Monday, March 31, 2008

The indelicacies of being a job applicant in a delicate way

Remember when I wrote about losing out on yet another job to motherhood? Turns out that what I experienced was, like, so illegal in my state, which is developing some of the strongest anti–pregnancy discrimination law in the land. Ironically, just a few days before getting discriminated out of that job, I’d been chatting at a party with a lawyer who works on pregnancy discrimination and who told me about a new case she’d worked on that strengthened pregnancy discrimination protections.

That case was just like mine, only mine was even stronger and clearer. I didn’t file charges with the local civil rights board, as a lawyer advised me to do, just confronted the temp agency rep, who ate crow after talking with his lawyer. He quickly found me other work (and promised to educate his staff and that of his client).

Here’s the good-bad news: I am not alone. The National Partnership for Women and Families reports that complaints of pregnancy discrimination rose by 14% between 2006 and 2007 and by a whopping 40% increase over the last decade.

Good for women for filing complaints. But yuck that we have so much to complain about. And, sadly, in most states the law against pregnancy discrimination isn’t very strong. The National Partnerships for Women and Families explains, “Under the law, pregnant women do not receive protection from adverse treatment, and employers can fire, lay off or refuse to hire pregnant women. However, the law states that pregnant women cannot be singled out, that employers must prove that men are held to the same standards and that male job candidates are asked comparable questions during the hiring process.” This explanation isn’t crystal clear to me, but I do know that in my home state—Washington—in a hiring process, you can ask only whether an applicant can do the job, and requirements, including physical ones, must be clearly established and uniform for all applicants. So rejecting me on the grounds of pregnancy for a job that required the ability to occasionally lift up to 25 pounds—which I said I could do—was clearly illegal. The fact that the job offer was rescinded after I mentioned I was pregnant was what put the employer in hot water.

The law couldn’t help me in the grayer area where I simply never received job offers after I mentioned I was pregnant. Broader changes in the job market are required. If paid parental leave were funded throughout the country, high-quality daycare provided and publicly subsidized so that mothers could work without the likelihood of disruption, and if temporary work weren’t so prevalent, we’d likely face less pregnancy discrimination.

Still, if employers understood that the law forbids the kind of paternalism toward pregnant women I was subjected to, I think that would transform attitudes and reduce discrimination. I was told, “We’d feel so bad if we needed something heavier lifted.” Never mind feeling bad about leaving me jobless (or considering that my 2 1/2-year-old is heavier than 25 pounds and I’ve lifted her every day of this pregnancy); the law makes clear that it’s not an employer’s job to protect people in a Delicate Way; that’s my business.

This is a profound shift, and not just for Neanderthals. I found myself rethinking the matter once I understood the law. If employers thought more clearly about the actual requirements of the job and let go of irrelevant assumptions about who they picture doing it, we’d be a step in the right direction.

Thursday, March 27, 2008

It's our fault, installment #5,726

As if we needed more proof that mothers can’t win, the Boston Globe recently ran an editorial claiming that the long hours Americans work are women’s fault. The next day the Wall Street Journal reported on a study that found lawyers who are mothers are less productive than non-mothers—whereas lawyers who are fathers are more productive than non-fathers. Which is it—are we women cold workaholics or slackers?

As both Broadsheet and Carolyn Elefant in a letter to the WSJ noticed, there’s a problem with the lawyer study’s definition of productivity. The researchers in fact measured billable hours, which they equated with productivity, which isn't necessarily the same thing at all. Elefant wrote, “I’d be curious to see, for example, whether women lawyers manage to complete tasks more quickly precisely because they have less time. If that’s the case (and I suspect it is), perhaps having children makes them [more] productive, not less.”

Exactly.

The study also found that women without children are more “productive” (bill more hours) than anyone else, male or female, though that brings us back to the Boston Globe’s diatribe against women for working such long hours and upping the ante on all of us.

