Discrimination Against Women in Individual Health Insurance Policies. A Boring Post.

Sean Hannity interviewed the health care expert (joking) Michelle Malkin on the question whether health insurance discriminates against women or not:

This week, Fox News host Sean Hannity scoffed at the idea that women face discriminatory practices from the health insurance industry, arguing that it is "disinformation" to claim that repeal of the health care reform law, which bans such practices, will again subject women to unfair and discriminatory treatment by insurers. In fact, the law bans insurance companies from its current practice of charging women higher premiums for the same coverage as men, and forbids insurers from listing pregnancy as a pre-existing condition, which was often used by some providers as an excuse to deny coverage.

The video ends before Malkin gives us any pertinent data on that "distortion."

It isn't a distortion, though the overall situation is slightly more complicated.  Women who are covered through employer-based group policies do not have to pay higher premia just because they are women.  This is because those health insurance policies fall under employment law, and charging women higher premia would mean that they get a smaller total compensation for their work than an otherwise identically placed but male employee.

Things can be different when it comes to individual health insurance policies, those which a person contracts separately with an insurer.  Some states do not allow the companies to charge women more, just on the basis of gender, but some states allow it.  And the practice does exist, wherever it is allowed.

What motivates it?  The reasoning is based on the fact that the average woman consumes more health care than the average man.  Most of this difference has to do with fertility differences.  In some ways the health care consumption which really should be attributed to babies being born is attributed to women, for example, but much of women's greater use has to do with routine gyno checkups, pap smear and breast screenings and so on.  So far we don't expect men to get routine prostate checkups every year from early ages onward.

Whether women would still consume more than men, on average, if the obstetric/gynecological visits were excluded is unclear to me.  Perhaps, given that many experts believe that men, on average, do not see their doctors often enough.

Insurance companies and plans will use the higher average use rates of women as the basis for charging women more than men for the same policies if they are allowed to do so.  This is an example of statistical discrimination, by the way, and of a very odd type, because someone loses and someone gains (in an unfair way) whether the premia are allowed to differ between men and women or whether they are not.

To see why, note that if women and men are charged the same premia, then as a group women will consume more health care for the same cost.  One could argue that women (as a class) benefit and men (as a class) lose under this scenario (if we ignore the consumption having to do with giving birth which probably should not be attributed to women alone).

But if men are charged less for the same policies than women,  then all high-using men benefit and all low-using women get hurt.

What makes this particular example even more complicated is this:  Women's greater use of health care is something which disappears with age.  Indeed, the rank-order changes when people age, and at older ages the average man consumes more in dollar figures.  But guess what happens then?

Medicare soon takes over and it does not charge higher premia by gender.  This means that when we would expect the premia of those individual health care policies to become higher for men, based on statistical evidence,  the state takes over.

This type of statistical discrimination is very complex.  Other examples exist in car insurance where young men are charged higher premia than young women, for the same coverage.  The rationale is similar:  Young men, as a group, have higher accident rates than young women, as a group.  If all young drivers were charged the same premium,  young female drivers, as a class, would pay more for the same total compensations than young male drivers, as a class.  But the practice of charging young male drivers more discriminates against careful young men and benefits reckless young women.

The car insurance example does differ from the health insurance example, because the former has to do with behavior which can be affected, at least in theory, whereas the latter may be about one's basic medical needs, as defined by gender.  Thus, one could argue that the ethical concerns in the two cases are different.

This has been your long-and-boring post of the day.  Enjoy!

I Waz A Poor Boy...

This article about the humble beginnings of president Obama and the financial struggles of Mitt Romney's family really is quite hilarious.  Sure, they try to connect with voters who are mostly not rich people. 

But what makes the piece hilarious to me is that neither Obama nor Romney are poor as adults.  Come to think of it,  politicians are pretty loaded:

While millions of Americans saw their incomes decrease, their job opportunities dissipate and their home values drop as the economy dipped, the 535 men and women they elected to represent them in the U.S. Congress were not only shielded from the economic downturn but  gained during it.
The average American’s net worth has dropped 8 percent during the past six years, while members of Congress got, on average, 15 percent richer, according to a New York Times analysis of financial disclosure.  The median net worth of members of Congress  is about $913,000, compared with about $100,000 for the country at large, the Times’ analysis found.
This wealth disparity between lawmakers and the people they represent seems to be continually growing. Nearly half of Congress — 249 members  — are millionaires, while only 5 percent of American households can make the same claim.

That's the real problem with politicians.  Not their humble or not-so-humble roots but the fact that it's considerably easier to enter into politics if one is independently wealthy to begin with.  And independently wealthy people are, by definition, somewhat removed from the realities of scraping together a living.

The Eltahawy Fire Storm And Other Pertinent Issues

Mona Eltahawy's article on the status of women in Arab countries,  Why Do They Hate Us? has created a fire storm.  I wrote about the piece earlier, before the many responses were available.

