So, on the way to helping colleagues at the Council on Contemporary Families get out an awesome Valentine’s Day Fact Sheet on Sexual Health by GWP contributor Adina Nack, I learned something new: the difference between a sexually transmitted disease (STD) and a sexually transmitted infection (STI).

“Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are infections that result from the transmission of certain bacteria or viruses during physically intimate acts. An STI may or may not result in a sexually transmitted disease (STD) that has noticeable symptoms,” according to the CCF Fact Sheet.

The importance of this distinction was made clear in a cool May 2008 article by Neil Munro. The article, Birth of a Number, is only available to online subscribers to National Journal. But you just might want to check it out because he highlights how some casual headline writing can influence the way numbers end up as a squishy political football (like a nerf football), excessively dramatizing an already serious problem. The numbers are not inherently squishy, but sometimes their use is squishy. In particular, in this case, the number he was reporting about was the number that “1 in 4 American teenagers has an STD.” When it came out that number was “infectious,” and popped up in a lot of headlines. But that number really referred to STInfection, not STDisease. AS Munro pointed out, it became a handy number for hand-wringing about teen sluttishness, but it didn’t become a handy moment to communicate on any kind of practical level about what to do about sexually transmitted infections–or diseases.

Nack’s CCF fact sheet includes a lot of very good sources on STIs, STDs, and advice about how to communicate with your partner about them. It turns out it will help you address the issues, but it will also help you address the numbers we use to represent the issues.

–Virginia Rutter

Read up, everybody. Here are a few links to interviews with, reviews of, and posts by Nadje al-Ali. She is the director of Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London and author of What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq. In her new book, Dr. al-Ali shows “how the US invasion has set Iraqi women’s rights back as much as 70 years”–as explained in an excellent Guardian review by Sara Wajid.

In a 2007 interview with Mother Jones, al-Ali explains, “Women have been the biggest losers of the post-invasion period. I worked on the modern history of Iraqi women, and of course there were horrible problems related to living under a dictatorship, living with wars, living with sanctions. But one of the most tragic things is that really, women have been pushed back and have lost out quite a bit.” The interview gives details about shifts backwards in the post-invasion safety, cultural practices, and even the constitutional status of women.

At AlterNet in March 2008, Dr. al-Ali posted on The Iraq Legacy: Millions of Women’s Lives Destroyed, pointing out the political irony (to put it lightly) of this so-called liberation:

“On International Women’s Day in 2004, nearly a year after the invasion of Iraq, George Bush, the US President, addressed250 women from around the world who had gathered at the White House. ‘The advance of women’s rights and the advance of liberty are ultimately inseparable,’ he said.”

But she explains that this is “stirring stuff, but totally empty claims. In fact, Iraq’s women have become the biggest losers in the post-invasion disaster.”

–Virginia Rutter

From The Independent: “The first government collapse of the global economic crisis is about to yield the world’s first openly-gay leader. Johanna Sigurdardottir, a former air hostess, is expected to be sworn in as Iceland’s Prime Minister by the end of the week.” Read all about it here.

Thank you, economic crisis!

–Virginia Rutter

Seven point two. And counting. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports, the most recent unemployment rate is 7.2 percent. On February 6, we will get the next installment of bad news. The big number gives us a backdrop for what bloggers like Deborah have been reporting on in a more personal way–that the Great Recession we’re in requires that us all to learn new things about ourselves. The downturn also helps us understand some old things, like inequality.

In the New York Times the other week, a blogger took a look at gender and unemployment and put the following together: the rates of unemployment are increasing for everyone, but they are increasing at a higher rate for men than for women, and at a higher rate for African Americans and Latinos than for other groups. As men fall out of their jobs at a higher rate, women are coming very close to being 50% of the workforce. The Times blogger asked, is this “A Milestone for Working Women?” The question is meant, I think, to be ironic: could it be that this bad news for the economy is kinda good news for the ladies?

Like so many other things, though, this employment question is not a a zero sum—in other words, men’s losses are not women’s gains, or any one else’s. As an alternative to any kind of zero-sum thinking, I suggest that we think about the meaning and function of work.

