Nice Work

The first study of California’s paid family leave (PFL) program details just how well it works for employers as well as families. Through California’s Paid Family Leave, eligible employees receive up to six weeks of wage replacement at 55 percent of their usual earnings to bond with a new child or care for a seriously ill family member. It is funded solely by employees paying into the program.

You can read Center for Economic Policy and Research’s Eileen Appelbaum and UCLA/CUNY’s Ruth Milkman’s report for the details but here are a few highlights:

A representative sample of 253 employers and 500 employees using PFL were surveyed in 2009-2010. Appelbaum and Milkman found that an overwhelming majority reported good results. Here’s what employers reported:

• 89 percent said that PFL had either a “positive effect” or “no noticeable effect” on productivity.
• For 91 percent, profitability/performance was neutral or positively affected.
• 96 percent reported a positive of neutral effect on turnover
• 99 percent (!) reported positive or neutral effects on employee morale
• 91 percent said “No” when asked if they were aware of any employee abuses of the program.

And from workers, a few highlights include:

• 84 percent of those in low-quality jobs using paid family leave received at least half of their usual pay while on leave.
• Only 41 percent of workers in low-quality jobs not using PFL received any pay while on leave
• The rate of bonding claims filed by men has climbed steadily since the beginning of PFL.
• Duration of breastfeeding among new mothers who used PFL also increased.

The report explains, “According to California’s Employment Development Department, in FY 09-10, 167,253 Californians used Paid Family Leave for bonding with new children and 23,220 used it to provide care for seriously ill family members.” Even so, one of the biggest problems they report is that too few people know they are eligible to participate. According to the report, “half the workers interviewed did not know the program existed, despite having had a qualifying circumstance for which to use PFL; low-wage workers, immigrants, and Latinos were least likely to be aware of the program.”

-Virginia Rutter

When men have children they start earning more—it’s the “daddy bonus.” The size of the bonus? About 11 percent of average earnings across a wide variety of educational, racial and ethnic characteristics. It begs some good questions, and sociologists Melissa Hodges and Michelle Budig at UMass Amherst have answered a lot of them in their recent Gender & Society article, “Who Gets the Daddy Bonus? Organizational Hegemonic Masculinity and the Impact of Fatherhood on Earnings” (abstract).

For example, you might ask, is the daddy bonus because men who are better at earning are also more likely to have kids? This is called the selection hypothesis, and Hodges and Budig’s analysis says “no.” In fact, having children creates a reversal of fortunes, a case of “negative selection.” The dudes who have kids have characteristics that suggest lower earning, not higher earning. But they end up turning it around when the babies arrive.

Is it because dads start to work more? When men become fathers they do work more. But that doesn’t produce the daddy bonus. Instead, the authors found that being married to a woman (a marriage bonus) accounted for about one-half of the increased earnings. Unmarried dads? No daddy bonus.

Is it because dads benefit from the breadwiner/caregiver model? Research sometimes shows that when wives de-emphasize market work (part time work or staying home) this is associated with men’s higher earnings (you can see a case of it here). Not so for whites and African Americans in this study, though it was true for Latinos. The “marriage bonus” for all groups, however, may relate to having the benefits of the extra share of domestic work that wives tend to do regardless of labor market participation.

Does everyone get the daddy bonus? Yes and no. All fathers, regardless of race and ethnicity, gain a wage advantage. But look at this: white dads received an 8.3 percent bonus, black dads a 7.3 percent bonus, and Latino dads a 9.2 percent bonus.

The authors explain: “Most men experience gendered advantages in the labor market, but not all men are equally privileged…. Men’s ability to capture the ‘patriarchal dividend’–privileges and rewards accruing to men by virtue of living in a gender-unequal society–varies by their other status characteristics….” What they are talking about is “hegemonic masculinity.” Think of it as the “war within the sexes” – you can read more about it here.

