June 29, 2011

The New Victoria Woodhull. But Not As Smart.

I’m finally catching up on New Yorker articles, and was fascinated by the recent piece on Silvio Berlusconi, the scandalous President of Italy.  Although he has been roundly criticized for alleged sex with underage girls and Bunga Bunga orgies, Berlusconi also made women central to his cabinet, appointing them as parliamentarians, and supporting them in mayoral elections.

How to consider a man who simultaneously objectifies women and lifts them to play previously unheard of roles in Italian politics?  My initial instinct was to think fondly of a leader with the courage to elevate marginalized women – women from humble backgrounds, perhaps some who had earned money in less socially acceptable ways than we’re used to from public officials.  I love the Victoria Woodhull story.

On the other hand, it’s clear that Berlusconi wasn’t scouring the backstreets of Italy looking for brilliant political minds.  And it’s likely that these women are more Berlusconi stooges than they are advocates for innovative public policy.  They are part of the government because they ponied up for powerful men.  Their looks and willingness to be the women ‘men want’ got them their jobs.

When you think about this paradigm it doesn’t feel all that good.  And it reminds me of Sarah Palin.  Palin capitalizes on her looks, her simultaneous domesticity and sexuality, and a stereotype of ‘what men want’.  As a stooge for the Republican party, how different is she from Berlusconi’s ladies of the night?

This is also why Palin’s brand of political ‘feminism’ is so odious to many of us.  If your political power rests on being cute, but not too bright, attractive but ineffectual, you do nothing to advance the role of women in society.  If you got where you are by pleasing an man – directly or indirectly – you’re just a modern Victoria Woodhull.  A novelty candidate there for laughs.

There are Republican women who provide important role models.  I don’t agree with them, but they add value to discussions about the issues.  Olympia Snowe.  Kay Granger.  Kay Bailey Hutchison.  This isn’t a political divide, it’s about how women in politics position themselves relative to their peers.  It’s about sounding intelligent and well-prepared.  It’s about elevating our best people, not because they adhere to someone’s idea of what a woman should look like, but because they can create effective public policy.

 

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May 24, 2011

The MamaBA

I started writing this post last October — with an apology for being away for more than a month.  Already I had heard from my online friends and community asking if I was okay.  I never answered because I kept thinking I would finish this post and all would be explained.  Little did I know that it would take nearly seven months to get my act together.  Here goes.

Over the past year The Mama Bee has transformed to “MamaBA”, a student at Columbia Business School.  Despite my concerns about women and part-time work, at first I thought that I would cut my hours to accommodate my academic schedule.  But soon after being accepted to the program I was offered the opportunity to shift roles at my company – an offer that I didn’t want to turn down.

So with two young children, a full-time job, a breast pump, and an immensely supportive husband, I went back to school.  I thought I could document the whole crazy experience through The Mama Bee, but it soon became clear that I could barely keep myself clean, fed and clothed each day, much less write cogently.  So I gave up blogging for a month, saying that I would pick it back up when I was more in the swing of things.  One month became two, and two became six – and before I knew it, half a year had passed without a single post.

Worse yet, I was starting to lose the courage of my convictions.  Only 35% of business school students at Columbia are women (this number dropped to 25% for the class immediately following mine), and in my group of 128 students with an average age of 32, there is just one other mother.  There are roughly 16 fathers, and counting – men have babies during the program, but women typically don’t.  Part of my vision had been to prove that working mothers could tough out the program as well as their male counterparts, and compete at the highest levels with the rest of the class.

I set forth to document the injustices that lead to mothers being just 2% of the class, while fathers were close to 13%.  (Adjusted for the overall male/female ratio, the difference is still alarming — .5% mothers, 8.1% fathers.)  But what became clear to me is that, while Columbia doesn’t make it easy for mothers, women themselves hold back from applying to MBA programs because they feel the combination of work, school and family is too challenging.  And the opportunity cost of doing one at a time is too high.

And it breaks my heart to say that they might be right.  For the first time in my life, I’m watching some figs on my tree of choices wither as I pick others.  It’s not that school isn’t an amazing experience — it truly is.  I’ve met extraordinary people, made lasting friendships, and learned so much about a breadth of topics out of my comfort zone.  I’ve never felt more prepared to take the next step in my career.  And yet I’ve given up so much this year.  With no leisure time, I haven’t really been happy.  I’ve had to give up this blog, which kept me intellectually stimulated and driven.  I’ve lost social networks that help ground some of my core values.  My children have missed me in their lives.