The meaning of work, as well as of “unemployment” and “employment,” continues to be something different for men and women. As I pointed out in November, recent research shows that on the job women work harder for less pay their male counterparts. And not because women have less experience. (For the latest on this, see Center for American Progress’s Equal Pay for Breadwinners report by Heather Boushey.)

Here’s an idea. Working status might best be understood as lying on a continuum: there are the unemployed (want a job, can’t find one), the underemployed (have some work, want more), the employed, and the overemployed (let’s call it the second shift category). (By the way, the BLS offers a bunch of alternative measures of unemployment; that 7.2 percent figure is called “U-3″—the official unemployment rate. But there’s another number, the “U-6″—or the underemployment rate, which in December 2008 hit 13.5 percent.)

The idea of overemployment adds important balance to the continuum. Overemployment–though not an official BLS designation—conventionally applies to people who are working well beyond full-time hours. But it is also useful to use it to think about all those people who are working their jobs—(or even just working hard to find a job)—while doing a second shift caring for their sick or infirm family members, or doing the inexhaustible amount of paperwork necessary to get any coverage for health-care services, and so forth (can you say health care reform?). Overemployment in this sense includes those who are doing their “real” jobs, and then doing a second shift taking care of their household and their kids (can you say work/family policy reform?). I could go on. But you’ve heard this argument a million times before, for example, in the work of Nancy Folbre or Heidi Hartmann.

Such a continuum would help us to track how much unpaid but socially and economically necessary work is being done—and by whom. Such a continuum might give President Obama and his team the bright idea that some of that overemployment—all the unpaid carework–could be officially transformed into value in the official economy. Of course, this is exactly the logic behind many excellent columns, like this one by Philip Cohen, regarding ways to keep gender in the equation when planning our stimulus.

Bottom line? We are all in this together, yes, but we are not all the same. When commentators emphasize the concerns of specific groups–women, Latina workers, African American auto workers, immigrants–they are identifying groups that share the whole problem. But they are reminding us that finding ways out of the current crisis requires attention to social inequalities that both cause and reflect our economic inequalities. Even if some employment stats go up, we will not be out of the woods until they go up across the board.

–Virginia Rutter

Women, Work, and the Downturn For an excellent column on why and how the downturn is likely to affect women, read UNC-Chapel Hill sociologist Philip Cohen’s recent post at HuffPo. He argues, as has Randi Albelda and Linda Hirshman, that Obama’s jobs/stimulus plans thus far are good for men, but not as likely to address the jobs concerns for women. As Cohen asks, will Obama listen?

The Black Middle Class As happened during the Great Depression, so in the (current) Great Recession, African Americans are going to be harder hit by job loss. Zenitha Prince does outstanding reporting on the issues in AFRO News. She reports that the manufacturing sector—read auto industry, where in particular African Americans had found a path to the middle class in the past few decades—is getting hammered. What’s the size of the problem? While the unemployment rate overall is currently at 6.7 percent, for African Americans it is at 11.2 percent. It will get worse.

Not only is unemployment generally twice as high for African Americans than for the population in general, but wealth inequality also makes the black middle class a vulnerable group. While the racial gap in incomes—what we earn at our jobs—has declined over the past thirty years, the gap in wealth—what we own in terms of savings, retirement funds, housing, stocks, and other assets—remains quite large. A 2005 report from the National Urban League reports that African American households have about one-tenth the net worth of white households. This makes family crises like unemployment much harsher.

–Virginia Rutter

Later: Read more about the recession’s impact on minority autoworkers in Tuesday’s New York Times.

Big news. Feminist media are covering unions. Thanks to a report from GWP friend John Schmitt over at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the feminist blogosphere is on the case–at Ms, at Feministing, at Feminist Majority. There’s also an excellent editorial in the San Diego Union Tribune.

The CEPR report, “Unions and Upward Mobility for Women Workers,” identifies what’s in the union movement for women. Schmitt reports that women in unions make 11.2 percent more than their non union peers. What’s the value of that? “All else equal, joining a union raises a woman’s wage as much as a full-year of college, and a union raises the chances a woman has health insurance by more than earning a four-year college degree,” reports Schmitt in a press release.

GWP talked with Schmitt about the report, to explore whether it is relevant to think of unions as a feminist institution, and here are a few thoughts he had for GWP:

GWP: What has changed for women in unions?
Schmitt: Women are now 45 percent of all unionized workers, up from 35 percent in 1983. If the trend holds,  women will be the majority of unionized workers by 2020.