Hegemonic masculinity is a big term for a concept that we all know intuitively: that being a good man gets blended together with other cultural norms to amplify male privilege for some men more than others. As Joan Williams has explained so well, we think the “ideal worker” (you can find a discussion of here) is gender neutral. But work is organized so that people who don’t have competing responsibilities–for example, for the kids–fit in better than people who have work-family conflicts. And those people, overwhelmingly (though not always) are men. Indeed, many of the cultural norms relate to work, others relate to heterosexuality. The effect is that it just seems obvious who has “earned” their rewards.

Hodges and Budig found that the fatherhood bonus is bigger for white men in professional/managerial positions, for white men and Latinos with college degrees, white men in occupations that emphasized mental activity more than physical activity, white men and Latinos in jobs that de-emphasized strength, and (as mentioned above) Latino men with more economically dependent spouses.

So, all men benefit from college education (though the benefits aren’t so great for everybody, as you can read here), and all men benefit from fatherhood. But fatherhood benefits for college educated white men is about 21 percent, Latino men 19 percent, and African American men is 7.3 percent (no different from the benefit for non-college educated African American dads).

The authors sum it up: “…the effect of becoming a father is another source of privilege for privileged men, but less so for men who are in more socially disadvantaged positions.” So, if you were looking for an example of “hegemonic masculinity,” now you have one.

-Virginia Rutter

We love to puzzle over the rise in employment for women vs the decline in employment for men. Is it about psychology? (Leads to speculation about men’s feelings of inadequacy.) Is it interpersonal? (Ends in “what does this mean for marriage?”… or how can we relate this to attachment parenting, [ffs]?).

But the big, giant, huge social forces of racism plus capitalism might help too: to wit, today the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) has published an analysis of Bureau of Justice Statistics data that indicates that incarceration in America reduces our male employment rate by 1.5 to 1.7 percent. The paper, “Ex-Offenders and the Labor Market,” follows the CEPR’s paper “The High Budgetary Cost of Incarceration” that was released last June.

Each year we produce around 700,000 “ex-offenders” … and those people’s prospects on the job market are undermined. Meanwhile, more than 90 percent of those ex-offenders are men. And a disproportionate number of them are African American.

“It isn’t just that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, we have created a situation over the last 30 years where about one in eight men is an ex-offender,” said John Schmitt, a Senior Economist at CEPR and a co-author of the report with Kris Warner, also from CEPR. Schmitt blogs on more details of his report here.

Consider this: When you are thinking about gender and trends in employment consider that in America, doing time is a social institution we’ve organized for doing gender. It is another one of our “man laws.”

-Virginia Rutter

Bridgette A. Sheridan is a historian of sexualities at Framingham State University. When Karen Owen’s PowerPoint became news–she’s the Duke student who sent her friends a faux presentation based on her “sex research” on a sample of men whom she’d slept with–Bridgette followed the story with curiosity and then dismay. I had a conversation with her today in her kitchen in Cambridge. Here’s what she said.

VR: So, tell me again what’s your problem with the Karen Owen/Duke Faux Thesis Controversy?

BAS: Yea, I don’t get it. Why is this news? A white woman at an elite college reports in a mildly witty way her sexual adventures—her “dirty sex.” The story gets attention because people are shocked! shocked! shocked! by this “role reversal.” They puzzle over whether this is “good” or “bad” and speculate about its value as a “feminist turning point.”

VR: So that’s not really news?

BAS: This is like stories we’ve been told for a long time, particularly about white middle class women and sexuality. It is an old story about gender, about sex, about race, about class. The story is that “these girls are dirty too.” And then much excitement, worry, and titillation follows. Even though being naughty has been a familiar part of the sexual landscape in America for a long time, we keep getting especially worked up about it when we hear about it from yuppy women.

VR: What is dirty sex?

