Follow the thread: The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation reminds us that women now make up half the workforce. And are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in 63 percent of families.

The report also reminds us that a lot of policy has not kept up with the definitive end of “separate spheres” and the caregiver/provider model of families. We all do market work, and we all need to find ways to care for our families, our children, and ourselves.

The report reminds us that now, more than ever before, we all need family friendly and more humane work policies. That issues like good (secure) jobs, adequate, affordable, and just health care, paid vacation, paid sick days, child care, and family leave aren’t women’s issues at all. They are human issues. They are workers’ issues.

How to get there? The word of the 1960s was plastics. The word for 2010 is unions. We don’t even have to invent them. They already exist. And they are changing. And there is opportunity just up ahead to help them change more.

A Center for Economic and Policy Research report released today, The Changing Face of Labor 1983-2008, documents that “over the last quarter century, the unionized workforce has changed dramatically…. In 2008, union workers reflected trends in the workforce as a whole toward a greater share of women, Latinos, Asian Pacific Americans, older, more-educated workers, and a shift out of manufacturing toward services.”

As reported in the Associated Press this afternoon, “Women are on track to become a majority of unionized workers in the next 10 years, signaling their growing clout in the labor movement.” Women make of 45 percent of union membership–up from 35 percent in 1983, according to CEPR’s report.

Lead author, CEPR senior economist John Schmitt, connects the dots: “When you have a majority of women in the labor movement, issues like work-family balance, paid sick days and paid parental leave become more important.”

And Change to Win head Anna Burger makes the message concrete:According to AP, Burger says, “Because of women, we don’t just talk about raising wages, but about creating family friendly workplaces with sick leave, child care, and family and medical leave. We don’t just talk about out-of-control insurance costs, but about the fact that women pay more than men strictly because of their gender.”

(Change to Win is a federation of five unions: Teamsters, Laborers International Union of North America (LiUNA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Farm Workers (UFW), and United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). The AP article also interviews secretary-treasurer of  the AFL-CIO Liz Shuler.)

The hype is about how women will benefit unions–by bringing traditional women’s issues that are really about the well being of all of us into the mainstream. For more on how unions actually benefit women–in terms of wages, pensions, and health insurance–read this interview with John Schmitt from last year.

Next thread: EFCA (The Employee Free Choice Act). That’s how to turn the benefits that women bring to the union movement into benefits for all. Bring us some more good news, ya’ll.

–Virginia Rutter

Last week U of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan argued on the NYTimes Economix blog that paid sick days are an incentive for people to stay out of work–shamming sick days is the suggestion. Paid sick days, the argument goes, encourages people to stay out from work. Well, sometimes people can’t see the forest for the ideology, but help, alas, was on the way the day Mulligan posted.

CEPR senior economist John Schmitt, co-author of a report on paid sick leave in the US and Europe earlier this year, said not so fast! At noapparentmotive.org, Schmitt took issue in two ways: first, as his CEPR report, Contagion Nation, pointed out, the current system of no paid sick leave in the United States provides incentive for people to go to work sick. You see, if we measure cost, we have to measure the cost of a policy of no paid sick leave as well as the cost of some paid sick leave. You can read more about Contagion Nation at girlwpen here.

If that isn’t bad enough, Schmitt catches Mulligan on another sleight of hand. Mulligan, it seems, left off all the countries in the data set he was using that didn’t conform to his thesis that paid sick days are an incentive to stay out sick. As Schmitt explains, “Denmark, Germany, and seven other countries with more generous statutory paid sick days policies all have lower sickness absence rates than the United States. A really interesting question is: how is it that these countries are able to provide both guaranteed paid sick days and lower sickness absence rates? (And why didn’t Mulligan include these countries in his graph?)”

Andrew Leonard discusses the Schmitt response at Salon. He concludes, “Of course people, given an opportunity, will abuse generous benefits. But what explains the situations where they don’t?”

Over at Mother Jones, Nick Baumann was not so cagey in his post Economic Dishonesty. In response to the question, why the selective use of data?, he simply says, “Um, because he was being dishonest?”

I think that making working life humane for all people is a feminist issue, as the Shriver Report recently reminded us. To my mind, rebutting simplistic supply and demand arguments about work/life issues is a feminist act.

Weirdly, the New York Times has not run a correction. What a shame.

PS 11/3/09. NYTimes reported today on the concern among public health officials that lack of sick leave may worsen flu pandemic: “Tens of millions of people, or about 40 percent of all private-sector workers, do not receive paid sick days, and as a result many of them cannot afford to stay home when they are ill. Even some companies that provide paid sick days have policies that make it difficult to call in sick, like giving demerits each time someone misses a day.”

