A creative new study reveals a new dimension of the wage gap between men and women:
In previous studies, academics have looked at variables like years of education and the effects of outside forces such as nondiscrimination policies. But gender was always the constant. What if it didn’t have to be? What if you could construct an experiment in which a random sample of adults unexpectedly changes sexes before work one day?
Kristen Schilt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and Matthew Wiswall, an economist at New York University, couldn’t quite pull off that study. But they have come up with the first systematic analysis of the experiences of transgender people in the labor force. And what they found suggests that raw discrimination remains potent in U.S. companies.
Schilt and Wiswall found that women who become men (known as FTMs) do significantly better than men who become women (MTFs). MTFs in the study earned, on average, 32% less after they transitioned from male to female, even after the authors controlled for factors like education levels. FTMs earned an average of 1.5% more.
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Paid Family Leave in the United States and Around the World: “Just 13 percent of U.S. employers offered paid paternity leave in 2008, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), down from 17 percent in 2007. (By comparison, SHRM found that only 15 percent of U.S. employers offer paid maternity leave.) But the news among the 100 Best Companies isn’t all about growth; the number of paid weeks offered to new dads last year averaged three weeks, only a week more than was offered on average five years ago.” (Dads: I really recommend reading this article.)
Dear Lucy: “There will come a night when the phone rings for me to bail you out of jail and I will probably be angry. I will drive to the jail and mull over the possibility of smoking cigarettes again. But I hope that I’ll be able to remember the day you stormed a soccer field to devour the horizon. Because on that day your rebellion made me smile. You reminded me that I am truly inside your bones, testing the limits of what can be done.”
A Mother’s Perspective on Palin, Disability Issues, and Reproductive Rights: “My son Ansel always hated the notion, growing up, that he should hang around with other ‘disabled’ kids. If I tried to hook him up with the other physically challenged boy in his school, or wanted to send him to muscular dystrophy camp, he resisted. ‘Mom,’ he’d complain, ‘Just because I use a wheelchair doesn’t mean I have anything in common with other people in wheelchairs.’ He thought that, even though muscular dystrophy was a genetic illness he had, it was only a very small part of who he was. And I had to rather reluctantly agree.”
Another way of thinking about “racism without racists”: “Allow me the liberty of generalizing here–whites are most concerned about racial bigotry. That is, ‘I don’t believe in interracial marriage’ or ‘I don’t want black people living next to me’ or even ‘I think black people are prone to crime.’ Black folks don’t like racial bigotry, but they’re mostly concerned–not about racism as bigotry–but racism as oppression. That’s a loaded word, I know. But let’s go to the dictionary– ‘an unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power.’ I think job discrimination falls under that category. I think redlining falls under that category… Blacks aren’t so much worried about whether white people like them, they’re worried about the fact that in New York City, their job prospects are about the same as white guy with a record. In that world you can have a guy who isn’t a racist bigot–but in fact is a racist oppressor. It may be ‘racism without racists’ but it’s still ‘racism with racist oppressors.’ Frankly, that terrifies me.”
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Here, predictably, was my favorite part of the vice-presidential debate. From Biden:
Look, I understand what it’s like to be a single parent. When my wife and daughter died and my two sons were gravely injured, I understand what it’s like as a parent to wonder what it’s like if your kid’s going to make it.
I understand what it’s like to sit around the kitchen table with a father who says, “I’ve got to leave, champ, because there’s no jobs here. I got to head down to Wilmington. And when we get enough money, honey, we’ll bring you down.”
I understand what it’s like. I’m much better off than almost all Americans now. I get a good salary with the United States Senate. I live in a beautiful house that’s my total investment that I have. So I — I am much better off now.
But the notion that somehow, because I’m a man, I don’t know what it’s like to raise two kids alone, I don’t know what it’s like to have a child you’re not sure is going to — is going to make it — I understand.
I understand, as well as, with all due respect, the governor or anybody else, what it’s like for those people sitting around that kitchen table. And guess what? They’re looking for help. They’re looking for help.
That felt true and heartfelt to me; I don’t think he was faking it. Whatever his shortcomings, this is a man who has experienced great pain, reflected on that pain, and allowed it to inform his work as a senator.
In contrast, I felt that Palin spoke about her family in the most robotic, scripted, shallow ways imaginable. She loves them at home, I have no doubt, but on the job she’s using her children as campaign props.
Does that contrast provide any reason to vote for one or the other? Not by itself, but in both the presidential and vice-presidential debates, both Obama and Biden have expressed depths of feeling and experience that I find tremendously encouraging. These are not careless men.
