Janelle Jones, Research Associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, gives Girlwpen an update on her most recent CEPR report. Janelle Jones researches and writes on a variety of U.S. labor market topics, such as unemployment, job quality, and unions. (Bio here.) Jones’ bottom line: Our better-educated, older and more experienced black workforce still has seen a fall in the share of good jobs over the last 30 years.

In a recent report, John Schmitt and I demonstrated that despite large increases over the last three decades in educational attainment, black workers are less likely to be in a “good job” than they were three decades ago. We define a good job as one with good pay, health insurance, and a retirement plan. Even with our limited definition of a good job, this disheartening pattern holds true for both black men and black women.

Between 1979 and 2011, the share of black men with a high school degree or less fell almost by half (from 72.6 percent to 43.4 percent), and the share with a college degree nearly tripled (from 8.1 percent to 23.4 percent). Despite this massive improvement at both ends of the education spectrum, black men overall and at every education level – less than high school, high school, some college but short of a four-year degree, and at least a four-year degree – are less likely to be in a good job today than three decades ago.

Over this same time period, black women have made even more educational progress. Between 1979 and 2011, the share of black women with no more than a high school degree fell from about two-thirds (66.7 percent) to about one third (34.9 percent), and the share with at least a four-year degree more than doubled (from 12.9 percent to 28.5 percent). As a result, in 2011, a higher share of black women had a college degree than black men. However, similar to black men, black women were less likely to be a good job in 2011 than in 1979 at every education level.

Although there were large improvements in educational attainment for black women and black men, only black women experienced increases in good jobs. Because the trend lines for black women and black men have moved in opposite directions, the gender gap shrank steadily since 1979. The good news is that black women have continued to improve their standing in the labor market. However, in every year since 1979, and at every education level, black women remained less likely to be in a good job than black men.

These substantial gains in education tell us that a lack of “human capital” does not appear to be causing the difficulties black workers face in the labor market. Instead, one cause of these difficulties is the deterioration in the bargaining power of low- and middle-wage workers, which includes a disproportionate amount of black workers. Decades of long-term economic trends – like a fall in the value of the minimum wage, decreased unionization, and the privatization of local and state functions – have taken away the bargaining power of workers, and had a disproportionate effect on blacks workers. Another factor in the lack of payoff for black workers is ongoing labor-market discrimination. In particular, black women must overcome a nasty form of double discrimination, which includes the need for pay equity, affordable childcare, and protection from sexual harassment at work on top of unfair practices based on race.

Black workers have made significant and often overlooked investments in education in the last three decades. The lack of growth in good jobs answers the main question of the report, has education paid off for black workers as a group? Short Answer: It has not.

Want to hear more? See Janelle’s interview at BloombergTV.

In 1968 the documentary Hunger In America aired on CBS. The film exposed the prevalence of hunger and malnutrition in the United States. I was among the many who were shocked. The sight of children with distended bellies begging on the streets of Calcutta had kept me awake nights as I traveled back from my first job teaching in Taiwan. A year later I’d married a man who worked for CARE and often accompanied him distributing food and cooking oil to villagers in the Dominican Republic. I knew too many people in too many places were hungry every day. I knew that poverty and hunger were ugly killers.  But until the documentary aired I was ignorant of the extent of hunger and malnutrition in the United States.

The film and the outcry that followed generated additional Congressional support for efforts in various areas to make good use of food surpluses and feed people in need. By 1974 the Food Stamp Program, (now known officially as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), was operating across the nation.

Hunger continues to plague America, but for four decades food stamps have been one of the most effective and efficient federal efforts directed toward the alleviation the severe, long lasting consequences of malnutrition. The food stamps have done more than any other government program to lift children out of extreme poverty.

Thus last week’s passage of a farm bill without any consideration of food stamps and other food assistance programs, struck me as more than just another Congressional wrangle between political parties with divergent agendas. It went beyond the anti-woman/anti child proposals cloaked in pious platitudes. This was a vote in favor of hunger, a pro-poverty vote.

The republican rationale for separating farm policies from food for the hungry went like this: separation facilitates cuts to agribusiness subsidies; food stamps can be addressed later.  But few could miss the obvious agenda in conservative rhetoric: drastic cuts to ‘wasteful spending’ on nutrition programs for those seen as lazy, work adverse freeloaders responsible for swelling the ranks of program beneficiaries.