When I read Eltahawy's piece I tried to understand the identity of the misogynists, the "they" in her article title.  Is it Arab men?  That's how the fire storm has interpreted her message, and that's also the general flavor of the piece.  But she makes specific comments which differ from that reading:

So: Yes, women all over the world have problems; yes, the United States has yet to elect a female president; and yes, women continue to be objectified in many "Western" countries (I live in one of them). That's where the conversation usually ends when you try to discuss why Arab societies hate women. 

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Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet's rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women. 

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"Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me," U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently. "But they all seem to. It doesn't matter what country they're in or what religion they claim. They want to control women." 

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How much does Saudi Arabia hate women? So much so that 15 girls died in a school fire in Mecca in 2002, after "morality police" barred them from fleeing the burning building -- and kept firefighters from rescuing them -- because the girls were not wearing headscarves and cloaks required in public. And nothing happened. No one was put on trial. Parents were silenced. The only concession to the horror was that girls' education was quietly taken away by then-Crown Prince Abdullah from the Salafi zealots, who have nonetheless managed to retain their vise-like grip on the kingdom's education system writ large.
This, however, is no mere Saudi phenomenon, no hateful curiosity in the rich, isolated desert. The Islamist hatred of women burns brightly across the region -- now more than ever.

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The hatred of women goes deep in Egyptian society. 

All bolds are mine.

Indeed, there's only one actual quote where the haters are identified as men:

Enter that call to prayer and the sublimation through religion that Rifaat so brilliantly introduces in her story. Just as regime-appointed clerics lull the poor across the region with promises of justice -- and nubile virgins -- in the next world rather than a reckoning with the corruption and nepotism of the dictator in this life, so women are silenced by a deadly combination of men who hate them while also claiming to have God firmly on their side.

This may be nit-picking,  but it is interesting that the responses all assume a simpler interpretation of Eltahawy's thesis:  That she is blaming Arab men alone.

I recommend reading the responses (especially those here).  Many of them make important points about the dangers of generalizing to all Arab men and women or all countries,  many of them also point out that Arab women are not just helpless victims of oppression but also activists who fight it and that Arab men can also be activists fighting against the oppression of women.

But I do take issue with this counter-argument:

Yes, in Saudi Arabia women cannot drive, but men cannot elect their government, instead they are ruled over by a religiously opportunistic dynasty. In Egypt, it's true that women were subjected to virginity tests, but men were sodomised. In Sudan women are lashed for wearing trousers, but ethnic minorities are also marginalised and under assault. We must not belittle the issues women face, or relegate them to second place, but we must place them in a wider context where wholesale reform is needed. One cannot reduce a much more universal and complicated problem merely to gender.

It is certainly true that men cannot elect their government in Saudi Arabia.   But Saudi women cannot elect their government AND they cannot drive.  In Sudan, women are lashed for wearing trousers AND women who belong to ethnic minorities are marginalized and under assault.  And if women in Egypt were not sodomized, they certainly could be.

I focus on this particular example because it is also common in American anti-feminist writings where it usually takes the form "everybody has it tough."  The problem is that in many cases (though not all) being a woman does not pardon one from also belonging to that group "everybody." 

Max Fisher at the Atlantic Monthly offers tentative theories about the origins of misogyny and the possible impact of the Ottoman empire and Western colonialization on the current values of Arab societies.  He also writes about the concerns that articles of this type could be used to support an anti-Islam hate stance and questions whether Eltahawy's voice is a helpful one, given the context:

Spend some time in the Middle East or North Africa talking about gender and you might hear the expression, "My Arab brother before my Western sister," a warning to be quiet about injustice so as not to give the West any more excuses to condescend and dictate. The fact that feminism is broadly (and wrongly) considered a Western idea has made it tougher for proponents. After centuries of Western colonialism, bombings, invasions, and occupation, Arab men can dismiss the calls for gender equality as just another form of imposition, insisting that Arab culture does it differently. The louder our calls for gender equality get, the easier they are to wave away.
Eltahawy's personal background, unfortunately, might play into this more than she probably realizes. She lives mostly in the West, writes mostly for Western publications, and speaks American-accented English, all of which complicates her position and risks making her ideas seem as Westernized as she is. That's neither fair nor a reflection of the merit of her ideas, but it might inform the backlash, and it might tell us something about why the conversation she's trying to start has been stalled for so long.

I referred to this problem in my earlier post on Why Do They Hate Us, and here it is in a much more open form:

In her column, Eltahawy cleverly weaves a web of torture and oppression against Arab women, with pictures of black-painted covered-up women planted throughout the article, to accentuate this image of oppression. Everything, from virginity tests, to sexual deprivation, female genital mutilation, sexual harassment and child marriage, is included in this article to produce a column that will surely be welcomed by many Western feminists and anti-Islamists, who for years have been telling us that Muslim women are weak, oppressed victims of misogyny and rigid Islamic rules that force them to hide behind their veils.

But for many Arab women (I say many based on the negative reaction Eltahawy's column has already stirred), this column is offensive and is nothing but a combination of old cultural practices and undemocratic government actions that are described in a way to represent women as the Oriental Other, weak, helpless and submissive, oppressed by Islam and the Muslim male, this ugly, barbaric monster. Yes, women everywhere face diverse challenges. Arab women have their own fair share of issues, but to claim that these are problems of hate is deceiving. 

