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.
The head of litigation at one of my clients emailed me recently (I’m editing because he’s close to illiterate in his typos and grammar on email): “I want part time tracks to be out there for women, but guys don’t take them because it is harder to make as much or be promoted. But the part time tracks can’t come with the same promotions and compensation. I don’t want to subsidize my partners by seeing my kids less.”
In the ideal world, there would be no monetary power dimension in a relationship for anyone to be concerned about. Either the man or the woman in either a hetero or gay relationship would earn more, or both/all would earn equally, and either way it wouldn’t really factor in to power within the relationship.
Sadly, we don’t live in the ideal world.
We all know the Terry Hekker story, right? What in the individual instance (note: I am not saying there is one right answer for each woman, or man, or couple) is just a variation that makes sense, when it’s slanted overwhelmingly one way, something worse develops: a trend, that’s weighted in one gender direction.
If a male/female couple has kids, then there is a period in which the stay-at-home parent, typically the woman, is occupied, possibly stimulated. But what about after the children are in school – earlier and earlier these days. You have one parent who has risen in whatever career of whatever collar, to a full professor or a manager at Starbucks or head of a janitorial union or a partner at a law firm or a licensed therapist. And another who has what might be a closer bond with the kids and a bigger voice on the PTA, both very meaningful. And the individual woman, if she’s the one at home, may have developed some hobbies that can be developed into entrepreneurial ventures, either lucrative or meaningful in some other way.
But very often that’s not the case, and there’s an imbalance. One partner will have a fulfilling, or at least varied and adult, outside life in which there is constant affirmation of value, even if that’s just a paycheck. The other will need to be creative to develop this, which will be difficult in light of the tasks that will fall to her – household responsibilities, chauffeuring duties, etc.
So my belief is that, to the extent women have more confidence than men that we can skate a bit on the economic side without our desirability or eventual lifestyle or responsibility level suffering too much, this is a curse rather than a blessing.
In some places (like – college, earnest young couples’ dinner tables, the Feminist Blogosphere…) all this talk of money is…kind of tacky. Why be concerned about the (ugh) money and power balance in a relationship? That’s so Republican, right?
Even I, a hardcore sellout, used to view things differently at the tender age of 28 compared to my current 40. At 28, I wasn’t too bothered by this either. I had finished my third academic stint after two initial hiccups. I was easing into a new job (which would turn out to be another hiccup, but that’s another story). Most of my friends of both genders were still working and weren’t married, or just beginning to get married.
Fast forward three years, most of them were having kids, or if not kids, then settling into some kind of semi-permanent domestic state. And yeah, at this point the above-mentioned trend was becoming disappointingly clear. Friend after friend opted out of the sometimes disappointing result of her often expensive education: the J-O-B word. After all, you didn’t have to be accomplish-ing to be accomplish-ed, right? The husbands were OK with it; their wives were still witty companions who were also willing to be maids. It was all good.
Five years later, it wasn’t always. Again: I have nothing against women or men who stay home. In the individual case, it may be a great idea. But as a trend slanting the estrogen direction, it doesn’t seem to be. Many of the women were signaling Betty Friedan-type frustration. Many of the men, though of course not all, were finding the nubile young MBA making deals in Prada suits in the office next door to have more interesting things to say than their aproned housemate.
Occasionally, one of those men would ask the nubile young MBA, or JD, or whatever, to say those interesting things under the covers somewhere, or on a conference room table after hours. I’ve gotten a few such requests from a few such young married men.
None of my partners’ wives work. Recently, Time magazine came out with an article about female midlife crises. This section is particularly instructive:
“Unlike their mothers and unlike the men in their lives, this cohort of women is creating a new model for what midlife might look like. … however disruptive menopause may be for some women, the changes that matter most are often more psychic and spiritual than physical. …Among the growing ranks of female entrepreneurs are many who have sensed a massive Midlife Marketing Opportunity. Women are natural marketers, even of their worst fears. Their instinct when they get in trouble is to talk about it with other women. So once they have weathered the crisis, they are ready to become crisis managers. The hospice nurse opens a consulting firm to help women handle their aging parents. The escrow officer becomes a personal trainer specializing in older women. The Harvard M.B.A. with three kids opens a temp agency specializing in placing part-time manager moms…. More and more people see not a crisis but a challenge–even an opportunity, observes Deborah Carr, a sociology professor at Rutgers University. ‘How are they going to spend the second half of their life? They know they’re going to have lots of healthy years, so I think it’s a period of making choices to live out one’s dreams that got put on the shelf during younger years.’”
One of my partners told me he liked the article and recommended it. Then he admitted he had hidden it from his wife. “Barbara [not her real name] has been depressed lately with her life and this would make it worse. She is bored, but with my mother ill and our daughter having some problems, she has a lot of responsibilities.”
Of course, it makes sense for Barbara, and not Jim [not his real name], to handle these responsibilities. Jim is bringing home the bacon. Sure, that often means trips to different cities, fancy meals out, opportunities to hold forth for people of stature. Yeah, patriarchal, capitalist stature, but still: stature. This enables Jim to pay for their house and bills, and it therefore is left for Barbara to shoulder Jim’s sick mom and their daughter’s issues, although Jim does his part to the extent possible. But on a nine-ten hour day, there’s only so much he can do, even though his schedule allows some flexibility.
So I guess I am tacky — I am concerned with the monetary power dimension in a relationship.
Warner has a point. Some of the opting out may be pushing out. But let’s not cast off all power to change this. Bad econonomies are beyond most of our control, but we can limit the gender-based impact to some degree.
I think delegation of responsibilities is natural, in opposite-sex or same-sex partnerships. But for the responsibilities to tilt one way too much of the time is not biology. It’s not equality. It’s not a privilege.
It’s a trap.