This rationale flies in the face of facts. Forty one percent of food stamp recipients live in households with at least one wage earner and less than ten percent of those receiving food stamps are also receiving welfare benefits.

Furthermore, years of data on the food stamp program indicate that in economic downturns more people need and use food stamps; but as the economy improves, the number needing assistance declines. Studies also reveal that more than seventy percent of food stamp recipients live in households with children, many headed by single working mothers; more than one-quarter live with senior citizens or people with disabilities. Put another way forty-seven percent of all those receiving food stamps are children and a significant number of recipients are unable to work due to debilitating conditions.

Far from being a rip off of taxpayer money, the SNAP program is an investment in the nation’s future. Research repeatedly shows that children with nutritious diets are healthier and do better in school than their malnourished classmates. Studies comparing children living in poverty who receive SNAP assistance with those who do not find consistent advantages in healthy development for program beneficiaries. Pregnant women with healthy diets give birth to healthier babies.

But the positive benefits of food stamps are not restricted to infants and children.  Benefits extend well in to adulthood. Last November the National Bureau of Economic Research released a working paper, “Long Term Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net”, co-authored by Hilary Hoynes, Diane Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond. Their research revealed that adults with access to food stamps as children in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in the final trimester in utero and early childhood, had significantly better health than adults from similar backgrounds who had not received nutritional assistance.  Better health included lower incidents of serious metabolic syndrome conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.  Furthermore, women receiving food stamp assistance as children fared better economically in adulthood. They were less apt to be receiving safety net benefits than similar adult women without access to food stamps during childhood.

Giving children a nutritious start in life is the first step in raising healthy, economically productive, community-minded citizens. No democracy can succeed with out such a citizenry.  We knew this more than sixty years ago when the first major pieces of the food stamp program were initiated. Today’s willful “forgetting”  is shortsighted and dangerous. Those who do so should not be allowed to argue that they “didn’t know the facts”. Ignorance of the law is not an acceptable excuse in legal proceedings; ignorance of fact should be viewed as equally unacceptable in matters of public policy.

(Or, What All Good Thought Leaders Can Learn from Academics, and What Academics Can Learn from Business, Too)

When LinkedIn launched its thought leaders feature in October 2012 (Follow Richard Branson! Follow Barack Obama!), they were flooded with aspiring contenders who self-nominated, then closed off applications once they reached 150. No matter that the list seemed to skew (ahem) male. Some LinkedIn members created forums to figure out the formula to get in, to no avail.

But if you want to know who has really cracked the code (or, a piece of it, anyway), look to academics.  Academics are the original, not to mention some of the most original, thought leaders. They lead with their thought—always have, and hopefully, always will. The time is ripe to learn from the masters. Because as the term “thought leadership” becomes more and more widely applied, some important principles continue to get lost.

How did such a lofty term become DIY, and what does “thought leadership” actually mean, academic colleagues ask me these days, in a business sense? Coined in 1994, according to an oft-cited Wikipedia entry, by strategy+business editor-in-chief Joel Kurtzman, the term “thought leader” initially referred to interview subjects covered in his magazine. Used here and there over the next decade, “thought leader” fast became one of the cool-kid buzzwords of the 2010s, so much so that we are now seeing a backlash against the term.

In the iconoclastic spirit of Colbert, “I can thought leadership, and so can you.”

Definitions abound. Last year, Social Strand Media’s Tracy Sestili published a list of 21 of them.  In May 2013, Mashable’s James O’Brien offered a longer “true history” of thought leadership tracing the term’s origins back to McKinsey Quarterly circa 1964 and noting that while social media has since brought about an incredible democratization, it has also wrought a dilution. Self-nomination in the Twitter-sphere and on the conference circuit does not a thought leader make.

But what does?

Two core traits, I believe, define thought leadership, at heart. And academics know these traits well.  They are:

1. Long-term commitment

To all those seeking a quick fix, remember that thought leadership is cumulative. “Rather like achieving academic tenure,” says Rebecca Lieb in Mashable, “[t]hought leadership requires a continuum of wisdom, accomplishment, and a body of published work that stands the test of a degree of time.”

There’s no fast track. It takes work. And so, thought leadership can hardly be monetized right away.

2. Authenticity

Thought leaders are not manufactured. Instead, they lead from within.