BAS: Hmmm. For white elite girls it is sex without commitment. It is sex focused on her own pleasure, rather than on her emotions about the person with whom she was having sex. Blow jobs rather than intercourse. Talking dirty rather than keeping the lights out. Sexting rather than sending flowers.

I love the question “what is dirty sex” because it draws our attention to how much sex is coded through social class, not just gender.

When I first started reading about the Duke episode, what I thought of immediately was the Milton Academy sex scandal of a few years ago, and it even took me back to Katie Roiphe’s commentary on date rape in the early 1990s.

VR: What happened at Milton?

BAS: Through an expose (Restless Virgins [!]) published in 2007 by young women from Milton Academy we learned about the fabulous, terrible sexual underworld at Milton after news broke of a 15-year-old female student giving blow jobs to five male athletes in the locker room at Milton.  According to Time, the charge about the book was that it read more like soft porn than sociology.

I would argue that the shocking and fascinating part for most people was “this is happening at an elite institution” – “these girls have so much to live for.”

VR: What’s the Katie Roiphe link?

BAS: Way back in the 1990s Roiphe wrote a book, The Morning After, based on her experiences at Harvard and Princeton, and her skepticism about the “campus rape crisis.” She came to the conclusion that all the (then) new dialogue on campus about date rape was overhyped and that women were full, knowing participants in the sexual dramas that unfolded on campus.

Here’s the link: For Roiphe, the story was women are just like men; for Milton, the worry was sure boys will be boys but a sexual revolution might mean that girls are like boys too. And now with the Duke story the case is, again, something about (elite, privileged) women taking on the characteristics of men.

VR: Wait, you mean the double standard isn’t being violated in these stories?

BAS: This Duke story doesn’t indicate that the double standard has gone away, or that women have more sexual privilege than men. What I mean is, really, for this to be a story at all the double standard has to be in place! That is all it is about. While there is so-called positive commentary such as “Karen Owen reaches the inner feminist in me” … ultimately the kind of shock at and condemnation of Owen and what she has done is always present, and reconfirms our sense that men’s and women’s sexual experiences are fundamentally different, and that this difference is a valuable cultural resource that ought to be protected.

Let me walk you through this: when the story broke, ever so briefly there was concern about the fact that men’s names and images were used in her “sex survey”; the concern about the humanity of those subjects was eclipsed quickly by the interest in the “role reversal.” And how was the issue of men’s names and images resolved? The concern for the men focused on how this would make them seem callous toward women. They wouldn’t be gallant men. There was no fear that they would be slutty men, because the very idea of men being “put down” for their sexual desires is unheard of.

Some online comments from readers at various sites pointed to how, if Karen rated a guy highly that he would have benefited, and that it was only harmful if he didn’t receive high ratings. Do you see how that constitutes a double standard? If you don’t, then think about what it means when someone argues that when a sixth grade boy is seduced by his (woman) school teacher that maybe he is just “luckier” than all the other boys. This is another version of that kind of thinking. This is not feminism.

VR: If this isn’t one, then what would be a feminist turning point?

BAS: I think a feminist turning point would be when this wouldn’t be a story at all. Sexual freedom will exist when there is no such thing as “role reversal” — that is, when there wouldn’t be roles of privilege or statuses of disadvantage. Sounds nice, huh?

-Virginia Rutter

Here’s something we don’t need a piece of research to tell us (though I’m going to tell you about a really good example): men with MBAs earn a lot more than women with MBAs. Most of the gap is explained by having children – which costs women but not men. Most of that parental-status tax costs women because they have to give up time at the office.

According to a recent article by economists at the University of Chicago and Harvard, who used data on UC Booth School alumni, men and women MBAs start earning about the same at the end of graduate school. But the earnings diverge over time. Nine years after MBA, men average around $400K; women, $250K.

This dramatic difference is much smaller for women who don’t have children. The authors opine that the lower-earning situation of MBA mothers is a consequence of “family constraints and the inflexibility of work schedules in many corporate and finance sector jobs” (p. 249).

