Economics – Page 12

Opt Out, Push Out, and Pink Collar Paths

In ”The Other Home Equity Crisis”, Judity Warner claims there’s no real “Opt Out” trend, that instead:

“Women left the workforce when the cost of child care ate up their entire after-tax salaries, or when family-unfriendly workplaces pushed them out. Or when, like women without children or men with and without children, they were laid off in a bad economy.”

She quotes a congressional report that says:

“Women may be more susceptible to the impact of the business cycle than they were when they were more highly concentrated in a smaller number of non-cyclical occupations, like teaching and nursing”.

She also mentions that because women who leave jobs are viewed as deciding to be “moms” and men are viewed as “unemployed,” the latter are more likely to get benefits.

So what do we make of this?

Well, it’s critical for workplaces to become more family friendly. Single parents, poor parents, don’t have the option for one parent not to work. And for women and men to have equal access to unemployment benefits.

But it’s also critical for this “family friendly” path not to become a pink collar ghetto. I think the percentages of women and men who avail themselves of these options should ideally be more equal, to the extent we have power over that.

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Bush to Veto Equal Pay for Women

This week, the House passed the Paycheck Fairness act, legislation that sets precedents to close the wage gap between working men and women and attempts to close the loopholes that allow employers to get away with discriminatory pay practices. However, according to an official statement, the White House fully intends to veto the bill, saying,

The bill would unjustifiably amend the Equal Pay Act (EPA) to allow for, among other things, unlimited compensatory and punitive damages, even when a disparity in pay was unintentional. It also would encourage discrimination claims to be made based on factors unrelated to actual pay discrimination by allowing pay comparisons between potentially different labor markets. In addition, it would require the Department of Labor (DOL) to replace its successful approach to detecting pay discrimination with a failed methodology that was abandoned because it had a 93 percent false positive rate. Thus, if H.R. 1338 were presented to the President, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.

Now be a good girl and make me a sandwich.

Via Think Progress

Blacks, Latinos, and the precariousness of “middle class”

Today I listened to a segment on Democracy Now! about a new report that’s out from Demos and Brandeis University on the state of the Black and Latino middle class in the United States. The study, entitled “Economic (In)Security: The Experience of the African American and Latino Middle Classes,” finds that three-out-of-four Black and four-out-of-five Latino middle-class families are economically insecure and at high risk of slipping out of the middle class. From the report, which can be downloaded as a PDF from the Demos website:

African-American and Latino families have more difficulty moving into the middle class, and families that do enter the middle class are less secure and at higher risk than the middle class as a whole. Overall, more African-American and Latino middle-class families are at risk of falling out of the middle class than are secure. This is in sharp contrast to the overall middle class, in which 31 percent are secure and 21 percent are at risk. Specifically:

Only 26 percent of African-American middle-class families have the combination of as- sets, education, sufficient income, and health insurance to ensure middle-class financial security. One in three (33 percent) is at high risk of falling out of the middle class.

Less than one in five Latino families (18 percent) is securely in the middle class. More than twice as many (41 percent) of Latino families are in danger of slipping out of the middle class.

African-American middle-class families are less secure and at greater risk than the middle class as a whole on four of the five indicators of security and vulnerability [named by the report as assets, education, housing, budget, and healthcare]. Latino middle-class families are less secure and at greater risk on all five indicators.

Jennifer Wheary, a senior fellow at Demos and one of the co-authors of the report, elaborated on Democracy Now!:

And what we found was when we compared the situation of white middle-class families to African Americans and Latinos, there were vast differences. You know, and what was astounding to us was really looking at—these are, you know, African American and Latino families that, by all sense and purposes, have achieved the American dream, people who, you know, have two earners, two professional earners in the household, you know, maybe are trying to own a home or do own a home, you know, very—have achieved all the aspirations that we typically go for. But even among those people, when you look at, you know, where they’re weak economically, we found that about two-in-five Latino middle-class families are in danger of falling out of the middle class. They’re so financially vulnerable, don’t have assets. Maybe somebody in the household is uninsured. And one-in-three African American middle-class families are also in danger, so vulnerable, so weak, that they’re in danger of falling out of the middle class.

I haven’t read the report yet, but when I do, I fully expect to cry. In fact, as I listened to the segment on the bus home today, I actually found myself tearing up; not only because the larger injustices behind what I was hearing, but because it hit a very personal chord.

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Feminist Porn: Sex, Consent, and Getting Off

Warning: May not be safe for work…unless you are like me and work at Planned Parenthood. 🙂 The links are definitely not work-safe and may contain adult content to be viewed only by people over the age of 18.

Feminism has a love/hate relationship with sex. The “Feminist Sex Wars” rage on and not just between second and third-wavers. I once spent an evening at a hole-in-the-wall strip club with a 20-something friend fiercely debating her anti-pornography/anti-prostitution position. We spent half an hour of that night talking with a dancer, a young single mom and the only woman-of-color on the floor. She said it was better than working at a grocery store; she made more money and didn’t have to pay for day care. How could I blame her? It was niave and classist for us to engage her in this conversation, but I was in college and didn’t know how stupid I was being. This also happened to be the night I bought my first vibrator, with that same friend, at a sleazy adult store in Syracuse, NY. Long story short is that I became passionate about the rights of sex workers and people that work in the sex/adult industry and began a more intelligent and articulate study of why I felt so compelled to defend pornography, prostitution, women’s sexual pleasure, and my own sexual desires.