Lewis Howes, who literally wrote the book on LinkedIn writes over at Clarity blog: “Thought leaders are indispensable because they’re custom made.  Their unique experiences and choices have shaped who they are and how they perceive their environment, which makes them one of a kind.”

Big agree. And more on that in a future post.

But back to my point. Aspiring platform creators, idea entrepreneurs, social entreprises, and businesses can, in cultivating authenticity and commitment, take a page from a professor’s book. In all fairness, can’t an academic (and other expert individuals seeking a public voice) learn from industry-driven thought leadership gurus, in turn?

Yes.

From Sestili’s compiled list of 21 definitions, all of which come from the business realm, here are five that I believe academics seeking a platform beyond academe would do well to absorb*:

1. Shel Israel: A thought leader is someone who looks at the future and sets a course for it that others will follow. Thought leaders look at existing best practices then come up with better practices. They foment change, often causing great disruption.
2. Jeanine Moss: Thought Leadership is the ability to aggregate followers around ideas to educate, influence and inspire.
3. Tom Paul, COO Pop-Art: To be a company that exemplifies thought leadership, you need to have an idea engine, a concept forge, AS WELL AS [sic] an outward-leaning communication stance combined with a desire to raise the playing field – a capability to not only learn new things, to not only discover them for the first time, but to educate others – selflessly.
4. TechCrunch: (on being a thought leader) someone who notices things so big and so obvious that everyone else manages to overlook them.
5. Scott Ginsberg: A trusted source who moves people with innovative ideas.

In other words, for scholars to be thought leaders in the more popular sense of the term, they need to develop a wider platform, accrue followers beyond their students, embrace forms of communication that may be new to them, and—my personal favorite—move people, publicly, with their ideas.

How do you define “thought leadership”? Do you bristle at or embrace the term? Drop me a line in comments, or tweet me @deborahgirlwpen. I’d love to hear.

*For one of the more thoughtful takes, in the business realm, on creating thoughtful thought leadership, see this piece by Daniel W. Rasmus at Fast Company.

Image source: Yagoshi

Thanks to Chloe Bird, Ph.D., Senior Sociologist at RAND Corporation, for sharing this new health podcast.

For nearly 30 years, heart disease has killed more women than men in the United States. Yet women continue to face lower rates of diagnosis, treatment, and survival. Many other diseases are disproportionately prevalent among women and may affect them differently, requiring gender-specific approaches to diagnosis and treatment. The disparities in care might have developed unintentionally, but the time has come to narrow them deliberately. In this recording, a panel of experts discuss women’s health, heart health, and the potential effects of gender on health.

This month’s column features a new guest author: Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, Ph.D. is a sociologist and author of the new book Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos (Scarecrow Press).

____________________

I have spent the better part of the last five years trying to understanding how women use music to heal after  experiencing trauma.  When I was interviewing women for my book, Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman, one comment stuck in my head from a woman named Madeline.  Madeline talked about how she used to be into music by hair-metal bands.  She said, “Growing up, all my favorite bands were male artists.  Um, maybe it’s just that now I see that their message is from their point of view.  And I internalize that and maybe that’s why I made all the shitty choices that I made.  I think that maybe the reason that I only listen to female artists is because I just would rather have their messages in my head.” And this comment wasn’t rare.  Many women said that they found empowerment/comfort/salvation in music written and performed by another woman.

Now, I am totally aware that women can listen to male bands to feel support and vice versa.  However, one thing that I think it missing from conversations about feminism and pop culture is how women use music by feminist musicians as a way to heal after they have experienced trauma. This was the premise of my research for Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman.  The women I spoke with selected Tori Amos’s music as their self-care guide.  They were very much aware that this help was coming from a feminist performer and, because of that, found her music to sit close to home.

From this study I took away a few helpful tips for connecting feminism with music and healing that I would like to share.  In no particular order:

– Find an anthem:  I don’t think it gets much better than listening to powerful women belt out songs like it is the last time they will have the opportunity to sing in their lives.  Whether it’s Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Aretha, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Janelle Monae, Beyonce etc.  Feminist musicians approach their songs with an eye toward empowerment, equality and expressing the experiences of women.  One of the reasons many of the women I spoke with enjoyed Tori’s song “Spark” was because it addressed her experience with miscarriage.  Healing from the loss of a child is hard, but hearing a performer address her emotions can be helpful.  So find your feminist anthem.  (I have many.  Some, like Aretha’s “Respect” and Ani’s song “Alla This” I will gladly cop to.  Others are embarrassing but help me get through the day!)