Alas, a Blog made a good observation:
Biden choked up in that moment, as I think one would forever. He wasn’t grandstanding, and he wasn’t attacking Palin, he was simply making a point: that dads, too, know about household fears. That just as Palin is not disqualified from talking about the statehouse just because she’s a woman, Biden is not disqualified from talking about his home life just because he’s a man. It was, ironically, the most feminist moment of the debate.
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1. The Anti-Proposition 8 Ad Campaign: I know. You’re sick of political commercials. We all are. But the ads against California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 are somehow managing to transcend the genre: They’re actually poetic and moving on a deep human level. Unfortunately, Wordpress isn’t allowing me to post movies to this blog, but you can view two of the ads here and here. You won’t regret watching them; you might even feel happier after you do. Seriously.
2. Beacon Press: OK, this is the publisher for my forthcoming book The Daddy Shift, and so I guess it’s lame for me to put them in my top three. But Beacon isn’t an ordinary publisher–they’re a mission-driven nonprofit, and, let me tell you as an author and editor, working with them is way different than working with certain other publishing houses. No, they don’t pay as well as big commercial houses, and, yes, the chances of me getting on Oprah to talk about The Daddy Shift are approximately zero. And yet it’s such a pleasure to work with people who care so passionately about books and ideas. In today’s global, hyper-competitive, sped-up, multimedia marketplace, Beacon is one of a dying breed. And they have a nifty little blog, too.
3. Spider Man: My son loves Spider Man, and so do I. I find myself spending quite a lot of time these days explaining Peter Parker’s personal history and the origins of supervillains like Doc Oc, the Sandman, and Electro. Like all right-thinking parents, I’m vaguely uncomfortable with describing scenes of mayhem, which is practically inevitable–what’s the point of having superstrength if you aren’t using it to punch out bank robbers or having spider sense if not to detect danger? But one thing I’ve realized in telling and retelling these stories is that they are as much about the virtues of self-restraint and responsible behavior as they are about action and adventure–much more so than other superhero stories. “With great power comes great responsibility,” said Uncle Ben to Peter Parker. It’s good advice for my son to hear, and for all of us.
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Shortly after I started working full time again, Liko and I developed a tradition: On certain Sundays we take the F train downtown and we spend the afternoon watching hockey or figure skating, playing on the playground, going to museums, eating.
This past Sunday I took him ice skating. We had tried it about a year ago and I had concluded that it was too early. But on Sunday he took right to the ice, and we skated around and around the rink, holding hands, and neither of us could stop smiling.
Later we went to the playground and Liko hooked up with two little girls, twins, about six years old.
“Did you guys go ice skating?” he asked.
They nodded.
“Did you see me? I was really good!”
They laughed, as they should have, and ran to the slide. Liko chased them.
Later we rode the merry go round and I watched his face and I thought, I’m happy.
That night I put him to bed. “I love you, Dada,” he said as he nodded off.
Then on Monday I read that the House voted to reject the $700 billion bailout package. Today I read that the war in Iraq continues to go badly; we’re now losing the war in Afghanistan. An internal Justice Department investigation has concluded that White House fired federal prosecutors for political reasons, while a former CIA official pleads guilty to fraud–just two examples, plucked at random from today’s headlines, of the ideological corruption that now seem to permeate American institutions.
The word I keep hearing in all these articles, the common thread that connects all these scandals, is “trust”–it seems that we no longer have enough it. People don’t trust banks, banks don’t trust each other, and neither trusts our political leaders or judicial system.
I’m not a sky-is-falling kind of guy; I tend to see history as the story of progress, and I have a great deal of faith in the creativity, decency, and resilience of human beings.
But the signs and portents are not good; it is now very likely that America is about to enter a full-blown crisis, one that will unfold on every level: spiritual, psychological, philosophical, financial, political, and military. Every institution will be affected, and so will every person.
Am I being melodramatic? I really don’t think so. America could conceivably pull out of its nosedive, but at a certain point you have to admit, if only to yourself, that we are going to crash.
Journalists keep raising the specter of the Great Depression, but we’re not going to see history repeat itself; America is a different place than it was in the 1930s or, for that matter, the 1960s, two previous crisis points. The next decade will be as different from those two decades as they were from each other.
In retrospect, both the 30s and the 60s were bridges; the Depression and New Deal completed the modernization of America, readying us for the role we occupied in the second half of that century; the 60s laid the foundation for the values we have needed in the twenty first century: diversity, tolerance, cosmopolitanism.
It’s conceivable that the next decade will also be a bridge, though where it’s going, I have no idea. At the moment, it seems that we are on the now-proverbial “bridge to nowhere,” built by nihilists, but I don’t want to believe that.
