I’ve always wanted to see the Thanksgiving Day parade here in NY up close, but have always managed to be away.  Until today!

My dad and I got up and out and wandered into Central Park, then hopped a wall and accidentally (whoops) snuck through the barricades and actually found ourselves in the area where everyone in the parade lines up as it begins.  This is generally known by those who know me as “The Siegel Slip” (coined such by one Miss Courtney Martin, who has traveled with me quite a bit), and it wasn’t planned, I swear.  Anyway, we got some GREAT pics from very up close, which I’ll post sometime over the weekend–as soon as my dad can figure out how to send pictures from his new iPhone over the web.  It may be a while 🙂

In the meantime, sending the GWP community my wishes for a wonderful day!

PS. We’ve been told there may have been an issue with comments yesterday — we’ll get on it as soon as we’re all back online after the holiday – please bear with us in the meantime!

This just got sent to me, and it seems so fitting for Thanksgiving this year–a poem, by Langston Hughes:

I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed –
I, too, am America.

– Langston Hughes, 1925

See also Hughes’ “Let America Be America Again”.  And thank you, Jessie, for sending these! Here’s wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving, filled with stuffing and gratitude and love.  Me?  I’ll be stuffing myself with my Jewish family, on the holiday few in my family this year feel ambivalent about.  Well, I always feel ambivalent about the turkeys, but that’s just the guilty carnivore in me.  Today, my parents get to meet their grandkitten!  Off to bake the pies…

We’re back to regale with tales of research from the international hinterland. The global economic crisis has been making front-page news for weeks now. And while we’ve heard lots about the bankers and the automakers, the gendered impacts of these shifts, especially internationally, are little reported. This week, we take a look at these impacts in the context of the phenomena of remittances.

Remittance is a big word that describes a simple concept critical to the economic viability of many countries. The term ‘remittance’ refers to the transfer of money from one country to the other by immigrant (or migrant) workers who leave their home country (usually in the Global South) to work in a higher-paid arena (usually in the Global North). Although difficult to exactly measure, remittances now account for the second largest source of external funding for developing countries. The Migration and Remittances Team at the World Bank estimates that flows to developing countries will reach $238 billion in 2008. Interestingly, with the rapid economic development of some developing countries, especially the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), the flow of remittances is increasingly between developing countries. Information from the US Census Bureau shows that remittances between developing countries was 17% in 2008.

Why is this important to women? Remittances are a direct product of migration, one of the most highly gendered social processes. According to UNFPA, in 2006 95 million migrants were women, approximately half of all international migrants worldwide. Whether women are being left behind with the children, making decisions on how to spend the money that men (or children or other family members) send from abroad, or whether they leave behind children with extended family members in the hopes that they can create better lives for themselves and their families from a distance, women are at the maelstrom of movement.

UN-INSTRAW has been working on a fantastic project on Gender and Remittances since 2003. So far, they have looked at the patterns of migration and remittances by women between the Dominican Republic and Spain and the US, the Philippines and Italy, Guatemala and the US, Columbia and Morocco and Spain, SADC and Lesotho and South Africa, Albania and Greece, and Senegal and France. Key concerns of these projects are not only the recognition of the shear number of women migrants and the amount of money being sent back, but these monetary flows are then gendered both at the household and community level. In many countries, community development projects have been started with remittance money. INSTRAW, and others using a gender perspective, seeks to ensure that such money benefits both men and women, as well as is inclusive of issues specific to age, sexuality, race, ethnicity and religion.

Why does the gendered nature of remittance patterns matter in the context of the current global economic crisis? Well, according to The Economist, “plunging commodity prices and reduced foreign demand will hurt quite a few African economies; foreign investment, remittances and foreign aid will all shrink.” However, in spite of much doom and gloom in the current financial forecast, there is hope.

Remittances are one of the least volatile sources of foreign exchange in developing countries. They may slow but they never stop. They will continue as long as migration continues. Not only are they sometimes the sole source of income for many families – they are often seed funds for entrepreneurs. Two amazing young women from Mexico recognize the importance and the effect of remittances in their communities and have mobilized women in the community and the diaspora to exploit the full potential of these funds, as well as to ensure that the funds are used in a way that benefits both men and women.

Image Credit.

After months of slugging through false starts on a sample chapter for my next book proposal, months of promising my agent I’d have it ready by the end of the month, and feelings of writerly delinquency in spite of hours of hard work, I have had a writing breakthrough. Friends have asked what I credit it to, so that I can learn from it for next time, cause I have no doubt there will be a next time. Writing life just works that way. I’ve been thinking about this, and wanted to share what I’ve learned with you. Here’s what I attribute the breakthrough to:

1. A supportive writing group that has been unflailing in its honesty (even when it hurts) and abundant with praise when something is good

2. Tenacity. I am stubborn, and determined to get it right.

3. A partner who reassures me that I am still a writer even when I’m between books.

4. Early morning writing hours. This has been key, as when “business hours” begin, as a consultant I feel the need to be accessible. But at 5:30am, no one is expecting an email from me.