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Feminist economics: an interview with Susan Feiner

For the past two weeks, I’ve been posting about feminism and economics, but I haven’t said much about feminist economics, a sub-discipline within economics. I have not studied as much explicitly feminist economics as I should have, so to introduce you to the fiel I’ve tapped into a much more qualified resource – Susan Feiner, a professor of women’s and gender studies and economics at the University of Southern Maine. This is a sort of guest post within a guest post – below the cut, there is a Q&A with Feiner about the difference between mainstream and feminist economics, how she got started in the area, why undergraduate economics courses can be so alienating, and more.

If you enjoy this post, you should check out Feiner’s own site and her blog, Economics She Wrote. Two good posts to start with are mock transcripts from a meeting introducing women’s studies to economics. You also might like her book, Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization.

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The puzzle of female entrepreneurs

If you close your eyes and think about entrepreneurship, what do you see? I used to see a montage of old Venture episodes. My entrepreneur was male, young, ambitious, and very busy. He was about to realize his dreams, so he didn’t sleep very much. If he had a family, they hadn’t seen him in weeks. Soon, he would be rich.

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on a paper about female entrepreneurship, and it’s becoming clear just how little real-life business resembles television, even CBC television. (That should be obvious I know, but sometimes I’m slow on the uptake.) For one thing, more and more entrepreneurs are women. Female business owners are a market force to be reckoned with. According to the Center for Women’s Business Research, over the past twenty years, firms majority-owned by women have grown at twice the rate of all businesses – a whopping 42 per cent. Women own 41 per cent of privately-owned firms. And in the last ten years, businesses owned by women of colour have grown at 120 per cent.

I wish this was a story about female empowerment. But the thing is, self-employment can be a pretty marginal existence. Once you think about it, it’s obvious – the man who works at my local convenience store seems to work more hours than I’m awake. And it turns out that businesses owned by women are even smaller, slower growing, less profitable and more likely to go out of business than male-owned businesses. This has personal implications for female entrepreneurs – even rich women are less likely to benefit, income-wise, from self-employment than their male counterparts, and non-professional women who start businesses actually see their incomes drop. Here’s the puzzle: Why do women start businesses, if it leaves them worse off?

Self-employment is one option for people marginalized in the labour market. Unfortunately, most of these studies only include white women, but I would be surprised if women of colour are faring much better. The evidence suggests that many women start businesses to escape inflexible work hours. Women who have taken time out of work to raise children are also more likely to start their own businesses. One clever study seems to show that women who face a larger wage gap are more likely to become self-employed. This explains some of the performance gap between male- and female-owned businesses: If you’re escaping a bad situation in the waged world, you’re more likely to settle for low profits elsewhere.

It sure makes those business growth numbers, especially the one for women of colour, look more ominous.

Further Reading

If you’re really interested in this stuff, or doubt my interpretation, drop me an email or comment and I can send you a couple pages of references. Many of my sources also appear in this substantial literature review. Also check out the fact sheet linked above.

Our genders, our salaries

Several of you have asked for a post about the wage gap. I’ve held off, because it’s a huge topic – really, most of my own blog circles back to income one way or another. But I get that not everyone feels like spending a few weeks, months, or years on this stuff, so I’ll try to quickly bring you up to speed.

The bottom line is that researchers haven’t been able to account for all of the pay gap between men and women. We know that part of it is about informal caregiving, which still overwhelmingly falls to women. On average, thanks to our other commitments, we have less formal work experience, and that translates to lower income, though in many cases it means that we work more hours in total.

Nonetheless, even when researchers try to correct for differences in education and work experience, the gender gap persists, suggesting that something else is at work. Feministe commenter Sappho pointed us towards this US Census report, complete with a dizzying number of charts and graphs. It quotes a GAO report:

When we account for difference between male and female work patterns as well as other key factors, women earned, on average, 80 percent of what men earned in 2000… Even after accounting for key factors that affect earnings, our model could not explain all of the differences in earnings between men and women.

What’s the source of that additional 20 per cent gap? I’d say it’s some part straightforward sexism – unequal pay for equal work – paired with workplace atmospheres that discourage women from excelling. Unfortunately, this stuff is tough to measure. Part of it also probably has to do with negotiation.

Those who dismiss the pay gap as yesterday’s problem also tend to associate the gap that remains with choice in a very positive way. I think this has to do with the way economists view specialization – for more of my take on that, you can check out this post – but we should remember a couple things about caregiving and choice. First, don’t assume that women who work part time or are returning from a few years at home are paid less because they actually are less valuable than their male coworkers. It could just be a different sort of sexism – in all sorts of contexts, women are held to higher standards than men.

Second, this is not about individual choice – as Slacker, another commenter (what would I do without you?) pointed out: "reproductive choices of women in general affect labor market treatment of a woman whether she intends to have children or not." In other words, you’re likely to suffer from your employer’s expectation that you will have children and take time out to care for them, even if you never intend to take a maternity leave.

It’s true – the wage gap has a lot to do with the way we organize family life. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about how to close it.

Further Reading

As Kathy G. points out, Echidne of the Snakes has a written a full series of posts on the pay gap. (While you’re over there, also check out her superb Statistics Primer – it will make everything else easier to understand.) The National Women’s Law Center put together an excellent fact sheet for the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act earlier this year, and it’s still worth a read. The American Association of University Women Educational Foundation (there’s a mouthful!) put out a report called Behind the Pay Gap last year – check out the press kit.

What is economics?

It’s too bad that most of our day-to-day interaction with economics is the least interesting part of every newscast, when they bring out the “economics” reporter to read stock market numbers. As you’ve probably figured out by now, there’s a lot more to economics than the price of gold. How much more? In this post, I’ve put together a list of complementary and contradictory definitions. It’s nearly impossible to briefly describe an entire academic and professional discipline, so take this with a generous pinch of salt, and please add and subtract from the list in comments.

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