-Virginia Rutter

A year and a half ago Feministing reported about rapes occuring to women working for defense contractors in Iraq. The gist of the story is this: assaulted workers told, badgered, intimidated into keeping silent about vicious assaults on them.

One of the people who this happened to was Jamie Leigh Jones. She testified before Congress in December 2007 about being drugged and gang-raped in company barracks in Iraq. Her company, Halliburton, said that when she signed her employment contract, she lost her rights to a jury trial. The contract they offered forced her into having her claims decided through secret, binding arbitration. WTF?! She had no idea.

Fast forward to October 2009. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) introduced an anti-rape amendment to a larger defense appropriations bill last week that (per talkingpointsmemo) would “prohibit the Pentagon from hiring contractors whose employment contracts prevent employees from taking work-related allegations of rape and discrimination to court.” Kind of minimum standard.

The amendment passed, 68-30, in the Senate. Because that is the right thing to do. Indeed, Jon Stewart profiled the case, pointing out that, “If, to protect Halliburton, you have to side against rape victims, you might want to rethink your allegiances.”

But, Huffington Post reports that someone not yet clearly rethinking his allegiances is Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI). He’s considering removing the amendment, and he has the power to do so. Explains HuffPo: “Inouye’s office, sources say, has been lobbied by defense contractors adamant that the language of the Franken amendment would leave them overly exposed to lawsuits and at constant risk of having contracts dry up.”

There is so much wrong with this I don’t know where to start. But I wanted to provide the update. Read this for info about contacting Sen. Inouye to tell him to support the Franken amendment.

-Virginia Rutter

Damn. The Shriver Report, out in the morning, already sounds fantastic. CAP explains: “The Center for American Progress, in partnership with Maria Shriver, has broken new ground with the publication of The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything. By taking a hard look at how women’s changing roles are affecting our major societal institutions, from government and businesses to our faith communities, the report outlines how these institutions rely on outdated models of who works and who cares for our families, and examines how all these parts of the culture have responded to one of the greatest social transformations of our time.”

You can read Gloria Steinem’s early Women’s Media Center review–she likes Kimmel on men’s stake in equality, she worries that the 50/50 workplace hasn’t created a safe and just world just yet, she has high hopes for change. At Time Magazine, they’ve posted the Shriver Report survey results with the headline, “The Argument about Women Working Is Over.” In a skillfully conducted poll, 76% of men and 80% of women agree that women and men sharing the work force 50/50 is “positive for society.”

In the coming days, much will be said–and the media blitz looks fabulous (Time Magazine cover out Friday; CAP President John Podesta and Maria Shriver on Meet the Press Sunday, Maria Shriver on Today Monday – Wednesday, Heather Boushey on MSNBC on Tuesday, and god knows what else)–but here are two early points that I want to celebrate tonight.

First, the survey finds–and recognizes that it finds–much more similarity than difference between men and women across a host of items. Just one example: Men and women have very similar life goals. We value security, fulfilling work, and children to a similar degree. The widest margin of difference? Women value religion more so than men.

Second, I love the way the Center for American Progress identifies their project. CAP has located the focus on the great labor market transition of the late 20th century as a human issue, not a gendered issue. Women are the movers–in this case moving into the workforce–but the movement is about all of us, men and women, and how we as a working nation can arrange our lives humanely and effectively.

For all the data and analysis, visit CAP’s project page “Working Nation: How Women’s Progress is Reshaping America’s Family and the Economy.“

-Virginia Rutter

Today is Blog Action Day. Theme is climate change. Here are a few things to consider:

• Women die from natural disasters more. In the 2004 Tsunami, 80% of deaths were to women. In the 1991 Bangladesh cyclones, 90% of the 140,000 people who died were women. And in the aftermath of Katrina in 2005, African American women faced the most severe obstacles to survival.
• Women are 70-80% of the world’s farmers, and climate disturbances and drought are disastrous for them.
• Women in many developing countries spend three or more house a day fetching water: droughts intensify this effort.
• The impact of climate change is disproportionately affecting the world’s poor. Women are 70% of the world’s poor.

Think about this. The reason to care about climate change isn’t because it is gendered. Saying it is gendered isn’t a marketing gimmick to get you to care about the climate. But climate change is about the social world, and the social world is a place where men and women around the globe still have very different statuses and opportunities. The poverty aspect of it reminds us that climate change is a human problem.

And do this. Be a human being. Take action to reduce your carbon footprint. Take steps to raise awareness of the processes and impact of climate change–see this for more info. And let your members of Congress know that you want to see a strong version of the Kerry-Boxer Clean Energy Bill. (Here’s some optimism about it.)