– Create While you Listen:  In 2007 I was a grad student at Virginia Tech  when my college became the site of the worst school shooting in U.S. history.  One activity that got me through was creating art while listening to Tori’s music and trying to use the lyrics to illustrate my feelings.  Many of the women I spoke with did the same thing with writing, crafting, singing and dancing.  Song lyrics became immortalized through their bodies, art and voices.  What is even more important is that this exercise requires you to think about the lyrics you are repeating to yourself.  What do they mean?  Are they empowering?  Of course we all can rattle off songs meant for entertainment.  But if there was ever a chance to think about the impact of music on our identities, it is when we are expressing ourselves through art and being vulnerable.

– The Feminist Standpoint:  Ok, stick with me.  In sociology (my field), the feminist standpoint basically says that women’s stories are often ignored in a culture.  So, I would encourage you to take an anthem song and use it to tell your story.  Anthems are great backdrops for activism.  They can help with speaking out about being raped, having an eating disorder, having a miscarriage etc. And, speaking out is a huge step toward breaking the culture of silence that surrounds these experiences.  I, like many of you, have found a new hero in Wendy Davis (the Texas legislator who stood for 11 hours to strike down anti-abortion laws).  She used her voice and inspired the band The Bright Light Social Hour to record this song called “Wendy Davis.”

Finding feminism in music (for both female and male artists) is key to changing the ways pop culture stereotypes women.  Finding feminism in music to help us heal from trauma is key to finding empowerment in vulnerable moments.  What do you listen to?

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– Crossposted from Feministing with permission –

Live, from the land of Betty Friedan’s homestate and the birthplace of radical feminist cells like Chicago Women’s Liberation Union and the West Side Group, it’s ChiFems!

Earlier this month, I spoke on a ChiFems panel moderated by Christine Gallagher Kearney along with my fellow Girl w/Penner Veronica Arreola, my fellow OpEd Project maven Claudia Garcia-Rojas, and fabulous feminist (and OpEd Project alum) Ashley Lauren Samsa about feminism in the Midwest, past, present, future.  ChiFems is a part-social, part-activist group that aims to bring Chicago feminists together to build relationships and work together to create change.  I adore them.

Here’s the video. Note: we didn’t all plan to wear jean jackets. Perhaps it’s a Midwestern thing?

If you haven’t already seen this column originally posted at MsMagazine Blog by Pallavi Banerjee read it below. Pallavi is a post-doctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University’s Sociology Department.

Do most of us still live in a 1950 nuclear family where dad goes off to work and mom stays home to take care of the family? Not in real life. But that lifestyle is enshrined in the United States’ dependent visa policies. According to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Leave it to Beaver way of life is the only way skilled workers’ migrant families ought to live.

It all begins with one simple fact. There is a shortage of high-tech workers in the United States. We don’t produce enough computer engineers, analysts, programmers, engineers, and doctors, to meet the country’s needs. The United States tries to solve this problem by allowing U.S. businesses to hire high-tech workers from other countries by granting H1-B non-immigrant visas to individuals from other countries seeking temporary work in  “specialty occupations.”

These visas allow a U.S. company to employ a foreign individual for up to six years with the possibility of permanent residency. To further entice migrant high-skilled workers to leave their homeland and come to the U.S., they offer H4 dependent visas to their spouses and children. In 2010, from India alone, 138,431 high-skilled Indian immigrants and the 55,335 Indian immigrants on H-4 dependent visas.

But the “dependent visa” puts many restrictions on the spouses, usually women, of the skilled workers who have an H1-B visa. The dependent visa holder is not allowed to work for pay until the lead migrant has gained permanent residency in the U.S., a process that can take six years or more. In some states, the dependent visa holders are not even allowed to drive.

When I studied families with an H1-B/H-4 dichotomy I found that most adult recipients of the H-4 dependent visas are highly qualified women. They experienced a loss of dignity and self-deprecation. Some women told me they felt they were thrown back into a model of the “traditional family” where women are not valued at all outside of the home. They talked about being rendered invisible, feeling lost, and for some, suicidal.

One of my study informants described her H-4 visa as a “vegetable visa meant to make you vegetate.” Others called it a “prison” or “bondage” visa. Another woman told me “You lose your individuality and in time all your confidence – and one day suddenly you realize you are just reduced to being a visa number in your head. It is scary – it’s like losing your head.”

