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Category: Work

Surrogacy, paying for pregnancy and whose rights end where

This entire story about a surrogate mother, Chrystal Kelley, pregnant with a fetus with severe abnormalities, is disturbing and heartbreaking. A low-income woman, desperate for money, agreed to be a surrogate for a wealthier family, something she had done before. Everyone was excited. Then, an ultrasound showed the fetus had several abnormalities — heart problems, organ problems. The parents, who had given birth to two premature babies before and knew the difficulties of raising children with health issues, wanted to terminate the pregnancy. Kelley did not.

Centering Sex Worker Voices

Unsurprisingly, the two recent threads on sex work are… active. There’s a lot of push-back (especially to mine) in the comments, so I want to address a few things. First, I stand by what I wrote in the post. But second, I did an inadequate job of focusing on the more important issue: Making life safer, here and now, for sex workers.

Tip your servers

Laura Beck is right — if you’re budgeting to go out to eat, you need to include a tip in that. And you need to tip even if your waitress isn’t as pleasant as you’d like, and even if the service is imperfect. It is a gender issue, and servers (who are disproportionately female) need tips to make a living wage. I also suspect that female servers are more often on the receiving end of a bad tip for not adequately stroking a diner’s ego — not laughing enough at his jokes, not flirting back, not smiling. So tip! Yes, 20%, even if the service was mediocre.

Divorcing ourselves from traditional marriage

My latest column in the Guardian is about the latest move from a group of conservatives to call a truce on gay marriage and get back to blaming single moms and poor people for destroying marriage itself. They say that poor and middle-class people aren’t getting married, and that’s hurting them financially and socially, keeping them poor. I say that working-class and middle-class people are marrying less often precisely because of economic insecurity: Outdated views of men as breadwinners mean that men who aren’t making enough to support a family may be less enthusiastic about marriage; increases in gender equality mean that working women no longer need to get married for social status and may not want to take on a husband who doesn’t pull his own weight inside the home and out; and with divorce being financially ruinous for women in particular, it’s probably a good idea to avoid marriage if you aren’t reasonably sure you’re hitching yourself to a good horse. If conservatives actually care about the things they say are the purpose of marriage — a good environment for children, family stability, accumulation of personal wealth — then they should support policies that directly promote those things instead of claiming marriage is the one and only solution, because it’s clearly not. A taste:

Let’s talk about that “ambition gap”

It needs no re-telling here, but there’s a big gender gap in leadership roles: there are 20 women in the Senate, and that’s a record high. As of November 2012, there are 21 women who are Fortune 500 CEOs – about 4% – and that is also a record high. Yet, women are getting college degrees and entering the workforce at higher rates than men. Between graduating college and reaching senior management, something is stopping women from making it to the top echelons of the workforce

Is an all-female Supreme Court in the near future?

Sadly, despite Justice Ginsburg’s hopes, I say probably not. And this is actually one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever written for the Guardian (the ensuing comment section also suggests that readers hate it, so there’s that). A (big) section of the piece:

Unfortunately, an all-female supreme court is a long ways off. And not because women aren’t just as smart as men, don’t achieve as highly or aren’t as ambitious. But because, socially, we set men up to succeed and set women up to fail.

Wherein I get to live out my lifelong dream of playing advice columnist

The lovely Kate Carraway let me weigh in on her advice column this week in response to a question about workplace sex-talk — that is, someone wrote in to complain that they feel their co-workers are judging their sex life. You can read Kate’s response, with a few thoughts from yours truly, here. The summary: Have whatever kind of sex you want, but STFU about sex when you’re at work. Even if your workplace is cool.

Rescued from Caperton’s Recycling Bin: “You’re kidding me! I’ve never been asked that question before.”

Periodically, I get around to clearing off my desk and flattening out crumpled magazine clippings and saying, “Huh. Look at that.” Today: Marie Claire‘s Carrick Mollenkamp interviews Sallie Krawcheck, “[o]ne of Wall Street’s most powerful women” who “was ousted from her job running Bank of America’s wealth management division last fall.”

Breastfeeding Sick Babies in Class

A professor walks into class with her baby — the baby was sick and couldn’t go to daycare, and it was the first day of class and the prof didn’t want to cancel, so baby was brought along. During the lecture, the baby is at times strapped to the professor’s back, and at times crawling on the floor, at times being held by a teaching assistant. At one point, the baby gets fussy, and so the professor breastfeeds the baby. Normal “this is life” stuff, or a national news story?