Indeed.  Just Google "farewell intercourse law" if you wish to see how uncritically Western press often accepts the oddest bits of rumor about the Muslim world:

Today, Egypt's state-owned Al Ahram newspaper published an opinion piece by Amr Abdul Samea, a past stalwart supporter of the deposed Hosni Mubarak, that contained a bombshell: Egypt's parliament is considering passing a law that would allow husbands to have sex with their wives after death. 

It was soon mentioned in an English language version of Al-Arabiya and immediately started zipping around social-networking sites. By this afternoon it had set news sites and the rest of the Internet on fire. It has every thing: The yuck factor, "those creepy Muslims" factor, the lulz factor for those with a sick sense of humor. The non-fact-checked Daily Mail picked it up and reported it as fact. Then Andrew Sullivan, who has a highly influential blog but is frequently lax about fact-checking, gave it a boost with an uncritical take. The Huffington Post went there, too.

There's of course one problem: The chances of any such piece of legislation being considered by the Egyptian parliament for a vote is zero. And the chance of it ever passing is less than that. In fact, color me highly skeptical that anyone is even trying to advance a piece of legislation like this through Egypt's parliament. I'm willing to be proven wrong. It's possible that there's one or two lawmakers completely out of step with the rest of parliament. Maybe.

That's pretty bad.  On the other hand, the Al-Arabiya piece mentions other possible proposals and nobody has suggested that they, too, might be hoaxes:

Egypt’s National Council for Women (NCW) has appealed to the Islamist-dominated parliament not to approve two controversial laws on the minimum age of marriage and allowing a husband to have sex with his dead wife within six hours of her death according to a report in an Egyptian newspaper. 

The appeal came in a message sent by Dr. Mervat al-Talawi, head of the NCW, to the Egyptian People’s Assembly Speaker, Dr. Saad al-Katatni, addressing the woes of Egyptian women, especially after the popular uprising that toppled president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.

She was referring to two laws: one that would legalize the marriage of girls starting from the age of 14 and the other that permits a husband to have sex with his dead wife within the six hours following her death.

...

Many members of the newly-elected, and majority Islamist parliament, have been accused of launching attacks against women’s rights in the country.

They wish to cancel many, if not most, of the laws that promote women’s rights, most notably a law that allows a wife to obtain a divorce without obstructions from her partner. The implementation of the Islamic right to divorce law, also known as the Khula, ended years of hardship and legal battles women would have to endure when trying to obtain a divorce. 

Egyptian law grants men the right to terminate a marriage, but grants women the opportunity to end an unhappy or abusive marriages without the obstruction of their partner. Prior to the implementation of the Khula over a decade ago, it could take 10 to 15 years for a woman to be granted a divorce by the courts.

Islamist members of Egyptian parliament, however, accuse these laws of “aiming to destroy families” and have said it was passed to please the former first lady of the fallen regime, Suzanne Mubarak, who devoted much of her attention to the issues of granting the women all her rights. 


Untangle those knots if you can.  Is gender equality something pertinent only to Western cultures?  What is the proper role of Western feminists in this context?  Do we write too much on women and Islam as one of the above quotes suggests?  Are we in cahoots with the anti-Islamists?

Or do we write far too little on those questions as many on the right argue, with the implication that Western (and especially US) feminists are in cahoots with the Islamists because we routinely criticize the Catholic Church or the fundie boyz of Christianity but are relatively silent (in recent years) when it comes to Islam?

Wherein Echidne Doesn't Have A Sense of Humor

This is a neat example of that old canard about feminists/liberals/whoever not having a sense of humor:

Fox News political and foreign affairs analyst Monica Crowley reacted to a report that Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke got engaged to her boyfriend by tweeting: "To a man?"

Following criticism of her on Twitter, Crowley wrote: "I love exposing the Left's total lack of a sense of humor."
As Media Matters has documented, Fluke has come under vicious attack by conservatives following her testimony before the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee. Most infamously, Rush Limbaugh called Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute."

Or put it in different terms:  If you don't have the same basic beliefs, the ones which make you go bwahahah! then you don't have a sense of humor.

In this case there is no joke without certain basic beliefs.  Indeed, Crowley's statement makes no real sense for someone who doesn't know the backstory about Sandra Fluke:  That she gave testimony about the question whether Catholic universities cause hardship if the insurance policies they offer do not cover the contraceptive pill.

But even knowing that doesn't explain the joke to someone without certain basic beliefs, unless one assumes that the joke is a surrealist one.

No.  To get the joke you need to know something about what  the basic beliefs of Monica Crowley might be about feminists or women who speak up on these types of questions.  If you know those then you get why she thinks her statement is funny.

All this is quite trivial.  But knowing what it means when someone accuses you of not having a sense of humor (assuming that you do have one) can be helpful.  It's mostly about a demand that the underlying basic beliefs  should be shared.