Gaining permanent residency in the U.S., which would allow spousal employment, could take many years for H1-B workers. This means these women will be legally unable to work for years on end. Some of the women I spoke to simply could not handle their situation and decided to return to India. One high-tech worker who recently went through divorce told me, “we had absolutely no problem as a couple, it’s this visa situation…she was unhappy and depressed and it was not going to get better. We had to take the very hard and cruel way out – the many pains of being a foreign worker.”

As the U.S. debates Comprehensive Immigration Reform, and considers increasing the number of “high skilled foreign workers”, lawmakers should reconsider the constraints on spouses embedded within dependent visas.

Immigration policies designed to bring high-skilled workers and their dependents to the U.S. fill a need in the high-tech industry, but they fall short in building gender equal, stable, happy, and viable families. The 1950s are long gone. It is time to let wives work. Why force migrant families to live in the past?

My daughter Amy turned 43 last week and on Saturday we’ll have a big party for her. Amy is party girl through and through and I always look forward to her birthday with delight. But yesterday my happy anticipation was dampened by a casual comment from a friend, “I know you must be tired of having little kid birthday parties after all these years.”

What?

Yes, I’ve given and/or helped plan lots of parties for Amy, parties that still involve aspects often associated with younger children. Amy has intellectual and physical disabilities; she requires more care than my friends’ daughters and sons.  Sometimes I’m exhausted by extensive mothering duties I’ll never out grow.  But tired of parties for Amy? Never!

Harilyn Rousso’s new book, Don’t Call Me Inspirational: A Disabled Feminist Talks Back, caught my attention the instant I glanced at the title.   The anecdote above is part of the reason.  Rousso, whose complicated birth resulted in cerebral palsy and noticeable physical impairments–slurred speech, facial grimaces, an uneven gait–addresses head on the ways many well meaning people assume that anyone with a disability is to be avoided, ignored, pitied–or admired simply for living with her disability. She writes, “I know, I know, if you were me, you’d never leave your house and maybe even kill yourself. So, I am inspirational because I haven’t committed suicide…”

Parents of children with disabilities often elicit some of these same reactions, especially if they are single parents.  I have cared for Amy pretty much on my own since she was a young child. I have plenty of experience with the ins and outs of caring and advocating for first, children, and then gradually disabled people of all ages.  I know many of the realities; I know the heartaches. But I also know the joys.

Rousso gives us an intimate glimpse of how far we’ve come and how far we have to go–as a society and as individuals–in providing not simply equal access, but equal acceptance and genuine inclusion. Her searing insider’s view of feminist organizations and what they have NOT done to support and learn from women with disabilities is part of her story. It is a story that should be required reading for every feminist.

The evolution of civil rights for people with disabilities built on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. By 1975 the passage of the federal Education for All Handicapped Children Act made it illegal to deny access to public education to disabled children. But Rousso, whose mother insisted her daughter could and would do everything other children did, attended public schools years earlier.  Dealing with substantial physical challenges, but gifted intellectually, she went on to earn a degree in economics from Brandeis and to train as a therapist at a psychoanalytic institute.  She was asked to leave at the end of her first year—the leaders of the institute thought the signs of her cerebral palsy would distress clients.

Rousso writes with painful honesty of how this obviously illegal, enraging discrimination led her to a clearer understanding of prejudices against people with disabilities—her own as well as those  of others.  The incident, as hurtful as it was, helped her to move from denying her disabilities to identifying with the disabled community, and to “embrace my identity as a person with a disability still further.” Moving reminders of how slow and incomplete this process is for the author and for society are scattered throughout the memoir.

Rousso was a feminist before she was a disability activist. She was puzzled by feminist obliviousness to the double (or triple, if you were a women of color) whammy confronting women with disabilities.  As a board member of various feminist organizations, usually the first and only disabled member, she experienced the excruciatingly slow pace with which many of her new colleagues came to understand these dynamics. Her ‘outsider’ status was one often shared by women of color, she later discovered.  Writing today, she notes “[F]eminists have become more inclusive…[But] even today disabled women are more likely to be included out of obligation…They are not seen as a rich source of diversity. The welcome mat is not yet out.”

