work/life

There’s so much Father’s Day goodness out there today I don’t know where to start.

Former NYTimes blogger Marci Alboher asks “Are Dads the New Moms?” over at her new Yahoo blog, Working the New Economy.

Lisa Belkin conducts a two part interview with The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared ParentingAreTransforming the American Family author and Daddy Dialectic blogger Jeremy Adam Smith

Michelle Goldberg of ABCNews.com tells us What Laid-Off Dads Want

And I offer “Findings from from the Layoff Lab”— a Father’s Day assessment of recession-era dads — over at The Big Money! 

You can bet we’ll touch on many of these themes — and more, and from a fresh and feminist perspective — at the Brooklyn Museum tomorrow when the WomenGirlsLadies talk about “Dads, Dudes, and Doing It.” Event is free!  We’ll be giving books away!  I’ll be wearing straight-up maternity wear!  This is one you won’t want to miss 🙂

PS. Time Out New York just listed us as one of the “Ten Best Father’s Day events” in town!

A simply-must-read over at American Prospect, “When Opting Out Isn’t an Option”, offers a four-part look at the under-explored side of the current recession:  How is recession affecting women who have to balance caregiving with wage-earning, and who make up an immense but largely invisible workforce, including nannies, maids and retail clerks?

Contributors include Heather Boushey, Ann Friedman, Dana Goldstein, Janet C. Gornick, Harriet B. Presser, Caroline Batzdorf and Elissa Strauss. Need I say more?

(Thanks to CCF for the heads up)

I’ve been busy working up my comments for this Saturday’s 2pm panel at the Brooklyn Museum, billed as “a fresh conversation among feminists in honor of Father’s Day.” We’re an editor’s pick over at the Daily News and Time Out is supposed to be featuring us too!

We’ve been launching a multimedia publicity attack, so if you receive email from me and another from Facebook, please bear with us.  As always, it’s one great experiment in getting the word out in the age of social media.  (Learning lots along the way!)

For a taste of WomenGirlsLadies, you can check out this YouTube video from one of our past events:

My fellow WGLs Courtney Martin, Gloria Feldt, Kristal Brent Zook, and I REALLY like to make these talks interactive, so it’d be so great to have YOUR voices there! And if anyone’s game for liveblogging it here on GWP, the door is open!  Just email me and let me know.  K?

My latest, up at Recessionwire.com today!  Today’s post questions whether laid off men’s (ok, Marco’s) values are changing, now that they’re spending more time at home.  Hint: It’s all about the eggs. I’d love your comments!

We’re in the first panel, organized by Kathleen Gerson.  Panelists are Bob Drago, Shirley Hill, Jennifer Glass, and Erin Kelly.

For a blow by blow of who’s saying what in real time, check out Veronica (who is sitting right in front of me!) over at Viva la Feminista.  She’s using this very cool software called Cover It Live.  (Man, that lady teaches me EVERYTHING!)

Can someone puh-lease get all the Wall Street shills like this one off my t.v.? As the economic horizons look darker and darker, economists at Janet Gornick and Pam Stone’s awesome work/family mini-conference at the Eastern Sociological Society meeting in Baltimore this weekend presented, by way of contrast, really nice work.

At the concluding panel, “Public Policy and Working Families: Providing, Supporting, and Equalizing Access,” Heather Boushey (Center for American Progress), Chai Feldblum (Workplace Flexibility 2010), Heidi Hartmann (Institute for Women’s Policy Research) and John Schmitt (Center for Economic and Policy Research) discussed horizons for work and family policy. And they really took Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel’s advice to “never waste a perfectly good crisis” to heart. All four demonstrated that the particulars of the current downturn plus key demographic trends will help us to move work/family policy issues higher up on Obama’s and Congress’s priorities list, even in these hard times.