GWP: What’s the significance–besides the increased wages you report?
Schmitt: There is a perception that unions are about white guys in their fifties who work in manufacturing and live in Michigan and Ohio. But, our study, which is one in a series focusing on different kinds of workers, shows that increasingly unions are about men and women. Union men and women are Latino, African American, white, Asian, and from other racial and ethnic groups, and more than ever union workers are in the service sector. I think the facts help to counteract some of our old-fashioned preconceptions of unions as not being representative of the workforce as a whole. For women today, unions have the potential to be a freestanding institution of the larger feminist agenda.

GWP: How are unions doing on health insurance?
Schmitt: Health insurance and pensions were two of the areas we examined. Part of the current health insurance “system” in the United States has been that marriage and jobs are gateways to health insurance, and this so-called system has the disadvantages of often making women dependent on their partner status for health insurance. In our study, we found that while 51 percent of non union women had health insurance, 75 percent of union women did. For low wage workers, the benefits were even more striking–union membership doubled a woman’s odds of having health insurance. Without a union, 26 percent of low-wage working women have health insurance. With a union, 59 percent of low-wage working women have health insurance. These large union advantages remained large even after we controlled for a host of demographic factors such as age and education levels.

GWP: What about women’s pensions?
Schmitt: Our retirement system has historically counted on women’s relying on their husband’s pensions–another case of dependence. Unions change that, nearly tripling the likelihood that low-wage women in unions have some kind of pension. While 21 percent of non union, low-wage women workers have a pension, 58 percent of these women do if they are in a union. For women workers overall, the pattern is similar: 43% of women workers without a union have a pension, while 76 percent of women workers with a union do. Again, the union effect holds even after we control for demographic differences between the union and non union groups.

GWP: What’s up ahead?
Schmitt: One of the key drivers of second-wave feminism was the incorporation of women into the workforce. But getting to work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for advancing the cause of women–and everybody, for that matter. What is happening today is that unions are increasingly acting to defend the interests of working women of all social classes and backgrounds, over issues such as flexible work schedules, extending the Family Medical Leave Act, and improving access to paid sick days and paid vacation.

–Virginia Rutter

As a sociologist, I like to break things down. So here we go.

We all know that women still earn less than men. Women’s wages are still a fraction of men’s—about 78 cents on the dollar—that’s just for full time workers. (For African American women, the number is 62 cents, Latinas, 53 cents.) Even when we “control for” education and experience, about 12% of the difference between men’s and women’s earnings cannot be explained. (Here at GWP we’ve discussed women in the failing economy and had dialogue about it, too.) So here’s the perpetual question: why.

Mind you, when we do “control for” education and experience, that means that we are not going to take into consideration the way that inequality influences who gets an education and what kind it is, nor the conditions under which one is able to ply her trade. We aren’t going to talk about how women’s and men’s so-called “choices” in the job market are conditioned on family leave policies that end up leaving women responsible for the 2nd shift at home more so than men. What I’m saying is that all those things aren’t choices at all.

But, I am also saying that inequality is complicated—and sneaky.

Let’s take the following puzzle. In 30 years of survey research, women report that they must work harder than men do. Why? A Gender & Society article by Elizabeth Gorman and Julie Kmec offers evidence for that sinking feeling that a lot of women have that “We (have to) try harder.”

Using surveys of working men and women in the United State and Britain, they found that women are 21-22% more likely than men to report that they work very hard at their jobs. That number is even higher when the kinds of jobs are taken into account, and it also is higher when women are working in fields dominated by other women. What is going on? The researchers investigated myriad explanations before determining what they see as the most likely explanation, namely, that “employers apply stricter performance standards to women than to men.”

How’d the researchers get there? Here are some questions they asked—and the answers they found:

Is it that men and women do different jobs? In other words, whose jobs are “harder”? They found that men’s and women’s jobs are different; though some jobs employ men and women equally (real estate, for example, is 50-50), other positions are dominated by either men (such as firefighters, 95-5) or women (like nursing, 10-90). In some ways men’s jobs are harder—and in other ways women’s jobs are harder. Women are more likely to be in part time jobs—these are more stressful and provide fewer rewards. Women are less likely to be in union jobs—and having a union makes your work life better, as reported in this and many other studies (including a forthcoming December 3, 2009 CEPR www.cepr.net paper on the topic). Men have jobs that are on average more physically strenuous, though jobs typically held by women in childcare and health care can also be demanding physically. The punch-line: when men and women hold the same job, women report work harder.