With the bulk of the core curriculum finished now, I’m pausing to take a breath and see if I can’t re-enter the world of women, work and the politics of motherhood.  The irony is that business school has given me the most enormous amount of material to write about.  Did I mention that of ten classes taken to date, only one was taught by a woman?  Here’s hoping I can pull it together to share the outrageous, egregious and moments of joy and laughter back here soon.

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August 27, 2010

Making Pin Money

The other day one of my blogger friends forwarded me a message she had received from a marketer representing a lawyer looking to break into social media through the “mommy market.”  The marketer wrote:

Many professional women plan to go back to work after they have a baby.  But when the reality of a little one at home sets in, some aren’t eager to get back to the office.  For women in the professional services field, there is another option – they can become ‘entreprofessionals’ and start their own businesses.

Mommies considering this path will certainly find advantages, like more time at home with baby.  But there are also some potential pitfalls if they don’t protect themselves.  XXXXXX is the founder of XXXXX law firm.  He has helped many people legally start and protect their businesses.  He can offer your readers tips and advice on starting a business.

I was appalled.  The implicit sexism.  The talking down to female business owners — most of whom do not spend significantly “more time at home with baby.”  The suggestion that women who start businesses do it because they want to “work from home” and not because they have big ambitions that can only be fulfilled by running their own companies.  The reference to these women as “mommies.”  (Note to marketers: Only my own children can refer to me as “mommy” without me taking offense.)

The trivialization of female entrepreneurs is disturbing for a number of reasons.  First, it minimizes the incredible impact women are having on the economy: as Forbes recently reported, women-owned businesses are expected to create millions of jobs this year.  To expand our economy as a whole, we need to be thinking collectively about how to support women in business, particularly by giving them access to the same networks as their male counterparts.  This is not just about women and their desire to be “mommies.”

Second, we have to stop giving women the false impression that starting their own business is going to be a panacea for their lack of fulfillment in the corporate world or their work-life crises.  Successfully starting a business is very labor intensive.  It is often not very lucrative at the beginning.  It requires tremendous personal drive and passion far beyond a desire to have a more flexible work schedule.  This needs to be understood, lest women opt out of their corporate jobs only to find themselves working harder for less money and fewer benefits.

The internet is rife with marketing ploys aimed at mothers who want out of the corporate world.  (Sharon Lerner had a great piece in The American Prospect about this recently.)  The irony is that many of these schemes ask women to invest money in services they don’t need or get-rich quick scams destined to fail.  They victimize women who are desperate to change their lives, while simultaneously damaging the credibility of the millions of real female entrepreneurs.

But even worse, legitimate marketers and businesses, like Lawyer X, are adopting the language of their slimier counterparts — language that implies women who start businesses are just doing a little something on the side to make pin money.  It’s offensive and untrue, and yet the more this kind of language seeps into the marketplace, the more it becomes the narrative of female entrepreneurs.  We start businesses to get out of the corporate world and spend more time with our kids, not because we are real businesspeople who have important ideas to actualize.

By the way, those of us who work for companies and don’t plan to start our own businesses, we need to be irate about this too.  It promotes the idea that women aren’t real businesspeople and that their ambitions are limited.  The success of female entrepreneurs boosts the credibility of all women; their trivialization hurts us all too.

Related links:

  • Part of the problem is online resources for work at home moms assume they are really stay at home moms who need a little extra cash — not ambitious, powerful women in their own right.  Consider the WAHM.com homepage, which reads: New to working at home?  Learn from our large library of articles and recipes.  (Emphasis is mine.)  This is only appropriate if you are a work from home chef.
  • The Wall Street Journal recently posted this article about people who work from home being asked to do favors.  While men were substantially profiled in the article, I suspect that women who work at home are even bigger targets for such requests.
  • A few months ago Joanne Bamberger (PunditMom) posted this open letter to The New York Times about the paper’s trivialization of women in the business of social media.  Funny how The Times never writes stories like these about men’s efforts to build their businesses and brands.

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August 11, 2010

It’s the Small Stuff That’s Going to Bring About the Revolution

Last week I was at BlogHer, and it was great — great to meet so many amazing bloggers in person, and great to feel like feminism and activism are alive and well.