And, your bonus round…here’s some info for raising awareness of the processes and impact of climate change. Barbara Sutton, a sociologist at University at Albany, SUNY, put together a fabulous list of sources — books, fact sheets, articles, organizations, websites — on gender and climate change. Check it out.

–Virginia Rutter

From our friend over at noapparentmotive.org: Here’s some info about the Domestic Workers United Celebration Campaign–because there are lots of ways to get it done but they should all involve respect and fair labor standards. Per noapparentmotive.org,

DWU is an organization of nannies, housekeepers, and elderly caregivers in New York working for respect and fair labor standards for domestic workers. In less than a decade, the DWU has built a membership of over 2,300 workers and won almost a half a million dollars in unpaid wages for domestic workers.

DWU has recently launched a campaign to recruit “donor members” to help sustain their work through these tough economic times. The donor campaign celebration will be held on October 29 from 6:30pm to 9:30pm at the offices of SEIU Local 32BJ, 101 Avenue of the Americas, 22nd Floor. (A flyer with full details here.) You can use the pledge form if you’d like to help, but can’t make it on the day.

A recent article in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society (you can check out the abstract here) asks: “As the boundary between family and market changes to accommodate the entry of women into the labor market, who will assume these women’s family‐welfare work?” The authors use an analysis of labor in the US and Sweden to conclude, “Rather than blaming women who hire housecleaners, progressives should aim instead at elevating the status of this labor.” That’s nice work.

–Virginia Rutter

In The New Republic Online, “line of the day” post by Jonathan Cohn, see the “…back-and-forth at the Senate Finance hearings, between Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican, and Debbie Stabenow, the Michigan Democrat. The subject is requirements that all insurance policies cover certain benefits.”

KYL: “I don’t need maternity care.”

STABENOW: “I think your mom probably did.”

Watch the video here.

As Jonathan Cohn comments on the exchange: “I’m hard-pressed to think of a single exchange that better captures the sensibilities of our two political parties–or the principle of shared risk upon which universal coverage is based.” (The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has taken note, as reported on TalkingPointsMemo, and has sent a fund raising letter to draw attention to the exchange–and how it reflects different values.)

Here, I’m stalled: I think Cohn’s excellent point is a kind of conversation stopper.
If we start from different principles, where do we go from here?

How about self interest and humanity? That’s where I’ll go. A very helpful article at Forbes.com reviews what health care reform means to women. In case you weren’t aware, most private insurance policies currently allow pregnancy as a pre-existing condition for exclusion from coverage. Most jurisdictions are able to have gender ratings that hike up charges for women over men.

Now lots of even the most pessmistic folks seem to think that health care reform at a minimum offers hope that we’ll make such “pre-existing condition” exclusions illegal and that we will establish community ratings that end subgroup ratings, like the gender one. That is the minimum, but I’m still holding out for Medicare for all, something that 65% of Americans favor, according to a recent Time/CBS poll. (yet we are still debating this because….?)

But there’s more: Columns like Adina Nack’s “HPM, Stress and the Inner Game” remind us about the important ways that health care is subjective–and those subjective aspects can cause negative (or positive) health outcomes. When we are disempowered, it wears us down, undermines the immune system. The overarching point of real health care reform is for us all to understand that, in the words of Deborah Lewis, “I do not believe that we earn our illnesses….” This suggests that women–and men too–should be empowered to seek and assert their need for care.

The dilemma is that in a world where it is “special treatment” to get preventative care, like mammograms (only 20 states require private insurance companies to cover these after age 40), or maternity care, or the like, such a personal empowerment view doesn’t get us all the way there. What gets us all the way there is health care for all. Maybe Macbeth would not care about it. But the rest of us, who have a mama, just might.

–Virginia Rutter

Are people really having less sex? Well, at the very least, it looks like they are having less sex outside of their committed relationships, according to a new study written up in Scientific American. But it also looks like people may be making up for having less sex outside of committed relationships by talking about it more. And that is good news for sex.

First the news: In each category surveyed—gay, lesbian, straight—people report fewer affairs now than in the 1970s. Everybody has changed in terms of monogamy: gay men do it (where do it means doing non-monogamy) 59% now versus 82% in the 1970s. Nowadays, straight men do it less—14%. Meanwhile, 13% of straight women and 8% of lesbians do it. As we keep seeing again and again in recent surveys on monogamy, women—lesbian and straight—still report fewer affairs than their male counterparts, but they are catching up with the boys, as UW psychologist David Atkins has shown. On the one hand, affairs overall may be on the decline because of STDS and the like; on the other hand, women may be catching up because they have greater autonomy and economic independence.