Do women feel like they are working harder because they are working a second shift—taking care of the family? It depends where you live. In England, the answer is no—being married or a parent doesn’t influence the way women report how hard they work. In the United States, the answer is yes—being married or having kids makes women report working harder. Why the difference? I suspect it is because the UK has better day-care and family leave supports, which mean parents (and in this case, especially mothers) don’t feel as stressed as they do in the US. It doesn’t explain everything, though.

Do women look to different social norms than men do—do women expect jobs not to be as hard? The authors examine this by looking at jobs mainly held by men versus jobs mainly held by women…and there were no differences in job effort. As they explain, “If gender-specific effort norms exist, we should see a greater difference … in highly gender-segregated jobs….” But they didn’t. So the answer to this question is no.

What about social desirability? Is there something that would lead women to inflate their responses and men to underestimate theirs in order to make an impression on the interviewers? Let’s say men and women are influenced by traditional ideas of “masculinity” and “femininity” when they answer questions about work. Does tradition say that men would act like they slack at their jobs? Or that they would seem more “masculine” if they talked about hard work? Does tradition suggest that women should act like they are very hard working in their field, or that they would be more feminine when their job was something lightly held, done with less intensity? I don’t know, and the researchers don’t know. But given that one could see it go either way, the notion that women had a special incentive to over-report, or men to underreport, doesn’t hold water.

So….what else could it be? After carefully examining a host of explanations for the fact that women report working harder than men report, and testing those explanations empirically, the researchers conclude: “The most plausible interpretation…is that employers impose higher performance standards on women than on men, even when men and women hold the same jobs.”

Inequality is complicated. It hasn’t disappeared. It isn’t a consequence of choices that men and women make any more than racial or ethnic inequality is a choice. But all these things can change. The first step? Employers need to recognize that they are at risk of pressing their bias in informal and unconscious ways.

-Virginia Rutter

Katha Pollitt has a great column about what Sarah Palin has left for us. Just as this week (“happy obama week!”) has given us heart, Katha has given us another way to see that things are looking up… and a way to understand how our talking and talking and talking about SP was good for feminism. My favorite passage addresses questions we’ve been discussing at gwp here (and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here) all fall:

So the first way Palin was good for feminism is that she helped us clarify what it isn’t: feminism doesn’t mean voting for “the woman” just because she’s female, and it doesn’t mean confusing self-injury with empowerment, like the Ellen Jamesians in The World According to Garp (I’ll vote for the forced-childbirth candidate, that’ll show Howard Dean!). It isn’t just feel-good “you go, girl” appreciation of female moxie, which I cheerfully acknowledge Palin has by the gallon. As I wrote when she was selected, if she were my neighbor I would probably like her–at least until she organized with her fellow Christians to ban abortion at the local hospital, as Palin did in the 1990s. Yes, feminism is about women getting their fair share of power, and that includes the top jobs–but that can’t take a back seat to policies that benefit all women: equality on the job and the legal framework that undergirds it, antiviolence, reproductive self-determination, healthcare, education, childcare and so on. Fortunately, women who care about equality get this–dead-enders like the comically clueless Lynn Forester de Rothschild got lots of press, but in the end Obama won the support of the vast majority of women who had supported Hillary Clinton.

Read the whole column and enjoy.

–Virginia Rutter

Perhaps someone forwarded you this wacky protest song in support of McCain-Palin by Hank Williams, Jr., that’s going around. Here’s a favorite line from this Palin anthem:

“If you mess with her cubs, she’s gonna take off the gloves. It’s an American female tradition.”

My friend who forwarded me the lyrics quipped: “For me, this really hit the sweet spot of country music and radical feminist politics.” As another friend said, “Hey! It’s McFeminism!”

McFeminism, Red State feminism, call it what you will, but that sweet spot is exactly the point where gender politics and social class politics intersect.