I can’t; I’m a dad. For me, for all of us responsible for nurturing life, nihilism is not an option. “When I travel alone far from home, I think of my children’s faces to calm myself down,” writes Mary Pipher in her 1996 book The Shelter of Each Other. “Those faces are my mandalas. They comfort and secure me. The faces of those we love are the first, the primal, mandalas for us all.”
Now I’m thinking of Liko’s face, and of my wife’s, faces I trust. They comfort me, but they also remind me to try to do the right thing, to be my best self, to try to be a hero, not a villain. We’re walking on the bridge together. We all are, I think.
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This is interesting:
Organizational psychologists Timothy Judge and Beth Livingston found that men who reported holding traditional views (that is, that women belong in the home, while men earn the money) earned on average $11,930 more annually for doing the same kind of work as men who held more egalitarian views. The reverse was true for women, to a much smaller degree. Female workers with more egalitarian views (that men and women should evenly divide the tasks at home and contribute equally to their shared finances) earned $1,052 more than women who did similar jobs but held more traditional views.
The effect was starkest, however, when researchers compared women’s salaries to those of men, while also taking into account their gender-role biases. Men with traditional attitudes not only earned more than other men with egalitarian attitudes, but their annual salary was $14,404 greater than women with traditional attitudes, and $13,352 greater than women with egalitarian attitudes. Put differently, men with traditional attitudes made 71% more than women with traditional attitudes, while egalitarian-minded men made just 7% more than their female counterparts.
And here, to me, is the really interesting passage:
“What really surprised us was the magnitude of the difference,” says Judge. “We suspected that ‘traditional’ gender-role attitudes would work against women. What surprised us was the degree to which that effect held, even when you start controlling for a variable that you think would make the effect go away, like how many kids you have, or how many hours you work outside the home, what type of occupation.” When the researchers controlled for education, intelligence (based on the participants’ IQ test scores), occupation, hours worked and even what region they lived in the United States, Judge found that “none of those really made the effect go away.”
In other words, it’s not that men make more than women because they work longer hours, are more highly educated or simply take higher paying jobs. Rather, the new findings suggest the wage gap may be largely attributable to gender-role attitudes. And the big winners, it seems, is men with traditional views. Why the gap persists, Judge and Livingston aren’t sure, but Judge thinks it might be have something to do with the different ways men and women sign onto new jobs. Women on the whole are less effective at negotiating salaries than men, and they tend to be less aggressive about asking for bigger salaries, or they accept employers’ offers without negotiating at all. And Judge suspects that tradition-bound women may be even worse at it than their more egalitarian counterparts: “I would posit that egalitarian women are not as susceptible to settling for less in the negotiating process,” he says.
As for those money-making traditionally minded men, Judge theorizes that if they believe they are the family’s primary breadwinner, they may show greater dedication to career and are perhaps more aggressive than other men in terms of salary negotiation. Compared with men with egalitarian attitudes, the primary breadwinner simply has more at stake. “Maybe the egalitarian guy thinks, ‘Well, I don’t have to go the extra mile because my wife and I share earning responsibilities equally,’” Judge says.
Another factor could be bias on the part of the employer. “We’re learning that more and more aspects of organizational psychology are operating somewhat subconsciously,” says Judge. “It may be that employers are more likely to take advantage of traditional gender-role women.”
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Did you know that the Democratic Party platform, for the first time ever, has a plank that addresses fatherhood? Here it is, in its entirety:
Too many fathers are missing–missing from too many lives and too many homes. Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and are more likely to commit crime, drop out of school, abuse drugs and end up in prison. We need more fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. We need them to understand that what makes a man is not the ability to have a child–it’s the courage to raise one. We will support fathers by providing transitional training to get jobs, removing tax penalties on married families, and expanding maternity and paternity leave. We will reward those who are responsibly supporting their children by giving them a tax credit, crack down on men who avoid child support payments, and we will ensure that payments go directly to families instead of bureaucracies.
On a policy level, I have no problem with any of this–quite a few of these items are critical, especially for poor families. There are some items missing, such as legal protections for caregiving parents of both genders, but I don’t hear the “pro-family” Republican Party pushing expanded paternity leave. (For exegesis on the policy details, see The American Prospect and Ta-Nehisi Coates at his Atlantic Monthly blog.)
But note where the plank begins, with deadbeat dads. Fatherhood is framed, first and foremost, as a problem to be solved. Note as well that throughout the paragraph, fatherhood is defined as breadwinning; nearly all these policies are focused on funneling money from the father to the mother and children.