The memoir’s 52 brief chapters resemble a conversation with a new friend. We learn first a bit, then a bit more about her life; gradually additional details emerge as the acquaintance deepens. Rousso’s book has the power to trigger further conversations–conversations critical to moving beyond the damaging misconceptions and prejudice still surrounding people with disabilities.

Most feminists, particularly those of us with close personal experience with disabilities, think we understand the issues. We think we are doing what we can, maybe even all we can.  Maybe we are. Maybe we aren’t.  We need to talk about it.

Among the many things I had planned to do before the birth of my first child, one was post a review of Lisa Catherine Harper’s first book, A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood.  Now over the initial shock of transitioning into motherhood, I realize all the more how valuable this book was and still is to me, as Harper precisely chronicles a life divided by “before” and “after”— in this case, having a child.

Harper presents the idea that the deep divisions that women experience — specifically around pregnancy, gestation, childbirth, and then the encounter of a child —sunder women physically and emotionally in ways they are left to existentially and practically reconcile.  Her book is categorized into three states of being: “Inside,” which begins with the conception of her daughter and follows her pregnancy; “Inside/Out” which chronicles her labor and birth; and “Outside” which tracks her entry into motherhood as closely as it does her daughter’s new experiences in the world.

Harper holds a PhD in English with an emphasis in feminist theory and research and her book includes meticulous research as she alternates exploring the science behind what is happening to her (with information about how pregnancy alters virtually every system in a woman’s body) and the emotional resonances she feels on a deeply internal level. She also chronicles her reactions to others’ responses to her physically changing state.  At times the tacking back and forth between the more didactic writing to the lyrical can seem abrupt, but the model reflects her commitment to knit understanding of the logical and mysterious, of fact and emotion, the science and the poetry of her experiences. Although I enjoyed Harper’s sensitivity to the physical processes of pregnancy and childbirth so much I gave a copy of her book to my Ob/Gyn, what I later appreciated more was Harper’s willingness to connoiter her new role as part-time professor with fulltime mother.  In this current moment of Lean In rhetoric and new iterations of the perennial “have it all” debates, Harper is disarmingly clear about her own situation, asking, after her daughter is born: “Why didn’t motherhood matter?  Why was the home still a separate, unequal sphere? Why were mothers and children still so isolated from those things that really mattered to the childless, to the world outside the home?  Why did we talk endlessly about stupid things like Cheerios and diapers?”  And to the crux of her book: “Why did I feel so fractured?”

Searching to locate meaning in the time she spends caring for her daughter, beyond a circle of other mothers, is the axis on which identity, cultural value, and priority all spin for Harper.  Scholar that she is, she turns to the volume The American Woman’s Home, written by Catherine Beecher (sister to Harriet) who called for “a revolution in domestic arrangements” and Harper says is the “precursor to all the contemporary lifestyle magazines, TV talk shows, blogs and Websites that have reinvented the domestic arts for the post-millennial home…” Harper recognizes that for Beecher “the created home is a political act” and she wants it to be for her as well, not by redecorating it, literally or otherwise, but by having it hold broad, and real, cultural value, something I think is happening.

Harper writes, “the life of the home had to be remade… it had to matter in real and consequential ways.”  She is critical of the “modern feminist movement,” as she broadly labels it, as one that has decided to “map power where it already existed” i.e. outside the domestic sphere, while neglecting to elevate the work women (largely) do inside the home and keeping this devalued.  In order to support women’s work outside the home, Harper argues, the domestic and childrearing work so many women do needs to be legitimized and legalized, in part to help support women working outside the home.

It’s an argument whose point I see, but I think oversimplifies. While it’s clear Harper’s goal isn’t to go into detail or depth, the idea that the feminist movement, broadly painted, has roundly devalued domestic work to the elevation of work outside the home seems too one-note to me. While not necessarily her point, Harper doesn’t raise the issue of shifting the expectations of gender roles or equal parenting.

Her daughter teaches her how much “to work inside the home is a worthwhile occupation,” Harper writes, although this realization leaves her at odds with her education and expectations of the professional working world. She writes, “I belonged in neither world: much of my energy was invested in raising Ella so I couldn’t fully claim my professional identity, but neither could I identify what seemed to me the petty concerns of motherhood. I loved my daughter and I loved my home.  I did not love the stay-at-home culture of mothering.” Harper concludes that there has to be a future shift where the bifurcation into being a “work outside the home” mother doesn’t square off with “work inside the home” woman either — a “mommy war” reduction that I question as still legitimate.

