Shriver Report Has More Bad News Than Good for Working Women
By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Get ready for a media blitz of massive proportions. Kennedy clan member and California first lady Maria Shriver has harnessed the powers of NBC, Time magazine, and a liberal think tank in Washington to profuse the Internet, print media, and the airwaves with the results of a new report she's produced. It's all timed to coincide with the consummation of a demographic trend that has been decades in the making: Women now comprise fully half of those on U.S. payrolls.
The report, "A Woman's Nation Changes Everything" is embargoed for release for tomorrow, but Gloria Steinem has apparently been given an advanced copy and wrote about it on the website of the group she co-founded, the "Women's Media Center."
Personally, I'm rooting for The Shriver Report to be right in its underlying assumption that government and business will have to adjust policies to meet women's needs as parents and workers in order to keep the economy going, and also that more men will get accustomed to women as indispensable co-workers and co-breadwinners, and thus increase their share of housework and childcare.
At the risk of alienating progressive, well-meaning women, allow me to disagree with the report's "underlying assumption" as described by Ms. Steinem. Let me first say Ms. Steinem is a personal heroine of mine—that, since my teen years when she was first among those leading the charge for women's equality. I have met and interviewed her on a handful of occasions since then, most recently when the Women's Media Center honored me as pioneer in women's media for creating and hosting PBS' To the Contrary for 18 years.
Crossing the demographic divide of making up one half of the workforce is not exactly news to those of us who chronicle women's achievements. And there's more bad news than good in that bit of data. Yes, women are now half the workforce, but they're still the overwhelming majority of those in minimum wage jobs (two thirds of all minimum wage workers) and they have yet to break into, in significant numbers, a fair share of corporate and government leadership posts.
Has there been progress in the 40 years since women made up some 33 percent of the workforce? You betcha! We've had three women appointed (not all at the same time) to the Supreme Court, we have our first female U.S. House speaker, and a handful of women run Fortune 500 companies.
But the progress has been slow and has not nearly evolved to the point where I thought we would be by now. I think it's time to admit that what's holding back women at this point in time is just as much women as it is, well, men. When I say that, I think there are few men left who purposely try to hold women back, but they do exist. Consider what the NRCC said last week in a statement about "putting [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] in her place."
Sexism does abound—I personally believe it is much more prevalent than racism in today's culture. But two things have changed since the halcyon days of what used to be known as the "women's liberation movement" that have also changed the terms of the women's rights debate.
First, we soon discovered that lots of women don't want to work outside the home and would rather stay home with children and have a man support them—even highly educated women. That's fine, but it does hurt women trying to make it in the career world. Guilt by association. Men don't have that problem. Very few of them have the option of quitting work and staying home with the kids.
Second, it's very hard to combine a high-powered career and children, for men and women. And men have been slow in coming to recognize that if their women are going to be breadwinners, too, then men have to pick up half the work of child-rearing.
So rather than look to companies and government to change policies to accommodate women who want to work part-time or flex time, I think women should be looking to the men in their lives to pick up half the child-rearing. There simply is no way to make partner in a major law firm and work 40 or fewer hours per week, nor to become CEO of a major corporation. Family life takes away from career commitment. That's all there is to it. But child-rearing becomes a lot easier if there are two people splitting it in half.
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Reader Comments
Work is work
Work is a pain; always has been, always will be.
Don't expect the system to change because it doesn't fit into your life plan. The sad fact of the matter is you need to change your life plan to fit system. Men have been doing this for hundreds and thousands of years with little concern for anything else but how much more work can be squezed from them.
It seems to me many women have the taste for success but a distaste for sacrifice. The system should be changed to accomadate?
Women have fought hard to share the fruits of the work and career worlds. Don't cry when you find out the fruit isn't as sweet as you thought.
Well Put
I very much agree with this article. I think this continued overmothering and underfathering is holding women's progress back with many ramifications for women, and perhaps just as importantly, for children of both genders.
I think our slowness in reaching equality is also significantly harming children of both genders. I grew up in a patriarchical family and my father's inability to connect and be there for my brother and me has caused us a great deal of difficulty in our lives. It is critical I think to improve the quality of fathering in the US (and this is not just in poor families but also in middle class and wealthy families).
I am a 40-something lawyer and so am not in the Steinem generation of feminism. I grew up with Title IX. I think some women of my generation were naive and unprepared (and perhaps lazy) about what it was going to take to make the final push to get to equality in public life and hence many women of talent (including those who obtained degrees at the very law, medical, business schools to which Steinem's generation worked to get us access) chose to seek high status men as husbands and power and authority over children by being stay-at-home mothers instead of balancing this with the final trudge to equality in public life. It is indeed a terrible shame, as we have wasted a generation or two in women's progress, and many children are still suffering from not enough fathering.
As I see it
We've known for some time that the tipping point for the number of women in the workforce would come. While I acknowledge women's progress in the workforce - (albeit in baby steps) if we're still getting paid less for the same job and reaching the corner office still comes as a difficult task - there's a mountain of work to be done. But I see two distinct issues here.
The treatment of women in the workforce & work life policy in general that impacts men and women with regard to family concerns.
I think you said it best here Bonnie:
" Second, it's very hard to combine a high-powered career and children, for men and women. And men have been slow in coming to recognize that if their women are going to be breadwinners, too, then men have to pick up half the work of child-rearing. "
I agree with you Bonnie that men need to take on more responsibility, but I do understand the social conditioning that has fostered that. And there's also got to be the desire on the part of men, to want that kind of change.
That being said, it's not just about changing the paradigm around how women are treated, it's about family leave and child care, flexibility, wellness, and employees being treated with respect as human beings - it's about an entire shift in our work life culture.
The entire corporate structure needs a rewiring of consciousness around our workplace culture and a better integration of our working and living experience. If not - no matter the gender - we're all going to burn out.
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