The closing keynote was nominally about using your voice, your platform and your power for advocacy, but really was a much deeper conversation about the role of women in public life.  As much as I liked what the panelists were saying — their commentary skirted a big elephant in the room of the women’s movement: that mothers (80% of women) are being left behind.  When I asked about this, the women on the panel were most interested in absolving the women’s movement of blame.  And it’s true; feminists have tried to advocate, but not practically.  Corporate cultures don’t change because they recognize “the right thing to do,” and they won’t spend money on programs to support working mothers without seeing significant pay-off.

It irks me when we talk about the “sacrifices” or “trade-offs” that women make without contextualizing those choices with an understanding of the institutional discrimination mothers face.  The women’s movement has been careful to validate every woman’s individual life decisions, especially to work in a formal setting, full-time, part-time or not at all.  What the movement hasn’t said is that this “choice” is frequently made under duress.

Most stay at home mothers are not homemakers by choice; circumstance, lack of skills and under-education has forced their hand. Those who do have education and skills may still have their hand forced by institutional sexism that values a male or childless employee over an equally credentialed mother.

Part of this is mindset.  Certainly we must win the hearts and minds of our supervisors and colleagues so that they no longer believe that mothers work less hard or are less ambitious.  But institutional discrimination against mothers manifests in small and unnecessary ways that are much easier to address than hearts and minds.  Fostering women’s advancement in the workplace need not require painful choices between work and family — they can coexist without either suffering.  Consider the following three scenarios:

Scenario #1: A friend started a prestigious MBA program recently that had a week long “in-residence” period at a conference center.  She was nursing her new baby during this time, and asked to be allowed to bring the child along with a 24-hour caregiver so that she could continue breastfeeding and participate fully in the planned social and academic activities.  (As any nursing mother knows, pumping round the clock for six days takes a lot of time out of the day.)  Allowing the baby would represent a relatively minor exception, while holding firm to their no-family policy would require my friend to make a life-altering decision between continuing to nurse her baby and pursuing an MBA.  The program ultimately allowed the baby, but not without much discussion.  Small change for the school, huge impact for the working mother.

Scenario #2: At BlogHer, I met Susan Niebur of Women in Planetary Science.  She pointed out that one reason women are marginalized in the science community is that there isn’t childcare available at most conferences.  Since many female scientists are married to other scientists, the two have to make a decision about which partner can attend a particular conference, and which stays home with the kids.  Typically women stay back, and are therefore less able to present and may have their name omitted from important papers.  The diminished public attention hurts their careers.  I would love to see some of the money we commit to promoting women in STEM support childcare at conferences; it’s an easy fix, but no one recognizes it as a root of the problem.  Small change for the scientific community, big impact for the working mother.

Scenario #3: TechyDad was liberated enough to attend BlogHer, and told a story at our Worklife session about a company he worked for that offered sick pay, but stipulated that it could only be used for the employee, not an employee’s child.  So if an employee had to stay home, s/he was required to use a vacation day.  This kind of policy — that would be easy to change and would have relatively little impact on a company’s bottom line — signals that primary caregivers have low value in the corporate infrastructure.  It’s the kind of policy that makes women think they are powerless in their company environments and that they might as well just quit.  It means something to women, but virtually nothing beyond principle to companies.  Small change for the company, big impact for the working mother.

These are three of dozens of small changes that could meaningfully address institutional sexism, gender inequality and the pay gap.  Because it appears that gender discrimination persists in the working world at least in part because mothers are not treated fairly.  And I’m not waiting anymore for the women’s movement to recognize this.  Feminist advocates are focusing on massive change, but it may be that relatively small and inexpensive modifications in how we do business would help to achieve our goals bigger, stronger and faster.

Related links:

  • David Indiviglio has a bogus post on “Why Mothers Fall Behind” in The Atlantic.  Indiviglio suggests that women take off more time to be caregivers and therefore are fairly denied advancement opportunities commensurate with their peers.  This is an old and discredited canard.  Maria Shriver’s report, A Woman’s Nation includes research indicating that only 10% of the pay gap can be explained by career choices including taking time off to be a caregiver.
  • Nancy Folbre at The New York Times Economix blog writes about how the women’s movement has supported mothers.  My beef is not whether they have supported, but how.  Their solutions have been impractical.
  • Fertile Feminism points out that it’s not feminism’s fault that mothers have fallen behind; it’s bad public policy and corporate culture.  I agree, but the women’s movement hasn’t done enough to practically combat the problems.
  • Momania asks “Do Kids Kill Women’s Careers?”  Spoiler alert: yes.