Fundamentally, Harper wants the halves of her life to join, primarily by feeling each sphere is validated — the life-changing experience of motherhood co-existing with the intellectual and professional ambition she realizes, for her, has been more valorized. She concludes that insisting on motherhood and the home as generative space is an almost radical throwback to Beecher’s nineteenth-century insistence on the importance of these activities and demand for their recognition. It’s an interesting argument, in some ways provocative for its potential to twine conservative strands of thought with progressive ideals. Figuring out how child-rearing and the domestic life matters to her personally, and how to reinvent its meanings within a larger context, politically, is another parsing that Harper negotiates well in the last chapter of her book.

While driving through Los Angeles a few months ago (what else does one do here?) I listened to a new release of a song by a band called The Head and the Heart.  The tune was catchy, but what lingered in my mind was the band’s name — calling out the division of the body and the symbolic resonances each part holds.  The central tenet of Harper’s explorations remains joining what has been sundered into separate spheres: mother/scholar, domestic/public, former self/present self and the million ways identity is fractured, constantly, daily, even moment-to-moment, and the intentional work it takes to keep rearranging these pieces to make a whole.

There’s a terrific chapter in financial journalist Helaine Olen’s new book Pound Foolish that debunks popular myths around gender and money fueling the personal finance literature aimed at women. Think women are less financially literate than men? According to research by Annamaria Luardi, a professor of economics and accountancy at George Washington University and the academic director of the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center, men and women are both woefully financially illiterate. Think women aren’t as good with money? Research suggests that being made to feel that way may be the larger problem here.

My daughter and son are only three and a half. But I’ve been thinking a great deal about how girls learn money—or rather, about how we don’t. As the recent Pew report shows, a record 40% of all households with children under the age of 18 now include mothers who are either the sole or primary source of income for the family. Our daughters are growing up in a world where they will be expected to be breadwinners, just like our sons.

But what are they learning, early on, about money, and how it works?

I sat down with Robin Patinkin, CFA, CFP®, a Principal with Cedar Hill Associates, LLC, an investment advisory firm serving high net worth individuals, families, and foundations. Over a large helping of watermelon in a Chicago apartment high up in the clouds, Robin and I discussed myths and realities around financial literacy and young girls.

Robin has over a decade of experience in investment management and financial planning with a comprehensive understanding of family interests and issues. Working intimately with clients as well as raising two sons and a daughter now in their twenties, she’s an expert in guiding individuals through financial life decisions. She’s something of a trailblazer herself, having majored in business in the 1970s (a time when few women did) and later going back to earn an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management with a concentration in finance at age 45. She became a CFA charterholder, along with her eldest son, in 2012. She’s frequently called upon as a panelist, speaks on a variety of financial issues, and acts as an expert witness in divorce cases.

Here’s how our conversation went down.

DS: You’ve raised two boys and a girl.  Did you notice any differences in the ways your children took interest in money?

RP: Yes. When each child turned ten years old, I had my first conversation with them about money and investing. I gave each an opportunity to invest in a stock they would understand at that young age as a consumer, and then we followed the stock together. There seemed to be a higher interest from the boys. That was the first signal.  Later, when they were in high school, as part of the Illinois state public school graduation requirement, they each had to either take a consumer education course or pass an exam. Academically, my children are all very similar. My sons passed the exam with very little, if any, studying.  Yet my daughter, who found the material uninteresting, asked for my help. I sat down with her and explained everything in the book page by page. She didn’t pass. We were both surprised.

DS: This story sounds like the stereotype. As a woman in the wealth management industry, how did this make you feel?

RP: A few years ago, I heard Marie Wilson speak about White House Project research that found a clear division in knowledge and acumen between boys and girls concerning financial literacy when they hit high school.  This is the very age at which my children took the exam. As you can imagine, here sits a mother who herself beat the stereotypes, was one of the few women majoring in business during the 1970s, and viewed herself as a role model who had knocked down the barriers, I thought: how can this be happening with my daughter?  I started to question what I had done wrong.

DS: What would you tell a mama like me to teach her preschoolers about dough?