Gender politics for working-class families often play out differently than do gender politics for middle-class families. Stephanie Coontz’s recent column goes into excellent detail, illustrating that, “how women address gender-based reproductive, sexual, and family interests varies by their class position and their personal options outside the family.”

So, for example, working-class folks, historically, are somewhat more likely to endorse traditional gender roles. In working-class families, according to this example, there’s a more traditional division of household labor. And as researchers show, working-class versus middle-class families even do sex differently. (Check out Coontz’s article “The Romantic Life of Brainiacs” for an analysis of sex and social class; page through to stuff on oral sex just for fun.)  Remember, of course, these are only statistical tendencies, not rigid patterns. They give us clues about how to sort out different feminisms.

So Sarah Palin has the promise to appeal to those who admire traditional feminine resourcefulness. In the traditional gender roles universe, the strong mama who does what it takes to defend her cubs (like a pitbull with lipstick) is a feminist heroine.

That’s powerful: I think of my mother who kept a gorgeously clean and attractive house, worked full time (sometimes at more than one job), finished college and went to graduate school, took care of four kids, tolerated an underemployed spouse, and seated the whole crew for breakfast and dinner every single day. This is an American Hero that we all can revere—maybe not as much as a prisoner of war, but certainly as much as Mom and apple pie. SP has qualities that remind us of our old fashioned, wage-earning, home-making, second-shift working moms—the very moms who gave many of us younger feminists greater courage to break the mold.

Luckily (for intergenerational harmony) my own Annie-get-your-gun kind of mom sees Sarah Palin as someone who, in the end, simply isn’t qualified for the job. In truth, my mom really thinks SP is pretty selfish, willing to do or say anything to get what she wants for herself—not that different from her running mate.

That might just be my mom. But it sure does make me think….

I can recognize and honor diversity among feminisms, but that doesn’t mean I–or my mom–can’t judge quality.

–Virginia Rutter

Photo from People magazine

Back in 2002, David Brooks reported that during the 2000 presidential election, “a Time magazine-CNN poll asked voters whether they were in the top 1 percent of income earners. Nineteen percent reported that they were, and another 20 percent said that they expected to be there one day.” Forty percent of people were all thinking that they were in that tiny, tiny space reserved for one percent of the population. When I talk about this with my introduction to sociology students, they get it. They can do the math.

But this bit of bad math is part of being American. It is essentially American to identify up the social ladder (over at the NYT, Jennifer Steinhauer has explained this wonderfully). We’ve had the lending policy and credit cards encourage us to do so. Just like we buy Gucci bags or cars we can’t afford, we have, for the past 25 years, voted for leaders that don’t line up with what we need or can afford.

Joe the Plumber is like the disoriented 39 percent from back in 2000. JTP identifies with the economic interests above his pay grade. Even though he doesn’t make 250K and doesn’t have prospects of doing so any time soon, he’s kind of “saving for a rainy day” by voting for the candidate who will have good tax policy for the life he wishes he had, instead of voting for the candidate who has tax policies that can help him now and can help him reach his goal.

JTP requires another twist of logic, much like the bad math of the 40% above: JTP doesn’t imagine that he could afford the extra taxes (perhaps $900 more under Obama than McCain) if he is making 250K per year (Dean Baker explains the numbers and the NYT offers a handy illustration). Still, he feels like he can forego the $$ from an an Obama tax cut that he will get now at his current income level. Not as good as a Gucci bag, but the same idea.

I know it is tasteless these days to mention socialism or anything like that. Obama used humor to remind us that sharing your peanut butter and jelly sandwich isn’t the same thing as socialism. Even so, this has been a great week for my social theory students to study Marxism. They are learning about how consciousness of your real position in the economy really can help you decide how to make your life better. And they think that Joe the Plumber’s class consciousness is out of order. Maybe he needs to call “Karl the Marxist” as Hendrik Hertzberg suggests in the New Yorker this week. (Thanks Ira.)

PS: What does this have to do with feminism? Economic justice and sound financial reasoning are feminist issues full stop. But over at the Joint Economic Committee, where GWP favorite Heather Boushey works, they have just put out a report about how bad things are in our economy–especially for the household sector, where women are especially hard hit.

–Virginia Rutter