And then there’s that depressing bit about father lawyers working extra hours, which fits with what researchers have found in other fields. As Joan Williams, Ann Crittenden, Edward McCaffery, and others have explained, the depressing fact that men tend to work even longer hours after they have children is the result of the gender role specialization that our culture—including our tax code—drives parents into. Combine the presumption that mothers be the primary caregivers with the likelihood that the wife in a couple earns less than her husband, add in the lack of public subsidies and meaningful tax deductions for childcare, and, just to really slant the deck, toss in a tax code that heavily taxes the wages of the secondary earner in a family, and you’ve got a recipe for fathers specializing in breadwinning and mothers in caregiving—fathers working longer hours, mothers fewer. Bingo.

Which would seem to suggest that it’s men, or at least fathers, not women, that the Boston Globe should be blaming for the trend to long hours—or that she’s on the wrong track altogether in blaming workers, rather than corporations or government policies. In part because of the perception that mothers are less committed to their work, mothers get paid 40 percent less than men (see that item in my list of facts over to the right). A woman wouldn’t be irrational if she felt the need to overcompensate for this assumption by working extra hours (or, if she’s paid hourly, compensate for her low rate of pay by working more hours), thereby demonstrating her devotion to work. Many mothers will tell you that after they had babies their bosses subjected them to extra demands beyond what other employees faced, as if to test their commitment to work. So give me a break (yet again) with this it’s-our-fault business.

Monday, March 24, 2008

"Single mothers ruining society"?

I’ve had it up to here with headlines like this: “Out-of-wedlock births are a national catastrophe” (said Slate), with their not-so-subtle subtext that, as Broadsheet put it sarcastically, “single mothers are ruining society.” I’m sick of hearing this line assumed as given fact even in liberal circles. I take this personally—that would be my mother—a fact that always startles the liberal men who spout this crap in my presence. I think they assume that single mothers are a) African American, b) teenagers, c) poor and ignorant, or d) all of the above. None of which fits my Harvard-educated mother who chose to have me at 24 (but who did briefly go on welfare after I was born).

The central argument is that because poverty is so high among single mothers, lack of marriage must be the cause of their poverty. “Some researchers identify out-of-wedlock births as the chief cause for the increasing stratification and inequality of American life, the first step that casts children into an ever more rigid caste system,” Slate’s Emily Yoffe says.

This makes me think the right headline should be, “Failure of education in basic statistical principles is a national catastrophe.” As any stats prof will tell his undergrads, correlation does not equal causation.

Here’s some pretty easy-to-come-by evidence that lack of marriage isn’t what’s causing child poverty: Sweden for over a decade has had the world’s highest rate of out-of-wedlock births—they’re now a majority of Sweden’s births—and yet one of the lowest rates of child poverty in the world. In several other Northern European countries with low child poverty rates, unwed mothers also are in the majority. France just last year joined this group.

A few other facts Yoffe and others of her ilk ignore: An American child is 79 times more likely to become a victim of child abuse than a Swedish child, although (because?) far more American children than Swedes are born within marriage. More than one third of all impoverished young children in the U.S. today live with two parents. And here's a zinger: Among African-American families, children from single-parent homes show higher educational achievement than their counterparts from two-parent homes.

And about that income stratification: It’s likely the causation goes precisely the other way. That is, because income is distributed far more unequally in the United States than in most other developed countries, it is difficult for low-wage workers (male or female) to support a family without a second income. And—duh—the shortage of affordable child care makes it difficult for single mothers to support themselves, whereas Western European nations provide publicly subsidized day care, not to mention myriad other supports to parents. The real catastrophe that we Americans should be talking about: the economic toll parenting exacts in America.

