economy

(Crossposted at Recessionwire)

When Marco got laid off in January, friends who knew of our family-launching plans asked us whether we’d continue or put things on hold. I just turned 40. Marco is seven years older than me. Our biological clocks are not in sync with the dipping of the Dow.

Sure, it occurred to us for half a second that this might not be the wisest time to be spending my grandmother’s inheritance on fertility treatments not covered by health insurance, but it’s expensive to adopt, too. And we really, really want a child.

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My latest Recessionwire.com column is now up. I’d love it if GWPenners once again would post comments over there to this one in particular, as I take on my fellow Recessionwire blogger “Joe the Trader” for some rather gender-stereotyped remarks (and a huge THANK YOU for all your awesome comments past!).

Joe’s column, “Out on the Street,” chronicles life after layoff for Wall Street guys.  In his latest, “Gendernomics”, Joe makes a number of great points (especially in comments!) but he also falls into the she-spends, she-nags vision of things that drives me nuts.  Ok, so maybe it drives me nuts in part because I’ve become a nagger. But mostly it drives me nuts because the underlying presumption Joe (who is now at home) and many men seem to make is that all the yucky housework tasks are a woman’s purview, even in couples where both partners work outside the home.

This recession is sure breathing new life into the ole laundry gap debate.  The eternal optimist in me hopes that this time, perhaps we’ll all get past merely arguing over the laundry.  Perhaps more men out of jobs–while their women continue to work–will ultimately result in a more equitable division of labor at home.  One can hope?!

So here’s my response to Joe:  “A Gentle Response to Joe the Trader”

Thanks in advance for comments, and I’ll see you over there!

Courtesy of my favorite economist, Heather Boushey, at the Center for American Progress:

In answer to the question “what about women? aren’t they losing jobs too?”, here are some December 2008 stats for a reality check:

Construction has lost 22.5 of all the jobs; manufacturing has lost 28.8% (add that together and that’s 50% of the jobs lost.)  These are both male-dominated fields.

Within manufacturing, over 2/3 of the jobs have been lost by men. In manufacturing, at the start of the recession, women were 28.8% of all manufacturing workers.  They’ve since lost 32.9% of the jobs.

Within construction, over 90% of the jobs have been lost by men.

Within the finance and insurance industries, where women actually made up almost 2/3 of the workers, women have lost 1/2 of all the jobs.

But let’s keep this in perspective: The financial industry overall has only lost 8% of the total jobs that have been lost.

Finance jobs lost are nearly 230,000 jobs out of a total of 3 million jobs lost, as of December 2008.

In real estate – the other subcategory in the financial field – women have lost over 100% of jobs, even though they made up about 1/2 of the real estate workers at the beginning of the recession.

All this underscores how important it is to look at industry-specific contexts when talking about gender and jobs.  On net, the men are losing.  Jobs, that is.

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama said, “We will restore science to its rightful place.” Yet just a few weeks later the Stimulus Package was stripped of provisions to expand affordable family planning, “a betrayal of millions of low-income women” as Planned Parenthood termed it. Republicans successfully jettisoned the provisions on the claim that family planning would do little to stimulate the economy, though they provided no statistical or economical rationale for this, proving only that prejudice and the culture wars still take precedent over the evidence of statistical science.

Just a few weeks later and now a detailed study from the Guttmacher Institute is out clearly showing the economic and social benefits of family planning:

Publicly funded family planning prevents nearly 2 million unintended pregnancies and more than 800,000 abortions in the United States each year, saving billions of dollars, according to new research intended to counter conservative objections to expanding the program

…

Report co-author Rachel Benson Gold called the family planning program “smart government at its best,” asserting that every dollar spent on it saves taxpayers $4 in costs associated with unintended births to mothers eligible for Medicaid-funded natal care.

For a Republican block that is so focused on saving Americans their tax dollars, family planning seems to cohere extremely well with their notions of economic stimulus after all. Let’s hope that the Democrats don’t bow out so easily on their next fight: they claim that they will soon work toward a large increase in funding for Title X, the main federal family planning program.

