women’s economic empowerment

So check this out:

Tonight at 6:30pm, Legal Momentum and Cornell University are bringing together leading lights Linda Hirshman, Heather Boushey, Mimi Abramowitz, and Irasema Garza to discuss the next frontier in women’s rights: Building Economic Equality and Security in a Time of Crisis. This panel event is free and open to the public.  Register here.

Cornell University ILR
16 East 34th Street, 6th Floor (between Madison and Fifth)
New York, NY 10016

I sadly cannot go but if any NYC-based GWP reader is interested in attending and either liveblogging for us or doing a post about it tomorrow, we’d all be thrilled!

More:

The current economic crisis has thrown the long-term impacts of women’s economic inequality into relief. Although women make up nearly half the workforce, they hold the vast majority of minimum and below-minimum wage and part-time jobs. Now, more than a year into a recession that has claimed millions of jobs in traditionally male-dominated industries, women are emerging as the de facto breadwinners, often struggling to support their families on low-wage salaries. While the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the FY 2010 budget promise major changes in labor and employment, it is not at all clear that these programs directly address the unique impact the recession is having on women.

The “Women’s Economic Equality: the Next Frontier for Women’s Rights” panelists will give an overview of the current economic landscape for women and families; will review policy initiatives to address the challenges confronting women; and set forth the case for a significant change in focus for the women’s rights movement toward an agenda focused on economic equality and personal security.

If you want to liveblog or post on this for us, please post a comment here or email me at deborah (at) girlwpen (dot) com.  Thanks!

As I wrap up this liveblogging session from the Brooklyn Museum, a gooey little confession about how the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art holds a special place in my heart:

This summer, the month before I married, instead of the traditional (cough cough) bachelorette party, friends organized a picnic accompanied by a private tour of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, housed at the Center.  What better way to mark the moment, we figured.  And what an amazing opportunity this was to learn about this pivotal piece of feminist art, long buried, and to reconnect with it as members of a new generation.

So it is with extra special love that I wish the Center many happy returns–and TONS of future visitors–on this, its second birthday!

For those of you just joining, here, in chronological order, are 5 posts blogged live from “Women’s Visions for the Nation: What’s It Going to Take?”, a speakout held by the intergenerational feminist thinktank, Unfinished Business, celebrating the 2nd anniversary of the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art on this sunny March afternoon.  Quite a gathering of feminists and ideas.  Enjoy.

Liveblogging Women’s Visions for the Nation @ Brooklyn Museum

Elizabeth Sackler Revs It Up

C. Nicole Mason Keynotes

Laura Flanders Emcees

Esther Broner and Ai-jen Poo Take the Stage

Let the Intergenerational Speakout Begin

What Will the Feminist New Deal Look Like?

Closing Thoughts from Esther Broner, Ai-jen Poo, and HipHop Artist Toni Blackman

Liz Abzug Brings It Home

Obama Signs Equal Pay Act. Some pictures speak louder than words, so I’ll just leave it at that.

(Do all women on the Hill wear red?!)

A few quick hits:

A front page story in this weekends Style section titled “Daddy’s Home, and a Bit Lost”

Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon on “Rosies of the Recession

Barnard’s new President on “One Gender’s Crash” in WaPo

Former Sec’y of Labor Robert Reich on The Stimulus: How to Create Jobs Without Them All Going to Skilled Professionals and White Male Construction Workers

And for kicks (though not explicitly on recession), a new video from the YWCA’s OWN IT initiative on what young women want from the Obama Administration.

Seen more stuff on gender and the recession? I’m collecting links!

In the midst of horrible headlines, a bright spot.  As reported at Womenstake, the National Women’s Law Center blog, today the House of Representatives passed both the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act. “These key bills provide women with critical tools to challenge pay discrimination. However, in order to ensure that women truly receive equal pay for equal work both of these bills must pass the Senate before reaching the desk of President-elect Obama.”  Read what’s next, here.

And on that note, I wish everyone a good weekend. Marco and I will be laying low, though I have some potentially exciting new projects brewing now in my head….

I’m late to the table with this one, but in case you haven’t seen it (as I hadn’t til last week!) I bring you “The Girl Effect” — an amazing video. Pass it on!

Linda Hirshman’s excellent oped in today’s NYTimes, “Where Are the New Jobs for Women?”, brings light to a conversation I’ve been lurking on among feminist historians and economists, and I’m so glad to see that argument reaching the light of day. (There was a Boston Globe piece on it earlier, too, titled “Macho Stimulus Plan,” which we reported on here at GWP.)  The call is basically this: Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the New Deal, which failed to apply a gender lens.

As Hirshman notes,

[W]omen constitute about 46 percent of the labor force. And as the current downturn has worsened, their traditionally lower unemployment rate has actually risen just as fast as men’s. A just economic stimulus plan must include jobs in fields like social work and teaching, where large numbers of women work.

The bulk of the stimulus program will provide jobs for men, because building projects generate jobs in construction, where women make up only 9 percent of the work force.

…A public works program can provide needed economic stimulus and revive America’s concern for public property. The current proposal is simply too narrow. Women represent almost half the work force — not exactly a marginal special interest group. By adding a program for jobs in libraries, schools and children’s programs, the new administration can create jobs for them, too.

Amen to that.  And speaking of F.D.R., which makes me think of Eleanor, which makes me think in general of powerful Presidents’ wives, may the Obama team take up Abigail Adams’ cry to “remember the ladies”. For reals.

(And thanks to Elizabeth Curtis for the, er, correction that it was Abigail and not Eleanor who said that!)

A quick hit:

Do check out this this Boston Globe op-ed, “The Macho Stimulus Plan,” about Obama’s stimulus package ignoring women, by Randy Albelda, a professor of economics and senior fellow at the Center for Social Policy at University of Massachusetts-Boston.

Say some prominent feminist historians, “We could be repeating the mistakes of the New Deal.”

Thoughts?

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.

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