In addition to staggering ignorance of logic, the single-parenting-is-a disaster arguments always seem to me to expose a nasty cynicism about marriage. Given the lower rates of marriage among mothers in countries with rich social supports for parents, it appears it takes economic coercion, vulnerability, and shame to get a majority of mothers to marry. Apparently that’s the state marriage promoters want women to be in—that’s the kind of marriage bargain they’re for. Yuck.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Domestic disputes

Good news, eh? The India Times (via Feministing) reports that Muslim women are on their way toward finally having the right to divorce on the same terms as Muslim men. If the The All India Muslim Women Personal Law Board has its way,
a Muslim woman would be entitled to seek divorce if her husband was found having illicit relationship with another woman.
The board has also rejected any divorce done through SMS, e-mail, phone as video conferencing, besides rejecting divorce done on provocation.
A Muslim woman can seek divorce if she is forced by her husband to indulge in unnatural sex. She can also seek divorce if her husband contracts AIDS.
Fine, good news. But I can’t seem to see the sunshine for the black cloud: the realization that India’s women are governed, in their family relations, by the law of the religious community they happen to belong to. Not so long ago, I was shocked to learn that in Israel, the “democracy of the Middle East” family law is handled by Orthodox rabbis.

How many other countries do the same, treating family as sectarian religious matters rather than as a matter of human rights? This isn't an issue only for Third World countries. Remember when the Archbishop of Canterbury created controversy by suggesting Britain would likely soon have to allow Muslims in Britain to be governed by sharia? And right-wingers want to introduce “covenant marriage” in this country—they’ve succeeded in a couple of states.

Some commentators on the archbishop’s remarks suggested this would be just fine because people would have to choose to be governed by sharia, much as people in the few states in the U.S. with covenant marriage have to choose to enter it (very few have). In neither India nor Israel do you have any choice. But in any case, if you live within a religious community, how meaningful is such “choice”? You might make the same argument for the legalization of slave contracts; in fact, our society has come to recognize that some “choices” are abhorrent and cannot be enforced or even allowed by the state. It wasn't so long ago that in this country a man beating up his wife was treated as a private matter, a "domestic dispute." Let's not forget what the stakes are when we privatize family law.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

How do we tell the children?

Among the many angles on the Eliot Spitzer the media are chewing on is how parents should talk to children about infidelity. Forget prostitution for the moment—I’m not ready to figure out how you explain to children the buying and selling of sex. What about infidelity?

Having grown up the child of a single mom, I always thought one of the grosser things about marriage as mythologized in our culture was how it muddled up the parents’ sexual relationship in their relationships with their children. Ick. My mother had boyfriends and partners over the years, but I always knew that had nothing to do with my relationship with her (and that ultimately I came first). And I think that’s a good thing.

Now, against all my expectations, I’m married. Which raises for me the question of how I make sure that my children know that my relationship with them is one thing and my relationship with their father is another. I’m pretty confident that infidelity and divorce—let alone prostitution—are not on the horizon for us, but I’m sure there will ups and downs in the marriage and I hope my children will understand that that’s about me and their father and not about them. My relationship with my children is unconditional.

But I lack models for how you convey this within the confines of heterosexual marriage. Perhaps one element is generally conveying that mama and daddy are separate (and imperfect) people and that our lives extend beyond our children, so there’s never any shattering of idols. My partner and I each spend time caring for our daughter alone, so I hope that we are cultivating equal and separate relationships with her. Still, we are a family unit—which is pretty wonderful, I think—and that is all she knows. I guess I just hope I never fetishize that unit. We’re still, also, individuals.

Any thoughts, gentle readers?

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Do we all work at the Emperor's Club?

Get a load of this angle on the Eliot Spitzer story (thanks, Broadsheet):
Telephone operators at the Emperor's Club criticized one of the women for cutting sessions with buyers short so that she could pick up her children at school. 'As a general rule,' one said, 'girls with children tend to have a little more baggage going on.'
Sound familiar, girls?

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Do I care if Eliot Spitzer hires prostitutes?