A little more to the story: Women who partner (and have kids) with lower-earning men do not have dramatically lower incomes than men on average. And women who partner (and don’t have kids) with higher-earning men keep their wages up in a kind of competitive synergy.

So, with all this information, I was thinking, what if we really wanted to reduce gender inequality? What could we do? And here are three ideas. Like all policy interventions, there are costs and benefits; let’s see what they are and who bears the costs….

Idea number 1: no kids How about women not having children? It would be a bit like Lysistrata, except thanks to birth control, or the option to have sex with women instead of men, women could still have sex. This would make women workers earn more like men workers and should more quickly reduce the gender gap in earnings among MBAs.

The downside: No more yuppy kids. Might be hard on private school enrollments, sleep consultants, that kind of thing. So, maybe not having children won’t work.

Idea number 2: marry down How about women marrying down? Unlike the situation of MBA moms who marry up, marrying down means MBA moms work just as much as ever—and don’t decrease work hours except in the brief period around a child’s arrival in their lives. Though it turns out that when women have higher earning spouses they are more likely to take off time, when men have higher earning spouses, they still remain those “ideal workers” plugging along in the workforce. These are the true income maximizers! These couples are more likely to hire a nanny or use day care, while for man bread-winner couples, having their high-powered women stay home to do the day care themselves is another status marker.

The downside: It could be a little tough on some marriages, at least in the short run: Turns out that marriages with higher-earning or higher-status women are less stable (and harder on men’s health for richer people). Limiting people’s freedom to marry, like limiting their freedom to have kids, isn’t particularly appealing, either.

Idea number 3: work flexibility How about creating more flexible workplaces that don’t penalize men or women for time out or reduced hours? If we really wanted to reduce gender inequality, we could do this. We could stop marginalizing men who seek flexibility, and stop putting up barriers to women seeking the same. It would be a way to promote freedom to have children and care well for them, freedom to marry whom we want, and freedom to participate in the market place in ways that leave constraint behind.

The downside: The authors of this study note that many believe that it is in the “nature of the work” of the high-flying banking and investment world that makes this kind of change especially difficult, and report that such changes have come about a bit more in, for example, medicine. I think more sweeping change is possible. And then, there would be no more papers about that puzzling wage and wealth gap between men and women. Because it isn’t really that much of a puzzle.

–Virginia Rutter

There’s s a long-lived puzzle about money, gender, and housework. In heterosexual partnerships where men earn more than women, women do more housework (on average). When men and women earn about the same, their housework contributions become more equal (though women still do more). But, and here’s the puzzle, when women earn more than their men, women again do more housework. (See this for a classic on the puzzle.)

If paid work and housework were “gender neutral” you’d expect there to be an equal trade off in households between paid work and domestic work. Women who earn more would do less housework, and men who earn less would do more housework.

But paid work and housework aren’t just about earning money and running the household—look back at this column on lower-earning men and health for a different example. Instead, paid work and housework are also about “doing gender”… they are activities that help to confirm masculinity (through earning for men) and femininity (through housework for women). But, you already knew that. A new international study (abstract only) tells us more about the symbolic meaning of paid work.

First, signs of change: researcher Sarah Thébaud found that men who believe in gender equality and who work fewer hours or earn less than their (women) partners do modify their housework behavior—a little bit. These men do about one and half hours more housework than their breadwinning (male) comparisons. But this modification isn’t enough to counteract what women do when they are in the same situation. Lower-earning women still do about twice as much housework as guys when they are the lower-earning partner. Gender roles are changing, but sticky.

The question is why are lived gender roles sticky and slow to change even when people’s personal gender attitudes appear to be changing? Thébaud used cross-national data from 18 countries to learn whether something in the larger culture could explain why we keep seeing this housework/doing gender pattern.

