” In a field study, job applicants with “white sounding” names got twice as many call-backs as those with “black sounding” names. So, James Chartrand probably had more than just the advantage of gender.

An even newer American Sociological Review study makes the case even more clearly. In “Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment,” Devah Pager, Bruce Western, and Bart Bonikowski report on sending out matched sets of job applicants–white, black, and Latino men, similarly well-spoken, well-dressed, and credentialed–for low wage jobs in the New York area.

The results? Whites received positive responses 31 percent of the time–twice as many as blacks (at 15.2 percent). Latinos, with a 25.1 percent call-back rate, did worse than whites but better than blacks.

The descriptions of the job applicants’ encounters that are enumerated in the article highlight what we keep hearing: there were few if any episodes of overt racism or bias. The job applicants in the study, for example, didn’t sense a pattern themselves as they went through the application process.

A lot of inequality is sneaky. And where there is gender inequality, I’m going to keep checking for other forms of inequality that are sneaked in along with it–especially class and race–because I don’t think we’re going to do much about any of it until we do something about all of it.

-Virginia Rutter