I so wanted to like “Who Cares If Eliot Spitzer Hires Prostitutes?”, Glenn Greenwald’s post on the hour’s hottest scandal at Salon.com. Purchasing sex is decidedly—shall we call it tacky? No, let’s be honest and call it morally bankrupt. But it’s not an abuse of public trust or public power (although I have to assume that it’s power that corrupted Spitzer into thinking he could get away with it and probably power that got him thinking it was cool to buy sex). I’ve always been ambivalent about prostitution laws, since although I consider the purchasing of sex abhorrent, I don’t think criminalizing women who sell themselves is a good way of dealing with the practice.

And I always thought of Eliot Spitzer’s raison d’etre as opposition to corporate malfeasance and greed, not private sexual behavior, as has been the case with so many of the right-wingers caught in sexual scandals, so I haven’t really seen the hypocrisy as all that direct. Still, he’s branded himself as “Mr. Clean” and he did prosecute at least one big prostitution case. And give me a break with Spitzer's wrapping himself in the righteousness of the progressive causes he's championed (come to think of it, that's kind of like the way he apparently used a friend's name to register at the hotel where he brought prostitutes).

Anyway, I was prepared to hear Greenwald sympathetically. He approvingly cites another blogger writing that if two consenting adults have sex and once gets paid, that’s illegal, but if several consenting adults have sex, film it, and they all get paid, that’s just business—ridiculous, says Greenwald. This is a funny point. Except that it misses the main point. It’s precisely the one-sidedness that makes prostitution a moral problem. When one person purchases the body of another, you’ve got a sin. When whole classes of people can purchase the bodies of whole other classes of people, you’ve got one sign of a social evil. To be a woman in this world is—to riff on Catherine MacKinnon—for your sexual body to be purchase-able. Which, I think, harms all women. I’m not with MacKinnon on outlawing porn, because I do think there’s a difference between word and act. And I’m not sure I’m even for outlawing prostitution, precisely because the law treats buyer and bought as equally to blame, which misses the point just as Greenwald does. Prostitution is not, as Greenwald claims, a victimless crime.

Still, I can’t get myself worked into too much of a moral lather over Spitzer’s deeds. I don't expect politicians to be personal saints. Mostly I think Spitzer's an idiot. He got caught by Bush’s Department of Justice and some banks that noticed suspicious transactions. Did it not occur to him that these two groups were likely to be out to get him?

And unlike some self-righteous liberals noting the disparity between Spitzer’s treatment and the retention in office of accused sex criminals David Vitter and Larry Craig, I thought Spitzer rightly had to go. There’s a difference between the legislative branch and executive branch. As an executive, Spitzer wouldn’t have been able to get anything done.

What I’m maddest at Spitzer for is his treatment of his wife. I’ve had it with political wives being forced to stand up with their husbands and use their victimhood to help their husbands salvage some sympathy. As if having the world know your husband bought sex (possibly partly because he wanted some rough trade) weren’t bad enough, you have to go stand by him under the klieg lights (looking haggard to boot)? Screw that. That’s another form of prostitution, and if that’s what marriage means marriage oughta be illegal. Let him twist by himself in the wind. That’s what I call personal responsibility.

Update: Gack! Apparently Silda Spitzer is getting lots of judgment thrown at her. According to Broadsheet, at least one commentator blamed her for the scandal (because she supposedly didn't kink things up enough). I can't do more than sputter at this. Damn them. (And Broadsheet offers some plausible and reasonable possible motivations to explain Spitzer's stand-by-your-man act.)

Monday, March 10, 2008

This just in: being poor is depressing

This oughta put paid to the idea that postpartum depression just is hormones: Researchers at one of my alma maters, the University of Iowa, have found that poor women (in Iowa) are many times more likely to suffer from postpartum depression than better off women. Yeah, no kidding, being poor is depressing.

Another study by the same researchers found that African-American women are more likely than white women to get depressed after birth, while Latinas are less likely to get depressed. The lead researcher suggested that the differences can be traced to differences in social support.