5.  An agent who hasn’t given up on me.  “Books have a life of their own,” says he.  “Better to get it right.”

What helps you break through a block? Feel free to join me in sharing strategies, in comments!

Don’t miss this piece responding to Hillary’s presumptive nomination as SOS from my fellow Progressive Women’s Voices-er, Michelle Wucker, titled “Great Expectations,” over at WMC today.  As a colleague of mine said last night, “Hillary is a tough lady for a tough job.”  Hells yeah.

I’ve always been fascinated by the contradictions inherent to universities, which on the one hand work as bubble-like institutions concerned with their students’ futures and educations, and on the other act as vast corporations with a great deal of self-interest. Who they do or do not allow to remain on campus following a crime or incident has always seemed arbitrary and the ways they attempt to keep student or faculty conduct, which reflects poorly on the university, hush-hush suspect. This was something I wrote about regarding a hate crime that took place at Columbia University in spring 2006. But I’ve seen few things worse than gag orders imposed on rape victims at risk of punishment, as was the case with the University of Virginia. Happily the Department of Education has now ordered this gag order to be lifted ruling that it “violated federal law by threatening victims of sexual assault with punishment if they spoke about their cases.”

And on the larger implications:

The ruling has major implications for victims of sexual assault on college campuses across the country, according to the man who filed the complaint on behalf of then-UVA student Annie Hylton, now Annie Hylton McLaughlin.

“It means that victims can’t be silenced at UVA or anywhere else,” says S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for Security on Campus.

So in the midst of worries about how the Obama administration will pan out, whether we’ll go deeper into recession, and whether we’ll ever make it through the wind tunnels of New York City, we can give a little “Huzzah!” for this.

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

Two tidbits for your Monday morning, courtesy my colleagues at CCF:

“Study Suggests ‘Hanging Out’ on Facebook, MySpace Isn’t a Waste for Teens,” Joe Crawford, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

A study by the MacArthur Foundation concludes that interaction with new media such as Facebook is increasingly becoming an essential part of becoming a competent citizen in the digital age. And further, all that Web surfing isn’t necessarily eroding the intelligence or initiative of the young generation. “It may look like kids are wasting a lot of time online, but they’re actually learning a lot of social, technical and also media literacy skills,” said Mizuko Ito, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine who lead the study.

Teen Birth Rate Falls to 28-Year Low, John Fauber, Milwaukee, Journal-Sentinel
Contraception, abstinence, media campaigns all helping to influence city’s youth, experts say.

Ah, insomnia!  One thing it’s good for is catching up on my online reading.  I’m late to the table on some of these, I know, on this one, but in case you missed any of them too:

Rebecca Traister, The Momification of Michelle Obama, and some interesting counterpoints at Slate’s XX Factor, “Michelle Still Has Feminist Cred” (Emily Bazelton) and “Sarah, Michelle, Hillary” (Melinda Henneberger).   Pundit Mom calls it in Will Michelle Obama Spark the Next ‘Mommy Wars’ Skirmish? Me, I’m with XX Factor on this one.

C. Nicole Mason at Women’s eNews, Michelle Brings the New Everywoman to White House

Erin Aubry Kaplan at Salon, First Lady Got Back

And, as always, the Michelle Obama Watch blog.

This here’s one of my favorite conferences of all, and not just because Stephanie Coontz, Steve Mintz, Virginia Rutter, Lara Riscoll, and Barbara Risman are fun to dance with.  Though that part’s fun too.  I love the Council on Contemporary Families Annual Conference because of the caliber and savvy of its participants.  It’s the cream of the crop, bringing together researchers, practionners, and media types who are interested in the way public discourse sees and understands “family” in our day.  I joined the CCF Board this year, so I’m feeling very fancy and all grown up.

The gathering take place this year on April 17 and 18, 2009 at University of Illinois at Chicago (OBAMALAND!), and the theme is RELATIONSHIPS, SEXUALITY, AND EQUALITY.  What more could a girl want?

Deets:

Changes in American families have radically altered how we define ourselves as men and women. These changes have affected romantic relationships, power dynamics in same and opposite sex couples, and the way we parent. The 2009 CCF conference will examine the latest research and clinical findings about where the lives of boys, girls, men, and women have become more similar in recent years, where they continue to be different, and how these differences affect the prospects for each.  Nationally recognized speakers will address the dramatic ways these changes are affecting work patterns and political life, and in turn, how changing work patterns and social mores are affecting men, women, and diverse families.

Keynote speaker: Andrew Cherlin, author of the new book The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today.

The conference will also include a conversation between historian Stephanie Coontz, Ms. Magazine Editor Kathy Spillar, and Chicago Tribune columnist Dawn Trice, titled “Gender, Race, and Equality: What Has the Election Taught Us?”

A pre-conference workshop features media training for everybody. In sessions with Stephanie Coontz, Virginia Rutter, and Deborah Siegel (that’s me!), hone your skills in op-ed writing, get started turning your good work into a media message that makes an impact, or learn how—and why—to use the blogsophere. This conference workshop is free to conference attendees, but folks who are not attending the conference are invited to attend these practical workshops for a modest fee.

Click here for the full conference schedule.  Hope to see a bunch of you there, as I often do!