It's the most effective responses that are trickier.  I've had some success by using reversals and then demanding that people get the humor in those, too.

Frat Boyz Vs. Geeks: New Models of Masculinity In the IT Industry

This Mother Jones article talks about a new model for selling programming jobs:

Many of the dozen or so people I interviewed for this story pointed to the rise of the brogrammer—a term that seeks to recast the geek identity with a competitive frat house flavor. The essence of it comes through in comments on the question-and-answer site Quora. "How Does a Programmer Become a Brogrammer?": Brogrammers "rage at the gym, to attract the chicks and scare the dicks!" They "can work well under the tightest deadlines, or while receiving oral sex." And they have their priorities straight: "If a girl walks past in a see-through teddy, and you don't even look up because you're neck-deep in code, expect to spend a lot of time celibate no matter how bro you go."

The obvious problem with that approach is twofold:  It assumes that programmers are only  men (though there is a hogrammer term for women if they want it!) and it assumes women are sorta like bottles of beer or ham sammiches.

I have no idea how common this brogramming trend is.   But stories like this one are a healthy (?) reminder of one of the reasons why women might have trouble entering certain male-dominated industries.  Imagine being the only woman in a room full of brogrammers.  What might they think you are there for?  If they believe in the brogrammer ideas, that is.

Just Hand Over Those Cookies

And no-one will get hurt!

Just kidding. But I'm tired, what with all the wonderful posts I have written recently and I deserve some cookies. Especially chocolate chip cookies or spice cookies. I had a wonderful spice cookie recipe which I have lost. It included cloves and cardamom and the cookies were just the thing to dip in coffee. If you happen to have that recipe, please may I have it?

Or any other great cookie recipes.  Both those which take eons to prepare and quickie ones.  Especially those which are not too sweet.  I don't have a really sweet tooth/fang.

For Readers Abroad

Several of you have trouble reading the comments and with the formatting of this blog.  The cause has to do with Blogger.

Shakespeare's sister offers one solution which might work.  Here's Google's answer.

The Invisible Elephants

I've often written about them. They are the missing ones in the political picture, the groups which become invisible, the arguments which are not raised. It's like a family picture, with people sitting on the couch, smiling, and in the very middle of it is that blank space. That's where the invisible elephant sits. We can't see it but something about that blank space bothers us.

This theme is common whenever we discuss, say, parenting. We mean mothering, not parenting, despite the euphemism, and that tends to result in fathers becoming that invisible elephant. The articles read connected, even logical, and yet there's something odd about them, something missing. Once you spot the elephant, that slight discomfort you feel starts making sense.

Other examples abound, of course. A recent one has to do with the way the economic crises are covered. The supply-side of the economy gets the major focus, the demand side gets little attention and practically never as one of the so-called Job Creators.

The invisible elephant in that context is the power of consumers and why proper earnings levels for ordinary people are the real job-creation foundation of any economy. But the articles often focus on supply-side concerns, covering consumers and workers only as passive recipients of the good and the bad the economy doles out to them. Including unemployment, the tightening of the belt etc.

This particular elephant is invisible in a subtle way. It is excluded because of the dominant economic frames of reference which regard the supply side as active, as a first-mover, and the demand side as passive, as the follower. Likewise, the dominant frame of reference concentrates on changes in the top layers of the economic system: Should banks be given more freedom or less? Should financial market be regulated? Should we tax firms at all?

But the elephant is not excluded in the sense of consequences if that top layer doesn't get what it wants (bad things will happen!). In that context we see it smack in the middle of the couch, weeping sadly. That demand is a powerful collective force, powerful enough to lift an economy from recession, is the invisible form of this elephant.

Housekeeping

Blogger has recent changes which make it hard for me to keep paragraphs properly separated.  I hope the bug is fixed soon.  So apologies for any weird mergings or separations which shouldn't be there.

The commenting system this blog uses, Echo, will be discontinued on October 1, 2012.  What might replace it (if anything)? 

Why Do They Hate Us?

So asks Mona Eltahawy in an article about women in Arab countries. The article is a wail, a scream, a plea to understand why the circles which define women's lives in those countries are so oppressively small, why their walls are so tall and so heavily and religiously guarded. Eltahawy, an Egyptian-American journalist, reported having been brutally assaulted by the riot police in Cairo last fall, and this piece is not only about the status of women in Arab countries. It is about anger, about fear and about betrayal.

Eltahawy's despair should be taken seriously. Yes, she quotes only the most extreme evidence in support of her thesis. But the events she describes took place. Twelve-year-old girls are dying in childbirth in Yemen because child marriages are legal. A woman caught driving in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to ten lashes and needed a pardon to avoid them, another woman, gang-raped, was sentenced to prison for having entered a car driven by a man not related to her. And in Morocco, a sixteen-year-old did drink poison because she had been forced to marry her rapist (which the law allows for him not to be punished for the rape) who then continued beating her.