Here are some key points:

*Four out of five jobs lost since December 2007 are men’s. This means that women are increasingly sole breadwinners in partnered families as well as in single-mom families. As Heather Boushey argued in a recent paper for CAP, this shift in family relations and the workplace makes work/family issues more salient as the economic crisis deepens. Boushey encourages us to focus on the implications of a “woman, making 78 cents on the dollar, now supporting her family.” More than ever, we gotta have pay equity. And here’s the crisis-as-opportunity piece:
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My latest post at Recessionwire.com is a preview, of sorts, of the WGLs’ 92nd Street Y event this coming Wednesday.  It’s now live, here: Learning from the Ladies.

I’m THRILLED to announce that my nationally touring (whohoo!) intergenerational panel, “Women, Girls, and Ladies” will be appearing on MARCH 18 at the 92nd Street Y in Tribeca.

For a taste, you can check out the piece up today in honor of International Women’s Day over at the Women’s Media Center site, where Gloria Feldt (67), Courtney Martin (29), Elizabeth Hines (33) and I (40 + 3 weeks) each share personal reflections on the economic crisis from our generational vantage point and comment on some of the unfinished feminist business of economic recovery.  Hint: It’s a lot about work and life, life and work, work and life….

For more on the March 18th panel, see our WGLs blog or the 92nd Street Y.

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!

Well, certain wives of presidents aren’t the only ones thinking about working family’s issues these days.  Check out GWP friend Heather Hewett’s interview with Caroline Grant and Elrena Evans (pictured left), editors of the collection Mama, PhD (reviewed here last month)  and Professor Andrea O’Reilly, author and editor of many books about mothering and Director of the Association for Research on Mothering at York University in Ontario.  The convo is posted here, at The Mother’s Movement Online.

Since I’m all about the mens for the moment, particularly as their working family issues and work lives affect women, here’s an excerpt that touches on the question of what’s going on:

Heather Hewett: Do these [work/life] challenges face fathers as well as mothers?

Elrena Evans: As far as fathers facing the same sorts of challenges, when Caroline and I were first dreaming up this book we talked about whether it should be a collection from both men and women, or just of women. Eventually we decided that while fathers do indeed face these challenges, and more involved fathers face them to a greater degree, since the brunt of biology falls on women, women are the ones whose stories we wanted to hear. Because men can choose to be involved, but they can also choose not to be — and those kinds of decisions are more difficult to face when you are the one who is pregnant or nursing. Even beyond the biological factors, though, we’re so conditioned to think of mothers as the primary caregivers of children that it’s really hard to escape that.

Caroline Grant: Fathers who ask that a meeting be rescheduled so they can take their kid to the doctor are viewed as charmingly hands-on, while mothers who ask for that accommodation are viewed as asking for special favors. And that’s an attitude that’s not exclusive to the academy; it’s just how mothers and fathers are viewed in the U.S.

And while I’m on it, I loved this comment on a GWP post from last week, by Lydia, a grad student who shares this anecdote about her spouse, a SAHD:

A few years ago I started grad school and my spouse became a stay-at-home dad. Something we have both found disconcerting is just how much attention he gets as an “exceptional father” because he is doing this. [Like when the above father was introduced to the playgroup as “we have a daddy with us!”]. The same response does not happen for a woman who chooses to stay at home and may have made the same sacrifices to do so. The problem is that our society does not expect fathers to take such an active role in parenting, despite what strides we have made. The fact that the title for this piece was the new “Mr. Mom” shows how much parenting is associated with women in our society.

I also question the psychologist’s advice to be on the job hunt. This assumes that the choice is temporary and out of necessity, and not a valid choice for fathers to make just because they want to or feel it will be good for their children. When I began grad school, my spouse’s family kept asking him if he was looking for a job to help support me, until I finally said to them that if our roles were reversed, everyone would be supportive of me choosing to stay at home without the need to look for other employment. Obviously “mother”work is still undervalued in our society (unless a man is doing it, and then he’s a good man).

A note on all this framing: All the mothers are working, all the workers with work/life issues are women, but working men who are also involved fathers get to be “brave.”

Harumph.