Let’s also hope that such two-faced rhetoric as that of Troy Newman of Operation Rescue, who termed the attempt to include family planning in the stimulus package a “shameful population control program that targeted low-income families,” disappears from the debate. Providing access to family planning and contraception does not add up to coercion. Taking away this access for those who cannot otherwise afford it does.

Did you hear the one about how testosterone is to blame for the meltdown? Pretty good stuff, eh? The headline reads: “Male Hysteria and the Market Meltdown: Is testosterone to blame for the financial crisis? A growing body of evidence suggests an intriguing answer as neuroscience reshapes our understanding of economics.” IMHO, it is perhaps one of the most absurd of the reflections on what the economic meltdown tells us about men and masculinity today.

Wondering if there might not be a “third-wave feminist masculinity scholar” on the project, I talked to my Framingham State College colleague, Professor Ben Alberti. Ben is an anthropologist who usually studies gender in ancient cultures (he says “prehistoric guylands”). Here’s what he had to say:

BA: How the hell can testosterone cause a market meltdown? Saying it is about testosterone covers up the idea of calculated greed. There is a much larger system than the trading room dynamics that accounts for how our economy works—or fails. It is misdirection, like a magic trick.

GWP: But even if we can mock biological explanations, isn’t that calculated greed part of the culture that men live in, a part of the expectations for being a “good man”?

BA: Oh, rubbish. You are simply saying that if men aren’t a “victim of their biology” they are a “victim of their culture”—that’s the “crisis of masculinity” argument, and I don’t buy it.

GWP: There’s been some interesting reporting on how unemployment is stressful for men, but you’re saying that we can biologize masculinity—but we can also culturize it—and get to the same place?

BA: Yes. Men can be victims—and there are a lot of men suffering right now in this economic downturn–but not because of their being men. It isn’t about identity or role any more than it is about testosterone. This crisis is about economics, values, inequality.

GWP: But men are living in a world of changing expectations, and it can be hard to respond because they aren’t (yet) fully equipped to switch gears, right?

BA: Oh come on!

GWP: What?

BA: In masculinity research there’s the notion of the “man box.” The man box view shows us the cultural expectations that men are subject to and that shape their actions. As you can imagine, a “box” suggests it is really hard to get out. I’m saying there’s no f-ing box. It is all about choices. Not the crisis, but the response. There are constraints, for sure. That means circumstances will determine which resources you can draw on for being what kind of man. But don’t masculinize constraints…. When we talk about men, we need to talk about possibilities rather than expectations. We need to talk about actions—what we’re performing—rather than containers—like the box.

GWP: (We’re not supposed to pun about the box, right?) You’ve talked about masculinity as performance—but what does that give us?

BA: Here’s a cliché example, one I’m familiar with: asking directions. So from the point of view of the “man box,” I don’t want to stop and ask for directions because I’m a man. What I’m saying is that, really, I don’t stop and ask directions because I haven’t done it before.

GWP: It sounds like you are saying that the issue of where men are today—in terms of unemployment or in terms of ethical choices in the pursuit of their work or career—is a lot more tractable and a lot simpler than we make it out to be when we expect biology or culture or the man box to leave men in “a crisis of masculinity.” Is that it?

BA: Yes. Stop anticipating a conflict. Don’t anticipate the man box. I am saying when you do it—ask directions, change your approach to work, deal with this awful economic crisis, whatever it is–it becomes part of your repertoire. That’s how change happens.

-Virginia Rutter

What Kind Of Economic Stimulus Do American Women Want? by Ruth Rosen
2/18/09
Talking Points Memo: Advocates for women workers have felt great anxiety about whether the Obama administration would make sure that women – along with men – would be included in the $787-billion stimulus package that on 17 February 2009 completed its passage through both houses of Congress.

Two Women Show Real Bipartisanship, by Madeline Kunin
2/17/09
Huffington Post: As the $789 economic stimulus plan is being signed today by President Barack Obama in Denver, two women deserve much of the credit. Without the leadership of Maine Senator Susan Collins and her colleague Senator Olympia Snowe, there would be no signing ceremony today.

(Thanks to the ladies at the WMC, as usual, for the heads up.)