These events are real. They do not describe the lives of every woman in those countries but they are newsworthy events. So is the outcome of the Arab spring for the women of Egypt. One quarter of the parliament consists of salafis whose agenda about women truly is medieval and the number of women in the parliament is miniscule. The next crown prince of Saudi Arabia is rumored to have truly frightening views on women, and the victories of various Islamist parties cause women's rights activists worry and sleepless nights.

 Eltahawy asks why the Islamists hate women so much. Her wail resonated with me, after my recent travels on the misogynistic hate sites (though the two issues are not intended to be seen as equated here). I had to go for several long walks to re-settle my brain and heart after those, to remind myself about the real wide world out there, about people who are kind and caring and logical.

And that gave me an inkling about the hatred of women. However it is created, it is stoked in the furnace of like-minded people, increased by exposure to similar arguments and made moral by the support of religion or pseudo-science. It is not then seen as hate but as god's commands, as necessary for stability, as The Way Evolution Intended It. As justified and obvious, even to many women. The more those messages are allowed to stand uncontested, the more the hate settles in, curls itself into a circle like cat and purrs out its justifying messages. Daylight is the best sanitizer and silence in this context is like darkness.

Whether what Eltahawy describes is truly a hatred of women or of uppity women or something more complicated can be debated. But it certainly is based on the arguments about The Other.

Women are different and that difference is the only real explanation ultimately required. The Other Must Be Controlled/Protected, For The Good Of All. What drops out of sight, completely, are all the similarities between men and women, what all human beings share.

If "we" (in the abstract sense) stay silent about what it means to be a human being (and not just a man or a woman) we contribute to the Othering.  If "we" (in the abstract sense) stay silent about the misogyny, hoping that not giving it oxygen will make it go away, we contribute to the Othering by leaving the lies unchallenged. If "we" (in the sense of western commentators) avoid discussing the issues Eltahawy poses because of fears of being seen as supporting the Islamofascist hate groups in the West we also contribute to the Othering. It should be possible to address the issue of women in Arab countries without demonizing whole cultures or without arguing for violence. Indeed, that approach is the only one which would ever work.

 Eltahawy refers to that last comment in her article:

Yes: They hate us. It must be said.  Some may ask why I'm bringing this up now, at a time when the region has risen up, fueled not by the usual hatred of America and Israel but by a common demand for freedom. After all, shouldn't everyone get basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? And what does gender, or for that matter, sex, have to do with the Arab Spring? But I'm not talking about sex hidden away in dark corners and closed bedrooms. An entire political and economic system -- one that treats half of humanity like animals -- must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun. So: Yes, women all over the world have problems; yes, the United States has yet to elect a female president; and yes, women continue to be objectified in many "Western" countries (I live in one of them). That's where the conversation usually ends when you try to discuss why Arab societies hate women. ... First we stop pretending. Call out the hate for what it is. Resist cultural relativism and know that even in countries undergoing revolutions and uprisings, women will remain the cheapest bargaining chips. You -- the outside world -- will be told that it's our "culture" and "religion" to do X, Y, or Z to women. Understand that whoever deemed it as such was never a woman. The Arab uprisings may have been sparked by an Arab man -- Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in desperation -- but they will be finished by Arab women.

On the other hand, it wasn't just Egyptian men who voted in the parliament Egypt currently has but women, too. As I've written before, many times, water has no taste to the fishes which swim in it, and values of a culture are inculcated in all its members with more or less success. But usually with more success.

The cultural problems are always deeper than one initially thinks, the justifications for women's lower status have their roots in the distant pasts of various cultures and how many of those roots have been cut varies across the globe. Religion is a powerful force: If you are told that your eternal life depends on agreeing to an oppressed life here on earth, what are you going to decide? Be a feminist here and go to hell for the rest of the eternity? Those are the kinds of trades the right-wing religious fanatics offer women in most religions.

Writing about the topic Eltahawy chose: the status of women in Arab countries, should be something we see critics (including many women) from the affected countries doing in the largest numbers. Because outsiders, however well informed, are still outsiders who lack the lived-in experience of that culture.

But what is the best response if such critics are few and lack access to the media? What is the proper response in balancing out the need to avoid neo-colonial accusations (aimed at Western feminists) and the need to avoid giving support to global warmongering with the very urgent need to speak out about problems of unfair laws and traditions against women all over the world?

A Fox To Guard The Chicken Coop. Or More on Vatican's Uppity Nun Dilemma

The more I think of the recent Vatican decision to apply more control to those "radical feminist" American nuns the more I see the whole thing as a metaphor: Catch the uppity women you can catch and lock them up. The sky is falling on the boyz in cassocks but at least they have control over the opposite sex inside the church. But that's probably too poetic. The truth may simply be the women religious are punished for their support of the Obama health care law:

Church officials did not cite a specific example of those public statements, but said the reform would include a review of ties between the Leadership Conference and NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby. NETWORK played a key role in supporting the Obama administration's health care overhaul despite the bishops' objections that the bill would provide government funding for abortion. The Leadership Conference disagreed with the bishops' analysis of the law and also supported President Barack Obama's plan. Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK, said in a phone interview that the timing of the report suggested a link between their health care stand and the Vatican crackdown. The review began in 2009 and ran through June 2010, a few months after the health care law was approved. The report does not cite Obama or the bill. "I can only infer that there was strong feeling about the health care position that we had taken," Campbell said. "Our position on health care was application of the one faith to a political document that we read differently than the bishops."