That is all interesting, but this is also potentially good news for wild, free-for-all sex. The investigators from Alliant International University in San Francisco showed that over the same period people have also increased how much they talk to their partners about the idea of sex outside of their relationship. (What’s happening in those conversations, report these psychologists, is that they are talking about outside liaisons, and deciding against them.)

But the other discovery here is about the talking. Increasingly, this study hints, people are talking about the notion of sex outside their relationship–talking about forbidden, off-the-approved-roster sex with someone who isn’t an official or legal sweetheart–even if in the end they decide against it. Conversations like that—no matter what the outcome—mean that more and more people are acknowledging, countenancing, and admitting that they and their partners are completely capable of having sexual fantasies about someone other than their official one. We all know that being in a committed relationship doesn’t change our brain structure and doesn’t stop a great, diverse sexual imagination about all manner of things, people, and situations. But when people don’t talk about it, they have to tell one another lies, and pretend like their fantasies don’t exist.

So, maybe people are saying no to the reality of sex with their hot new colleague, but if they are saying yes to a conversation about it with their partner, it might mean that those partners will be better at dreaming up their own edgier, more interesting sex. And, by the way, in a world where women have greater sexual freedom to have affairs, they also have greater freedom to acknowledge desire and have conversations about it that can lead to fewer affairs.

-Virginia Rutter

If you liked Veronica’s excellent Science Grrl post on the gender wage gap, make sure you read Inside Higher Ed’s article , “Hiring Women as Full Professors.” Per IHE‘s Scott Jaschik, University of Texas/Austin released a self study on gender equity last fall, and, by gosh, they used the data to shape their subsequent hiring this spring, and hired more women than they ever have in the past.

The UT report showed gender gaps across the board–hiring, salary, retention, time to promotion and tenure–but the biggest gap was among full professors: After controlling for a lot of stuff, they found that among full professors, men’s starting salaries were on average $12, 229 higher than women’s. Moreover, only 19% of full profs were women. (Sounds like a case of “this food’s so bad and there’s not enough of it!”) The typical response to the wider gap at the top–seen across the country and across professions–has been, jeepers ya’ll this is a problem, but I guess we’ll just have to wait. This takes time!

But UT said, uh, why wait? As Jaschik reports:

“Randy Diehl, dean of liberal arts, said it was important for universities not to simply wait for junior professors to rise through the ranks. He said that the presence of women in the senior ranks is part of what you need to encourage younger women, and that there are issues of bias if an institution doesn’t add women as full professors. Diehl noted, for example, that the highest salaries for full professors go to those who didn’t come up through the ranks, but who were recruited from one institution to another. Universities that rely on gradual promotion from within will not see a narrowing of average faculty salaries between men and women, he said.”

Read the article. Their hires look fantastic. And the dean’s logic: Goes for minority hiring and promotion too, right? (Thanks to Paul Rutter for the heads up!)

-Virginia Rutter

1. National Health Plan=Good for Small Businesses and Self Employment.
2. Small Businesses and Self Employment=Good for Women.
3. You do the math.

Allow me to explain:
Old news: The U.S. hasn’t been able to muster the will to get real health care reform, but we are leaders in entrepreneurship and small businesses. We have that going for us.

New news: Oops. The U.S. has one of the lowest rates of self-employment and small businesses of any comparable rich economy, per a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Check out “An International Comparison of Small Business Employment.”

“Conservatives and liberals see small business as a way for women to get ahead in the economy. It offers flexible employment–and takes away the glass ceiling because you are your own boss,” comments the report’s lead author and CEPR Senior Economist John Schmitt. “But the numbers on U.S. small business and self employment suggest that the U.S. lags far behind European counterparts.”

Uh, health care issue? The CEPR report explains that one big obvious reason for this surprising weakness might be our lack of availability of health insurance. As Schmitt and co-author Nathan Lane explain, “The undersized U.S. small business sector is consistent with the view that high health care costs discourage small business formation, since start-ups in other countries can tap into government-funded health care systems.”

So, for example, those considering their own business, women with pre-existing conditions or women of childbearing age can have a lot of trouble getting health insurance. Though insurance companies can’t treat pregnancy as a pre-existing condition, the loopholes make the situation look like gruyere cheese. I’m sure GWP readers have a story or two to tell.

All roads lead to health care reform. This is #87 of the 46 million reasons why Americans really do want health care reform. By really do, I mean, 72% of Americans (polled by NYTimes/CBS) support a public option. It gets framed as like “Medicare for All”–and there’s a bill in Congress to support it. Want to do something? Tell your member of Congress about the CEPR’s small business research. And tell your member of Congress that Medicare for All (H.R. 676) is a no-brainer.

-Virginia Rutter