Working women are routinely punished for their biology.
But for all they do to boost the economy, women continue to get the shaft across the American workplace. It’s not just the wage gap — which remains at around 20 percent four decades after equal wages were made the law of the land (According to the AFL-CIO, the average 25 year-old woman will lose almost a half million dollars over her working life). And it’s not just the “glass ceiling” (white men make up les than a third of the workforce, but hold almost 95 percent of top corporate positions, women make up 46 percent of the workforce, but hold less than five percent). The real problem facing working women in the U.S. is that we have the most inflexible workplaces in the developed world.
According to Harvard’s Project on Global Working Families (PDF), the United States is one of only five countries out of 168 studied that doesn’t mandate some form of paid maternal leave. The only other advanced economy among those five was Australia’s, where women are guaranteed an entire year of unpaid leave. That puts the U.S. — the wealthiest nation on the planet — in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.
Well there’s something to be proud of.
That means that women in America face a unique burden. Regardless of how enlightened we believe we are, the yoke of housework and childrearing and eldercare still fall disproportionately on women. The legendary progressive economist Marilyn Waring was the first to consider the economics of unpaid housework in the 1980s. Waring estimated that if what has traditionally been thought of as “women’s work” were counted economically, it would constitute the world’s single largest service and production sector.
Women haven’t caught a break at home to compensate for going to work in the numbers that they have in recent decades. Suzanne Bianchi, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, studied time-use surveys and found that working mothers spent an average of 12 hours a week on child care in 2003, an hour more than stay-at-home mothers did in 1975. That double-burden constrains women’s workforce participation, lowers fertility rates, and impacts the wealth of both women and two-income families in myriad ways.
And of course,
Inflexible workplaces offer socially mobile women a devil’s choice: they can advance in their careers or they can have families. According to BusinessWeek, female corporate execs are twice as likely to be child-free as the the female population as a whole. Those women making $100,000 dollars per year are two-and-a-half times more likely.
But more often women don’t have that choice, and take the financial hit. Much of the “wage gap” is in fact a baby gap. Karen Kornbluh notes that women without children make 90 percent of what their male counterparts earn, but working mothers earn less than three quarters of what men make. A first child lowers a woman’s earnings by an average of 7.5 percent, a second child by 8 percent.
It’s not so much that women leave the workforce permanently to have kids, it’s that when they leave their jobs for a period they can’t return. That has a ripple effect across their working lives — costing them raises, promotions and benefits. According to economist Heather Boushey at the Center for Economic Policy Studies (CEPR), “If women have paid leave they are much more likely to go back to their jobs, and much less likely to quit or switch jobs.”
Leaving the workforce temporarily to have a baby or deal with a sick child or parent costs women seniority, raises and any benefits that require a lengthy stay of employment to become vested. Former Clinton advisor Gene Sperling points out that the average time a worker needs to put in to get pension benefits — if they get them at all in our wonderful “New Economy” — is five years. Men’s average length in the same job is 5.1 years; for women it’s under four. According to the AFL-CIO, “Half of all women with income from a pension in 2002 received less than $5,600 per year, compared with $10,340 per year for men.”
As a young woman in professional school, I’ve already heard, “There’s no way you can have it all.” When a successful female attorney came to speak to one of my classes, the women in the class asked her repeatedly about how she managed to balance her demanding work schedule with having a family. None of the men seemed interested, let alone concerned.
The problem isn’t that women are told that we can’t have it all when we actually can, or that feminist women have too high of expectations and are bound to be disappointed when they realize that they have to make choices. It’s that women are the only ones expected to make these kinds of sacrifices for their families. How many men in my law school class have given more than two minutes of thought to the question, “How will I balance work and family?” They don’t have to.
Social policies are crucial to balancing these things out, but there has to be a major social shift as well. Maleness has to be defined as something more than the ability to be a breadwinner, and femaleness has to be defined as something more than the ability to bear children. This has to happen in tandem with policies that allow both parents to balance work with family. Then we’ll be getting somewhere.