On the other hand, there is this:

Around the same time of the doctrinal review of the Leadership Conference, the Vatican ordered an Apostolic Visitation, or investigation, of all American congregations for religious sisters, looking at quality of life, the response to dissent and "the soundness of doctrine held and taught" by the women. The results of that inquiry have not been released. The report released Wednesday paints a scathing portrait of the Leadership Conference of Women's Religious as consistently violating Catholic teaching. Investigators cited a speech by Sister Laurie Brink at an annual assembly that argued that religious sisters were "'moving beyond the church' or even beyond Jesus." Brink is a professor at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She did not respond to an email request for comment. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said the Leadership Conference had submitted letters that suggest that sisters in leadership teams "collectively take a position not in agreement with the church's teaching on human sexuality." In programs and presentations, investigators noted "a prevalence of certain radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith." "Some commentaries on 'patriarchy' distort the way in which Jesus has structured sacramental life in the church," the authors of the report wrote. The investigation also found that while the Leadership Conference has emphasized Catholic social justice doctrine, the group has been "silent on the right to life from conception to natural death, a question that is part of the lively public debate about abortion and euthanasia in the United States. The reform will be managed by Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain and could stretch over five years.

Mm. More about Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain as the Guardian of the Chicken Coop in a moment. But first note that this is all about the expression of opinions. Nuns are not allowed to express them. Only priests are, and women cannot be priests. Still, this is not simply about some opinions being unacceptable to the church powers-that-be. Even silence is a sin:

The Vatican concludes that the fact that some LCWR leaders question church doctrine in the context of the modern world is of primary concern, but so is their silence on other issues.  “The second level of the problem concerns the silence and inaction of the LCWR … given its responsibility to support a vision of religious life in harmony with that of the church and to promote a solid doctrinal basis for religious life.”

To which Sister Beth Rindler answered:

“We believe that God created men and women equally,” ... “That’s where we clash.”

So. The man assigned to get these harridans under order, Archbishop Peter Sartain, has been criticized for his possible role in the church's child abuse scandal:

A group that monitors abuse by priests says Sartain is known for something else, however: ignoring warning signs about a potential abuser. This morning, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, wrote a letter to the pope asking for Sartain's appointment to be rescinded. "You are probably not aware of just how recklessly and secretively and callously he acted recently with a priest who pled guilty two weeks ago to molesting a boy as recently as January of this year," the St-Louis-based SNAP wrote of Sartain in the letter. The letter is referring to the case of Father Alejandro Flores, convicted earlier this month of a sexual assault charge related to the abuse of an underage boy. Sartain, then the bishop of Joliet, Illinois, ordained Flores in the summer of last year--just a few months after church officials had found gay porn with young-looking boys on his computer, according to a press report quoted by SNAP. "Sartain in our view had a moral obligation to postpone the ordination, send Flores for treatment and inform the public," SNAP president David Clohessy says in an interview with SW. "He did none of that." This is the first time SNAP has called for a papal appointment to be rescinded. It is a particularly egregious case, Clohessy asserts, "because it is so clear-cut and so recent. What bishops have historically said, when they were finally caught [covering up clerical abuse], was: 'We just didn't know. Now we understand. Now we'll do better.' "

Now consider the practical implications of all this, from the demand that nuns return to traditional garb to having everything their organizations do first scrutinized for appropriateness. Add to that the fact that nuns are becoming scarcer in this country. Their total numbers today are less than 60,000, down from 180,000 roughly fifty years ago. The proposed changes make becoming a nun less attractive to modern women, I would think, unless they are truly into unquestioning obedience. And some current women religious may depart if the inquisition they will be subjected to is sufficiently unpleasant. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! Well, the Vatican has a deeper reason: They are sending a message to all nuns in other countries that their proper role IS unquestioning obedience.

You're Gonna Love This Story From Finland

The land with great gender equality, right? But it also has a law about the right to associate with others which creates slightly different problems from the American ones.

Suppose, for example, that a very old and very fancy organization exists in the financial industry. Call it a club, say. Any man involved in business with a good record and the recommendation of two existing members can apply. The club is hundred years old but not at all decrepit! Indeed, its membership has doubled in the last ten years.

Suppose, moreover, that the purpose of the club is to network, to do business and to create contacts, and suppose that the chairman of the club tells this quite proudly.

Then suppose that he is asked about the possibility that women might be admitted as members of the club, too, and that he answers as follows: "So far women are not members but women have visited here from the very beginning." He then adds: "It's always pleasant when female guests visit so that I get some eye pleasure."

 Mmm. That's not a made-up story but the actual current situation of Helsingin Pörssiklubi, Helsinki Stock Exchange Club.

