Tag: Gender

Paternity Pays, Ctd

Kay Hymowitz responds to Claire Cain Miller:

The jumping off point of [Miller’s] piece will be familiar to anyone who has kept a casual eye on gender gap research. Mothers earn less than fathers with similar credentials and laboring in similar occupations.  Citing research by sociologist Michelle Budig, Miller notes that “childless, unmarried women earn 96 cents for every dollar a man earns, while married mothers earn 76 cents.” Men, on the other hand, get a parenthood bonus.  Their earnings go up when they become fathers.

Now, there are two plausible reasons for the motherhood penalty and fatherhood bonus.

One is that women behave differently than men when they deal with the inevitable tradeoffs between jobs and children.  That position is certainly consistent with Budig’s finding that men increase their work hours after becoming a parent while women reduce theirs—not to mention mother’s oft-repeated preference for part time over full time employment. Miller, however, seizes on the gender gap literature’s preferred explanation: The gap is caused by discrimination against women, or in this case, “old fashioned notions of parenthood.” Employers remain suspicious of working mothers, she believes, while they are forever patting working dads on the back with raises and promotions.

Megan McArdle also sees some inherent divisions in family roles:

The fundamental unfairness of reproduction carries over into the partnerships we form to assist it. The ideal of an egalitarian partnership in which both partners work outside the home and inside the home in equal measure isn’t achieved even in those Nordic paradises where everyone gets scads of fully paid parental leave and subsidized day care — and women are even less likely to end up in a private-sector job or management than they are in the heartless U.S.

Instead of talking about how unfair it all is, it’s probably more useful to talk about what we want to achieve. Do we want to encourage the formation of marriages in which one spouse charges harder outside the home and the other spouse assumes more domestic duties? Or should we penalize spouses who made the mistake of counting on their partner to provide the lion’s share of the earning power? That was the argument of many feminists in the 1970s; they didn’t want women to have the choice of becoming housewives.

A reader chimes in:

My husband benefited from the Family Man trope. I didn’t benefit so much. We made compromises – I made compromises – all through our marriage to help him meet the requirements of his job. That meant that my career got derailed and we moved to places where we had no support network and I had problems finding work. So his career flourished and I went along with it, because the more I compromised the less of a career I had. Critics of “wage gap” calculations will no doubt point out that I undermined my own earnings, so I have no right to complain about the wage gap, but in retrospect if I’d been paid more for comparable work when I started out, my job would have been a more powerful bargaining chip when we made joint decisions.

When my husband died unexpectedly from a rare and previously undiagnosed cancer before age 60 and I was a widow in my late 50s, I found out widow’s benefits don’t go far and sometimes aren’t even available until later. Pensions are reduced for widows and cut further when the pension holder dies before retirement age. Social Security isn’t much help for younger widows who earn a disproportionately smaller share of the family income. Even though he had life insurance (I insisted), and we had retirement funds, I am facing a rocky retirement that began earlier than expected after my dead-end job laid me off just after I turned 60.

I have good friends who made the same compromises, but their husbands are alive and the wives are working part-time or not at all, traveling, and facing a much different old age – because so far, their husbands are still earning money and clocking time on pension actuarial tables and contributing to Social Security (and they’re lucky because as far as I can tell, they have less insurance and retirement savings than we had, although a couple of the men have larger pensions than my husband did). It takes a lot of capital to produce the high cash flow that a living, successful spouse brings in.

While my problems may sound like the problems of privilege to single moms, I find there isn’t much awareness about how early death pretty much burns up all the financial advantages of having a Family Man who earns most of the family income. It’s very hard for a couple to calculate how career decisions will play out financially 30 or 40 years in the future. These days, I don’t recommend the Family Man model.

When A Black Woman Kisses A White Man

Ashley Southall tells the story of a possibly racist misunderstanding:

The actress, Daniele Watts, who appeared in “Django Unchained” and plays Martin Lawrence’s daughter on the FX show “Partners,” revealed the incident last week in a note on Facebook. She said she was “handcuffed and detained” by the officers “after refusing to agree that I had done something wrong by showing affection, fully clothed, in a public place.” … Ms. Watts’s boyfriend, Brian James Lucas, a celebrity raw food chef, said in his account of the incident posted to Facebook on Friday that the officers’ questions indicated that they suspected the couple were a prostitute and her client after observing their different skin colors, his numerous visible tattoos and her shorts. He did not say what questions the police had asked. Mr. Lucas also accused the officers of threatening to call an ambulance and to drug Ms. Watts “for being psychologically unstable.”

Yomi Adegoke contextualizes the incident:

Cases such as Daniele’s illustrate why intersectionality is crucial to any discussion of racism and, more pressingly, any discussion of feminism. We must face the facts — this would not have happened to Daniele had she been a black man, nor would it have happened if she were a white woman. … As it stands, black women are sexualised to such a degree — and black people criminalised to such a degree — that it appears the police are unable to fathom something as common as an interracial relationship in anything other than sexual terms, despite an incumbent biracial president.

And Elizabeth Nolan Brown takes the occasion to describe the extent to which non-black women are not hassled by the police.

The only correlate I have to stories of routine street harassment and cruelty by cops is how often I haven’t been bothered, arrested, or abused. And let’s just say I’m no angel. I have absolutely walked the streets of so many cities drinking alcohol from travel mugs, ducking into dark parks and alleys to sneak a joint or a kiss; purchased drugs and even untaxed cigarettes in the relative open; and generally engaged in the kind of semi-suspicious and minimally-criminal public behavior that I’m certain would get someone with darker skin or more testosterone at least harassed (if not arrested or assaulted) many times over. …

I wish everyone had the privilege I’ve had to not just break dumb laws without really fearing repercussion but even simply to go about regular life without being treated like a criminal. Incidents like this one with Watts, however, show how it’s not merely about the attitudes of cops. Excluding everything the officers did or didn’t do once they showed up, there’s still the fact that someone seems to have called them on an assumption that this young black woman cozying up to a white man must be a prostitute. Absent anything the cops did in Chris Lollie’s case, there’s still the fact that someone called them in to investigate a black man suspiciously sitting idly. There’s the fact that in my decade of living, working, walking, loitering, and sometimes breaking the law in cities, no one has ever called the cops on me.

Update from a reader:

Listening to the police tapes of the encounter clouds the narrative a bit. The police can’t go around randomly asking for ID – but they do have a right to ask for ID when they receive a call about a potential crime in progress, in this case what witnesses thought was public sex in a car. While that initial call to the police might have been racially-motivated (or they might have actually been getting frisky in the front seat), the actions of the officer seem to be pretty standard response: check IDs and move along. She was briefly detained when she refused. But come on: a cop, after getting a call about a possible crime, is obliged to investigate and is not just going to walk after if someone is being uncooperative. Racial bias in policing is deplorably common, but alleging racism over basic policing protocol doesn’t help the cause.