Sure enough, in countries where breadwinning, paid work, and earning a good income are more highly valued (as measured by a “work culture index”), even lower-earning men are more likely to resist doing housework. It wasn’t that the men were necessarily personally invested in any kind of gender stereotype, but where the larger culture emphasized the importance of earning and paid work, men did less housework no matter what. So, for example, the Netherlands had a lower work culture index and Dutch men who earned less than their (women) partners added more housework hours. Meanwhile, in Slovenia, which has a higher work culture index, the men performed no additional housework when they earned less than when they earned more.

The way Thébaud explains it, “Although men may do more housework on average in contexts where women have a stronger presence in the labor market…my results suggest that the ongoing pressure for men to live up to breadwinning expectations remains strong and has the power to considerably restrict the degree to which they engage in unpaid work.”

In case you were wondering: countries that were higher on the work culture index weren’t higher on productivity or GDP. But, other aspects of cultural context are more encouraging. Studies, like this one, have shown that men in countries where more women are in the workforce do more housework.

–Virginia Rutter

Here’s how it works: if you call it a “diversity initiative” or a “work family intervention” or stuff like that there’s the chance that you will see resistance to the project of, well, promoting diversity, or creating a family-friendly work place. On campuses, all the earnest and the marginalized check it out and everyone else goes, “what? Oh, I don’t think I got that email.”

You already know this intuitively, but a study in the current issue of Gender & Society (abstract only) tells the story of a workplace initiative that starts with the notion that framing matters.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota hung out at Best Buy corporate headquarters while Best Buy instituted a program that is not called “let’s try to reduce the sexism in our every day practices at work” — instead it is called “Results-Only Work Environment” (ROWE) : On the ROWE website they explain their project like this:

“Results-Only Work Environment is a management strategy where employees are evaluated on performance, not presence. In a ROWE, people focus on results and only results – increasing the organization’s performance while cultivating the right environment for people to manage all the demands in their lives…including work.”

The program was created by Jodi Thompson and Cali Ressler , and it has gotten positive recognition in BusinessWeek (twice!) and you can also hear about it on a recent NPR segment. It basically involves a flexible workplace.

The UM researchers (including Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen at the Flexible Work and Well Being Center) explain in their article how the focus on results reduced resistance. “ROWE was not presented as a work-family initiative or a gender equity initiative; rather it was strategically framed as a smart business move… [the founders] felt that a gender or work-family framing would lead to the initiative’s marginalization.”

You see, ROWE is about achieving excellence. This isn’t (merely) Foucauldian. This is what any diversity project of any sort is all about, right? ROWE–which has has been adopted by other companies, too–reports a 35 percent reduction in waste and a 90 percent reduction in voluntary worker turnover.

But here’s the other part of the story: The program didn’t reduce resistance completely–especially among men managers. But it created a different kind of conversation because the analysis wasn’t explicitly about gender or diversity or accommodating people with exceptional needs. It was about an alternative approach to  work that relied less on conventions of time use and more on outcomes. The resistance heard by the researchers was to the ways that the program was challenging what’s called the ideal worker norm.

What is the ideal worker norm? Well, you know what it is, it is the way you were brought up to work. You’re there or feel you should be there as much as possible (long hours). You are busy all the time, doing doing doing (look busy!). You are ready to drop everything when someone says there’s a panic (excel at “fire drills”). Thing is, this way of working is (1) not necessary for success and (2) damaging to people’s ability to balance work and other aspects of their lives. Joan Williams writes about the ideal worker norm wonderfully in Unbending Gender (2001). She shows us just how gendered this approach is, as it builds on an outdated model of family life.

By saying (as ROWE does), oh this norm of how we work (excessive hours, fire drills, et c) is a “choice” it says we can make other choices. This means that we can de-naturalize the sneaky connection of men as superior workers (especially men who can hide or evade their other personal responsibilities). And we start to allow men as well as women to make contributions and be achievers in all the domains of their lives.

–Virginia Rutter

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

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