It does not accept women as members. And why? Because the majority of the members would have to vote to allow women in and they have not done so. Indeed, according to the chairman it is the younger men who are most opposed to the admission of women.

Which is not surprising as it is the younger men who would most benefit from the networking the club offers, and the exclusion of women cuts back on the potential competitors.

The comments to the linked article divide fairly equally between those which state (more less irked by that "eye pleasure" comment) that women should be admitted and those which argue that women can start their own club if they want one so much and leave the gentlemen in peace, and what about all those women-only fitness clubs?

The problem with the latter two solutions is the professional nature of the Helsinki Stock Market Club and the smaller numbers of women in business. An all-female club would not offer the same networking opportunities.

 Oh, and one person stated that women are all incompetent and should stay at home.

New Hate Sites

The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated several "manosphere" sites as hate sites. The justification? This:

The so-called “manosphere” is peopled with hundreds of websites, blogs and forums dedicated to savaging feminists in particular and women, very typically American women, in general. Although some of the sites make an attempt at civility and try to back their arguments with facts, they are almost all thick with misogynistic attacks that can be astounding for the guttural hatred they express.

Yup. Guttural hatred would be the correct term. It's gotten more guttural recently. Wear a hazmat suit if you decide to visit the listed sites or any of the hundreds of other similar ones which exist on the net.

Those Automated Phone Answering Systems

Offer an interesting example of some changes which may save firms money but which also increase the true opportunity costs for their customers.

Sayz Echidne, after having spent a frustrating afternoon listening to canned messages and pressing digits on the mobile while trying to reach a real person. Because the problem I had did not have an automated answer.

The time I had to spend is a loss to me. I couldn't do other work at the same time, or not as well, and I couldn't do rest or relaxation, either. In economic terms this loss is a real cost. For instance, if it stops a person from carrying out work for pay either the pay for that work is lost or something else will be lost later when the work can be finally carried out. That "something else" is the value of what would otherwise have occurred at that time.

Yet when firms consider changes of these types to the way they operate, the extra customer costs are seldom factored in, until they results in a drop of revenues. Because all firms automated their phone systems at about the same time, customers are stuck with that extra time expenditure.

What's my point here, other than venting about a minor frustration? That when we calculate costs and benefits to various economic agents we should be careful not to ignore costs or benefits which are transferred to someone else, unless, of course, we are the accountants for only one economic agent.

For instance, sending seriously ill patients home from hospitals earlier will save hospitals money. But if those patients then need home-care, someone to stay with them or visiting nurses to see them, the total savings (if they still are savings) will be less than the savings to just the hospitals. This from the point of view of the whole economy, not just the hospitals.

The Rebuttals. Or Why The US Economy Is Not Biased Against Men

As opposed to being biased that way. It's important to remember that the initial argument goes like this: The US Economy Favors Women!

The Atlantic Monthly posted two rebuttals. One is by Bryce Covert:

Is there hard data we might examine in order to determine what's causing the gender wage gap he thinks is so misleading? In fact, there is. A GAO report tried to account for the difference in earnings between men and women and found that factors like work patterns (experience or time in the workforce, for example), industry, occupation, race, marital status, and job tenure do come into play. However, it then stripped all of those factors out, and it still found that women make 80 percent of what men earn. It concluded, "[W]e were not able to explain the remaining earnings difference." One of the possibilities, it said, is discrimination, pure and simple.

This is the study I use in my gender gap series.
The second rebuttal is by the Catalyst Inc. and makes the point that family-friendly policies benefit both men and women, what with men starting their lives as babies and then often becoming fathers themselves. So they are not a sign of reverse discrimination against men. And, astonishingly, the zero-sum game between men and women in the MRA view of the world is not zero-sum in the real world because (lo and behold!) men and women sometimes live together, help each other, even (gulp!) love each other:

But here's where it gets even more interesting: Men now have more personal reasons to support equality too. Take fair pay. Of the more than 25 million married couples with children in the US in 2010, 57.7% were dual-career couples. And in 2009, working wives contributed 37.1% to family income. Yet many women today still earn less and get promoted less frequently than men from day-one of their careers--regardless of their aspirations, credentials, work experience and parenthood status. Over the course of a 40-year career, this can add up to an average of $380,000 in lost wages. For fathers who rely on their partner's income, support for pay equity is a no-brainer. Equal pay equals more money for the family.

I still also recommend my direct rebuttal of the Nemko article below. Because it's almost as nasty as Nemko's piece and addresses his specific arguments.

Then to the media politics in all this: The Nemko piece has over 400 comments, which means that it was good piece for the Atlantic Monthly! That about half of them are misogynistic comments (all about what's wrong with those billions of women in the world) is of no consequence to the editors. Or perhaps they were babes-in-the-woods and never thought that the intended audience of a misogynistic piece might be misogynists?

What's extremely ironic is that the comments thread to the Nemko piece offers such strong evidence of misogyny among one group of commentators that it would outweigh any kind of evidence of bias against men in the actual article (had it offered such). Just imagine one of those guys in charge of the hiring process at some firm!