I find the press release darkly amusing in its bureaucratic caution. “Considered together, the results of both studies highlight … the need for early identification programs.” I picture social workers saying to patients, “I think you should be aware that our data suggest there is a high likelihood that you are poor/black.” If you ask me, the results of the studies highlight the need to end poverty and racism and the way our society isolates mothers.

Which is not to dismiss the program the researchers have created to help depressed women postpartum, called “listening visits,” in which mothers get the chance to talk about their difficulties with a caseworker or nurse. But here again there’s something darkly amusing: The visits were modeled on the “health visitor” provided by Britain’s National Health Service for new mothers, and the Iowa researchers imported Brits to do the listening. Eek—the socialists are coming; don’t tell Aetna, Blue Cross, Kaiser, …

Thanks to the Our Bodies, Ourselves blog for noting this research. The blog’s also got other good stuff.

Friday, March 7, 2008

Women in Iraq bowed but not broken

I've just discovered this organization, the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq, which in honor of International Women's Day tomorrow issued a statement of solidarity with women of the world and is circulating a petition to "End the Genocide on Women of Iraq." Among depressing lowlights of the petition,
The southern cities of Iraq which are totally under the grip of Islamist parties have turned into no-woman zones...Since the 2003 occupation of Iraq, these cities were open land to "Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice- PVPV" Islamist militant squads, gangs and individuals...The top of the female death toll list is occupied by PhD holders, professionals, activists, regular office workers, and then prostitutes. This PVPV campaign terrorizes the female population so as to restrain women into the domestic domain and end all female participation from the social and political scene.
Feministing lists a number of other efforts to celebrate International Women's Day.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Birth mothers react to Juno

I know from reader feedback that Katha Pollitt and I aren’t after all alone in finding Juno disturbing. Thanks, gentle readers. Thanks now also to the Chicago Tribune, which ran a piece last week about reactions to the film by women who gave children up for adoption.

Check out the lead:
When Kateri McCann gave up her baby for adoption, she was a lot like the heroine of the hit movie "Juno": young, starry-eyed, and in love with the idea of doing the best thing for herself and her child while making the dream of parenthood a reality for a deserving couple.
She thought she could outsmart grief, she says, and for about a year and a half she succeeded.
Then came the tears, the nightmares, the spiraling depression.
And this:
McCann [says] that Cody, the "Juno" screenwriter, nails the initial stages of adoption with eerie precision, but misses the big picture almost entirely.
"It seems like [Cody] knew someone in that situation, paid really close attention -- and then lost contact when [the birth mother] became depressed."

Monday, March 3, 2008

Sluts talk back

Priceless: The Colorado state rep who called teenage mothers “sluts” and urged that they be shamed and sent away was forced to eat crow at a school for teen mothers (thanks to Feministing for flagging it). When he visited the Florence Crittenton School, Larry Liston actually apologized to the students, saying, “I uttered a word which I regret and I apologized for. It's a word I don't use. Scout's honor. I never use it"—uh, yeah, except for that very public time he did use it.

Not sure if this means he’ll change any of his policy positions, but still.

Ironically, the Florence Crittenton Association originally provided homes for “fallen” and “wayward” women—i.e. unwed and pregnant—and, especially during the ‘40s through the ‘60’s these homes were among the places where “girls who went away” were sent to hide their shame (and their families’) and then give up their babies for adoption (exactly what Liston seemed to be advocating in his original speech). By the early ‘70s, thanks to the women’s movement, Roe, and the rising acceptance of unwed motherhood, the demand for these homes had largely evaporated, and they began closing or being transformed into schools like the one Liston visited. I love it that girls at a Crittenton school faced Liston down—poetic justice. Some things really do progress.

(Although about some things we still have trouble being honest: If you google Florence Crittenton, you’ll find plenty of info on the history of their homes, but nothing noting that girls there were pushed to give up their babies in circumstances when they had little opportunity to refuse. I know this only because of reading “The Girls Who Went Away.”)