RP: Now is the perfect time to start. Even Sesame Street is incorporating financial literacy in their curriculum. I would begin with the basics: put a piggy bank in the bedroom. Show them money, physically. Take them on a field trip to look at currencies of the past. Talk about bartering—use their toys—and explain how the money system developed.  Go to a coin shop. When they’re a little older, perhaps even take a trip to the US Treasury in DC. Teach the basics of saving, spending, and giving. And don’t be afraid to really talk about money. There are many wonderful children’s books that teach what money is. One of my favorites is called The Go Around Dollar, by Barbara Johnston Adams and Joyce Audy Zarins. It takes a dollar bill and dissects what every symbol on it means. It’s important to start the conversation young: “Mommy is saving this for our vacation. Mommy is spending this on food.” Play games with money. When you’re in a store, have children count the change to make sure it’s correct. Money, at a young age, can be fun.

As your children grow, add different parts of financial literacy into the conversation. It’s important for parents not only to role model, but to talk about it. So at an early age, it’s about charity, saving, spending. Children have different personalities and will exhibit varying feelings about these things. As they get older, you build in more about your personal lives: your spending, your saving habits, good debt/bad debt, things that worry you. Talk about how we work to earn money and where the money goes. Do a field trip to a bank, explain credit cards and their use, define what an asset is. When the news is on, if there’s a financial term mentioned, define it for your children right there. Use the moment, whenever and wherever you can.

DS:  In Pound Foolish Helaine Olen writes, “[T]here’s a fine line between making the [personal finance] industry more friendly to women and overtly condescending to them, and frankly, it is a line few have managed to tread successfully.” How do you think parents can be cognizant of occasional differences in attitudes between boys and girls around money, without condescending to the girls?

RP: I assumed, because I was in the business, that my children would understand equally, and there was no need to put effort into educating them differently at all.  In retrospect, I probably should have spent additional time with my daughter, who seemed less engaged, thus piquing her interest more around money and investing. I should have realized back when she was 10 that another approach was required to interest my daughter on the subject. Selecting a stock wasn’t the right fit. One size does not fit all.

I often think about what I should have done differently with my daughter, and why her financial competence was less than her brothers’. I wonder if there was some sort of emotional hook or mode of presentation that I should have employed to involve her more in the conversation and learn the lessons. I could have offered her baby steps, assignments, and tasks in a simple non-threatening way.

DS: Your daughter is currently 23. What do you do now?

RP: Marie Wilson’s presentation was a trigger for me. I am now, and have been for the past few years, making a concerted effort to get my daughter up to speed. In her early years in college, my daughter started overspending. This was not intentional by the way, but more from a lack of understanding. So I then set the stage. My husband and I were fortunate enough to be able to put money aside to support college expenses, something so many American families struggle to fund. She had a credit card, her own checking account, and was given a reasonable monthly amount to live on. We covered tuition, and she was responsible for everything else. She learned how to budget and pay bills. She caught onto the lessons of personal finance she hadn’t yet somehow received.  She’s now moving into her first apartment after college and working her first grown up job.  She’s empowered, with me in the background still coaching, but she’s as responsible now as the boys.

DS: It’s been exactly 50 years since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law yet women still make $.77 to the male dollar, prompting a renewed look at a legacy unfulfilled. So much of the problem, of course, is structural. But do you think an additional problem is that girls and women need to “lean in” more to our own financial education, or that the financial literacy industry isn’t effectively leaning out to us? Are we doing a good enough job teaching our girls, and are the methods employed successful?

RP: I think we’re failing on both accounts. There are outliers of success, and we can’t group all girls into one category. Yet I do believe these discrepancies in financial literacy are a problem across race and class. From my personal observation and experience working with girls, women, boys, and men, I suggest there is much to do. Yes, there are improvements since my college days, when there were few women in business, but the stereotypes persist, especially in much of the personal finance literature. I strongly believe it is our duty as mothers and fathers to recognize this shortfall and focus on the issue of financial literacy for our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, and ourselves. And it’s important for women like myself, in the industry, who have the education, the understanding, and the acumen, to work with our colleagues in the industry to combat this dilemma. My ultimate goal for my daughter—as for all our daughters—is that she pursues her career dreams and ambitions while living a life of financial freedom and independence, so that should a crisis take place, she is not destroyed.

Add your thoughts to the conversation, and be sure to check out Olen’s book. Is there a financial literacy gender gap, and if so, to what extent is the problem structural in nature? To what extent can parents and teachers play a role? Got questions for Robin? Feel free to leave them in comments here.