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August 4, 2010

Family Policy for A New Age

Today’s New York Times piece by David Leonhardt sums it up, quoting Columbia University professor Jane Waldfogel:

American feminists made a conscious choice to emphasize equal rights and equal opportunities, but not to talk about policies that would address family responsibilities…[consequently] women do almost as well as men today… as long as they don’t have children.

Since 80% of women will have children at some point (not to mention the many who are caregivers for parents, spouses or siblings), this really means that most women are still marginalized from corporate advancement.  While men are able to pursue their dream careers regardless of family situation, studies have shown conclusively that women — if they reveal that they have children — are less likely to be hired, promoted and compensated fairly than their childless counterparts.

And that’s just about the women who lose because employers perceive them to be less competent.  It doesn’t take into account women who lose out on advancement opportunities because there isn’t high-quality affordable childcare availailable, or because they don’t have paid leave, or because pumping milk on site is frowned on, or because they need the flexibility to take their child to the doctor on a given day.

Morra Aarons-Mele (Women and Work) and I are facilitating a “Room of Your Own” discussion on how social media can impact work and family policy at BlogHer on Saturday at 1:30pm.  I hope some of you will join us.  Earlier this week Morra wrote a terrific piece laying out all you need to know to join the movement; I’m following up today with a few “from the trenches” thoughts about organizing around “worklife” issues from a corporate perspective.

1.  Even the best public policy won’t create meaningful change in the workplace unless business is on board. And to get business one board we need to message the many studies that have been done showing that productivity and efficiency increases when employers adopt family-friendly practices.  There has to be focus on the bottom line, not what we believe is “the right thing to do.”  Nanette Fondas recently wrote about this in Psychology Today, but dozens of others have made the case for years now.  Let’s aggregate the research and disseminate is widely to corporate titans (and their HR staff).

2.  It’s not about women. Everyone benefits from improved family policy.  Men need to be on board with the greater work life mission and message — we can’t do this without them.  We have to stop thinking, writing, and conceptualizing about work life as a “women’s issue.”  Cali Yost has written compellingly on this at Work+Life Fit.

3.  Getting more women to be CEOs is only half the battle. It’s absolutely critical that we get more women in power positions, but it’s equally critical that women have access to middle management jobs that offer autonomy, meaning and growth.  Why are so many women unhappy at work?  Family obligations may play a role, but I believe job dissatisfaction is a function of stifling jobs with limited challenge, meaning and advancement.

4.  Flexibility has to go both ways. That means that if employees demand flexible workplaces, they need to be ready to be on call outside of normal business hours.  You would be surpised at how many people think of flexibility as “working less.”  In fact, flexibility may mean working the same or a greater number of hours — but on a tweaked schedule.  Employees have to be on board with availability before 9am and after 5pm for flexibility to work in most contexts.  And if there’s a crisis at work, the employee has to be ready to address it fully whenever and wherever, or trust breaks down.

5.  Effective public policy in this area can’t focus primarily on flex-time or telecommuting. For those of us in the corporate world, flex-time may or may not work.  It’s not a solution for all jobs in all contexts.  Instead, we need to hone in on family policies that will make a meaningful difference for all employees right away.  I would flag paid leave, sick days and affordable childcare as primary issues.  And let’s not forget that improved transportation and technology infratstructure is key to making life better for working families, even though they are not “family” issues per se.

For more on my perspective around family and worklife legislation, see “Legislating Worklife” and “Advocating Wisely.”

And for more great blogging on worklife policy, check out:

WorkLifeNation
PunditMom
Leanne Chase
Chrysula Winegar
Cali Yost

And don’t forget to come visit us at BlogHer ’10 this week!

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August 3, 2010

Mommy War Research

Will we never learn that when we ask whether a child is better off with a working mother or a stay at home mom nobody wins?  Such is the case with the most recent study reported in the Washington Post that shows “the overall effect of 1st-year maternal employment on child development [to be] neutral.”

Titled “Working Mothers Not Necessarily Harmful to Child Development,” as though there had been definitive proof that working mothers were necessarily harmful to children, the report tells us something those of us on the front lines have known for years: there are pros and cons to working, trade-offs at every level, every day.  High-quality early childcare is key, but that care need not be provided exclusively by a mother.

A study like this should be a good thing for mothers, working and non-working, because it essentially suggests that you can be a good parent no matter what choices you make.  But the devil is in the details.  By contextualizing child development gains in terms of whether the mother works or not, we miss out on the greater truth: it’s not about working in or out of the home, it’s about how parents communicate with their children, arrange for childcare, buy into early education practices and connect emotionally.