I would actually argue that, with fatherhood, an once of prevention is worth a pound of cure: If we want fathers to stay involved, emotionally and financially, we must make sure that they are involved from the beginning, by providing, for example, paternity leave. If we do that, I think we’ll ultimately need to spend less time collecting child support.
What if the plank had instead read this way, with a hopeful, inspiring vision of fatherhood, explicitly connected to a public policy that could support that vision:
Fathers play essential roles in their families as both breadwinners and caregivers. But too often, government has failed to support fathers in fulfilling those twin roles. We will support fathers by expanding maternity and paternity leave, requiring that employers pro-rate benefits for part-time employees, removing tax penalties on married families, and providing anti-discrimination protection for parents who are primarily responsible for child or elder care. As we enact these public policy reforms, however, we need more fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception. Too many fathers are missing–missing from too many lives and too many homes. Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and are more likely to commit crime, drop out of school, abuse drugs and end up in prison. We need them to understand that what makes a man is not the ability to have a child–it’s the courage to raise one. We will reward those who are responsibly supporting their children by giving them a tax credit, crack down on men who avoid child support payments, and we will ensure that payments go directly to families instead of bureaucracies. Above all, however, we recognize that fathers must be more than just cash machines; they must also be involved in their families. We call upon fathers to fulfill that roll, and we call upon employers to support them.
What do you think?
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 1. Engage Her: Last night I went to the premiere of this new documentary about the need for women of color to vote and get involved in the political process. But the film isn’t really for me: It’s aimed at women of color themselves, and I thought it provided a very effective argument for their political participation. If you, dear reader, have some way of getting this film in front of an audience that needs to see it, please do contact Engage Her and tell them you want to help.
2. Mad Men: This cable series, set in the advertising industry in the early 1960s, just won a bunch of Emmy Awards. The writing and characters are gripping, but Mad Men is also a fascinating sociological and historical study of womanhood, manhood, and gender roles at a dramatic point of transition. It made me think right away of Susan Faludi’s 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man–in fact, the parallels between the POV of both the series and Faludi’s book makes me think that Stiffed must be required reading for Mad Men’s writers. In both, traditional masculine values like self-reliance, steadfastness, and dedication to community welfare have steadily undermined by the encroachments of a culture that prizes image and performance over principle and real accomplishment. Its a process that pushes both the interview subjects of Faludi’s book and protagonist Don Draper of Mad Men into a state of spiritual free fall. At the same time, however, we’re reminded by both works that we cannot go back: Thanks in part to its terrific attention to the details of its characters’ lives, Mad Men makes sexism real and concrete, and reminds us of how far we’ve advanced from the “good old days” when women were prisoners in their own homes.
3. Friends: Last night Liko’s pal Linus and mama Molly were supposed to come to dinner. Alas, they cancelled, and Liko wept inconsolably. Suddenly the doorbell rang: It was Liko’s pal Anna Priya and daddy Viru, just stopping by! Liko and Anna Priya got married and had a baby, though they couldn’t agree whether it was a boy or a girl. No matter: Liko was happy, and I was happy that he has such good friends.
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The No-Fear Option: Just wait ’til your father gets home! “What I wanted to be different about my children’s upbringing was their attitude toward their father: I did not want them to be afraid of me. Looking back, I see that there was something I had overlooked. If I raised children who were not afraid of me, I would have children who were…well, not afraid of me.”
Obama’s Mixed Heritage: A Mother’s Perspective. “It’s an interesting historical moment to be a white mother of a Black child, as another white mother’s Black child is running for president of the United States. Who’d have thought?”
The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama. “The political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process.” More wisdom on race and the election: “Barack Obama, John McCain and the Language of Race” and “Poll: Racial views steer some white Dems away from Obama.” (My quick take: Argh!)
Contraception Foes With Friends in High Places. “Claims of equivalency between contraception and abortion have been a long time in the making among contemporary religious right activists. The recent eruption of their claims onto the public stage, helped along by an aggressively anti-choice administration, is the culmination of grassroots work begun in the early 1980s among fundamentalist and evangelical Christian activists, particularly in the homeschooling movement, who developed a pronatalist theological movement that came to be known as the Quiverfull conviction.”
Art of Darkness. “No wonder we crave an entertainment like ‘The Dark Knight,’ where every topic we’re unable to quit not-thinking about is whirled into a cognitively dissonant milkshake of rage, fear and, finally, absolving confusion… If everything is broken, perhaps it is because for the moment we like it better that way. Unlike some others, I have no theory who Batman is — but the Joker is us.”
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A solid, useful piece in today’s New York Times: “I think parents feel like it’s their job to just make their children eat something. But it’s really their job to serve a variety of healthy foods and get their children exposed to foods.”
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