I’ve got the cover story over at The Big Money (Slate’s money mag) today! It’s posted here: Love and Layoffs | The Big Money. Your comments over there would be most welcome!

And a humongous shout out to Marco, who is so bravely allowing me to use him as Exhibit A these days, in print.

We’ve been quiet over here today, I know.  I’ve been on deadline, but am now resurfacing.  I’m excited to bring you my new column over at Recessionwire.com: LOVE IN THE TIME OF LAYOFF: Take This Heart and Shove It. It’s a Valentine’s Day special in which I give my husband’s ex-employers a lil piece o’ my mind.

Have fun 🙂

And check out The Big Money tomorrow…I’ll see you there!

January 20, 2009 not only ushered in a new President, but a President who believes in science and wants to fund it. While I haven’t been in the lab in over a decade, my heart is still there, and I have been working on a daily basis for over ten years to convince more women to decide on a scientific research career.

The last few years I’ve had a tough time with this because the level of funding for science has dropped like a lead balloon. I have many reasons for wanting women to enter science or engineering, but one of them is that they can make up to $40,000 – $60,000 right out of college. Economic justice for women can’t happen if we continue to keep women segregated into low-paying jobs. In my insider/outsider status in the scientific community, I’ve seen more and more scientists fight over fewer and fewer dollars. It’s made me think: Is this really the place I wanted to send women?

The women I meet want to change the world with their science and engineering skills. They want to ease, if not eliminate, poverty in drought-stricken environments. They want to cure diseases that they watched their grandparents die from, that broke their parents’ hearts. So yes, of course, I still encourage them to keep moving forward and to chase their dreams. They will change the world.

As I write this, the economic stimulus package has just been passed in the Senate, though it may ultimately be shorn of some essential funding for science and education. Republicans criticized and wanted the removal of funds for the National Science Foundation, which supports much of the basic science that happens at colleges and universities where many of our future scientists and engineers are training. Apparently a number on the right side of the aisle don’t believe in or understand science enough to know that yes, science is stimulus and is shovel-ready. I’ll let my former research adviser, Mark Westneat, take it from here:

…scientific research is basically all about hiring people and buying stuff. NSF grants are not funding elite Ivory Tower endeavors — the money helps everyone. The primary line item in most research grants is salary for students, technicians, interns, post-doctoral scientists, and researchers. These are mostly young people who contribute fresh approaches and new ideas to the research while receiving training in science and technology. While these are not blue collar jobs, all institutions charge an overhead fee on federal grants that is used to fund operational costs, including administrative assistants, plumbers, electricians, and house-keeping staff to keep the research enterprise running. The remaining money is used to buy things, from high-end items such as computers, microscopes, DNA sequencers, and chemicals, to every-day items like office supplies and airline tickets. Most of these things are purchased from American companies and, in the case of my own institution, preferentially from local minority and woman-owned businesses. In addition, scientific institutions provide a significant portion of developmental aid at low cost, by training thousands of students and colleagues each year in developing countries.

In all reality, some of our great institutions of higher learning are putting off building maintenance in order to keep classes open and faculty employed. I’m sure that if those who criticized NSF funding as pork understood that science and education are shovel-ready projects, they would have thrown a few million to universities to fix deferred maintenance on buildings.

Here we are in a new administration, which clearly supports science, and yet we still have to deal with anti-science people who seek to cripple our colleges, universities, and museums from doing what they do best – research, teaching, and preparing a new generation of products and people to bring us economically and scientifically into a new frontier. Science and engineering bring us medical advances and the new gadgets that people line up for days before going on sale to buy. From the smallest iPod to the next Wii, there’s a lot of science and engineering, education and research, behind it. Ever seen the line outside the Apple store? That’s stimulus. And that’s an industry I could feel comfortable telling women to go into in order to derive all possible benefits. But clearly it’s still going to have to take some more Change around Washington to do.

I’m working on this week’s post for my column at Recessionwire.com — a Valentine’s Day Special — and just learned about yesterday’s profile of the site on CNN. I’m so tickled I just had to share:

See also latest coverage in Wired, Mediabistro, and Portfolio.

Go Recessionistas!