As soon as we invoke the mommy wars, and in effect, that’s the way this study is framed — working versus stay-at-home — we lose the opportunity to think critically about capturing the best childcare practices from all different kinds of mothers and fathers.  Once we’ve uncovered these “best practices,” there might be opportunity to advocate for public policy that would make them available to all parents, working in and out of the home.  Instead of the headline “Babies Don’t Suffer When Moms Return to Work,” there might be an article that offers a roadmap to successful parenting, regardless of work schedule.

Working mothers have the money to invest in high quality early childcare, stay at home mothers have the time.  The real question is what can be done for both groups to ensure the best outcomes for children.  This study and many others indicate that high-quality early childhood education in formal and informal settings offers a path to better cognitive and socio-emotional development.  Rather than asking how we can ensure that all children have access to the kind of early learning that would help them reach their highest potential, we continue to ask ourselves is it better for women to work or stay home.

Ultimately, the report proves nothing so much as that working versus staying at home is a lose-lose question.  The study found that children of working mothers score slightly lower on cognitive testing, at least until first grade.  But stay at home mothers were less responsive and emotionally sensitive to their children’s needs, and had less income to plow into formal education and childcare.  So we all have something to feel badly about.

But there’s hope.  This study overturned findings by the same researchers at Columbia University from 2002.  If we wait another couple of years, I’m sure we’ll get another study with new conclusions about mothering.  Maybe this time it will be truly be about parenting, and not about mommy wars.

Related links:

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August 2, 2010

Suck Me, Long Island Railroad

Do we still need the women’s movement?  On Friday I had a personal experience that reminded me that sexism is alive and well, even in the most liberal of places — the New York metro area.

I was coming home with my infant son on the Long Island Railroad from a visit to friends.  The baby was fussy, so I began to nurse.  Soon after, the train conductor came around collecting tickets.  When I handed mine over, he said me to “Cover up, miss.”  I was shocked — my breastfeeding has never so much as elicited a dirty look — and so I asked if he was kidding.  He said “No, COVER UP, miss.”  I told him that it was my legal right in the State of New York (NYS Civil Rights Law § 79-E) to nurse in any public place.

The conductor became angrier and angrier, saying that what I was doing was “offensive to him and other passengers.”  I reiterated my legal right, and he then told me to “call a cop” if I was so concerned.  The interchange was disturbing; in the context of the LIRR the conductor is a power figure who should be aware of the law.  But what happened next was even more troubling: our conversation had clearly left the conductor enraged and as he passed through the car he pushed my stroller, which was in the aisle (the only place it could be on the crowded train) into my seat, knocking me and the baby while we nursed.

I’ve been on the LIRR many times.  I’ve seen women in tiny string bikini tops on their way to the beach, I’ve seen men walk into station newsstands to buy porn, I’ve seen people drinking beer and smoking cigarettes on both the platforms and the trains.  None were approached by the conductor on my watch.  Here’s where the pervasive sexism comes into play:

Bare (or almost bare) breasts are tolerated both in person and in print on the LIRR if the woman in question is revealing herself for the pleasure of others.  But not if she is breastfeeding her five month old baby.

And maybe we think this isn’t that big a deal — just one crazy older white guy on a train.  But if this was the reaction of a conductor on a train in one of the most liberal cities in the country, how are our sisters in more conservative areas faring?  Forty-four states have the same law protecting the right to breastfeed in public as New York, but how many people in “power positions” are ignorant of this basic woman’s right?

An equally troubling epilogue to the story: when I told my husband and mother, each of them asked if my breasts had been showing; in other words, if I might have been breaking any indecent exposure laws.  Wrong question.  First of all, New York exempts nursing mothers from indecent exposure laws.  But the point isn’t that I showed a little more nipple than was comfortable for this man — it’s that his anger at seeing my breast while I was nursing was crazy and irrational.  Even if my rights had not been protected by New York’s penal code, the idea that there was something prurient about what I was doing is just insane.  And their reactions indicated that even my liberal husband and mother were uncomfortable with seeing me nurse in public.

What is it about nursing that made this conductor and others so angry, when women wear equally revealing clothing on the LIRR all the time?  For some reason breastfeeding signaled to him subversiveness, power, and female empowerment.  And his discomfort with women and power and motherhood infringed on my right to feed my baby in the way recommended by the American Association of Pediatrics.  On a micro level, that’s why we still need feminism.

Related links:

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