Is The US Economy Really Biased Against Men?

I debated myself for a while about the advisability of posting on this opinion piece in the Atlantic Monthly, by Marty Nemko, who appears to be the co-chairman of the National Organization for Men (!). Mostly because the initial opinion piece is intended to be a click magnet or linkbait and I don't wish to reward bad behavior by the Atlantic, especially if they don't offer a balancing post at all*.

But then someone must address the issues in Mr. Nemko's piece, so it might as well be me.

He begins with a parable:

You've just landed on Planet Zuto.
The Intergalactic Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (IEEOC) has sent you to determine whether Zuto's economy is fair to its two sexes: vozems and zems. Your boss suggests you'll probably find sexism against the vozems.
But your first discovery is that 60 vozems graduate from college for every 40 zems. You discover clues as to why. Despite the under-representation of zems, many scholarships are set aside for vozems, few for zems. The curriculum accentuates vozems' accomplishments, zems' failings. Student groups are funded to encourage vozems, for example, Future BusinessVozems, far fewer for zems.
You beam your first report back to the IEEOC: Zuto U's appear to be sexist against zems, not vozems.
Next, you examine the Zuto Bureau of Labor Statistics and find that the unemployment rate for vozems is 20% lower than for zems. You are shocked to discover that rather than trying to help zems land work, the government deliberately exacerbates zems' deficit: vozem-owned businesses get special preferences in landing government contracts and taxpayer-backed small-business loans are set aside for vozems.
You beam back your next report to the IEEOC: More signs of sexism against zems. Your boss responds, "But vozems earn 77 zits for every 100 zems earn!"

Good stuff, eh? But note the initial setting in its ahistority. We are not told why vozems seem to get such preferential treatment on that planet. The probable reason for that is intimately tied to the 77 zits figure. The vozems may have been barred from economic opportunities in the past but there are now attempts to change that.

That quote sets the stage for the whole article. Just substitute women for vozems and men for zems. Though be careful with that substitution, because men's unemployment rate in fact is no higher than women's unemployment rate over the long-run. It rises more in recessions and bounces back more rapidly when recessions end because there are many more male workers in the bellwether industries of construction and manufacturing.

Nemko's basic premise appears to be that things would be perfectly completely gender-equal if only there weren't any special set-asides or women-only groups in colleges and at work. But those arrangements exist for a reason, and that reason is that everything is NOT completely gender-equal. Whether they work to increase the representation of women in traditionally male-dominated industries is a different question.

But the reason why colleges and universities might have special groups for women who study physics or computer science, say, is because women are scarce in those fields, and because being one of the few women in the classroom can be difficult. It makes little sense to offer men support groups in those field as they are already a majority.

On the other hand, such groups for men who study, say, early childhood education, would be fantastic and deserve to be created.

What I conclude from the above quote is that Nemko is very much opposed to anything that smacks of affirmative action for traditionally excluded groups. He regards that as reverse discrimination.

But he has more to say about how the US economy hurts men:

The 77-cents-on-the-dollars statistic is calculated in a way that is biased against men. For example, while among all physicians, men earn more than women, men are more likely to be in specialties requiring longer training, high-stress, and irregular hours, for example, surgery and cardiology. In contrast, women are more likely to be pediatricians. Despite that bias, across all careers, surveys report that childless women under 30 make more than men. More than 90 percent of workplace deaths, military deaths, and severe workplace injuries (e.g., amputations, black lung disease) occur to men. Such dangerous work justify higher pay for men.

My answers to that:
1. Studies controlling for working hours and occupation still find a largish unexplained earnings difference between men and women. Indeed, good studies control for all those factors routinely. He is right that the 77-cents-to-a-dollar figure is not necessarily due to discrimination. But his arguments fail to account for a large chunk of the total difference, the chunk which obstinately stays there after researchers take into account education, experience, hours worked, occupation, marital status, age, number of minor children etc. What that unexplained residual might be caused by can be debated, of course, but it certainly leaves scope for discriminatory effects. See my gender gap series for more on this.

Or put in very simple terms: If we compare male pediatricians to female pediatricians, we find an average earnings difference to the detriment of the latter. If we compare male cardiologists to female cardiologists we also find an average difference to the detriment of the latter.

2. Then this:

Despite that bias, across all careers, surveys report that childless women under 30 make more than men.

Which surveys might those be?

Because Nemko doesn't give us a reference I'm going to hazard a guess that he talks about the survey which compared the earnings of young men and women in urban centers. But that study failed to hold education levels constant. As women in those areas have more education than men, the survey amounts to comparing oranges with grapefruit. To find out whether young childless women indeed earn more than young childless men we need to compare men and women with the same amount of education. Otherwise we run the risk of attributing an education bonus to gender.

In general it's tricky to make an earnings prognosis from very young workers. This is because most income differences accrue over time and not at the point of entry to work, whatever their causes might be.

3. Nemko argues that the higher occupational mortality of men justifies their higher pay. But this doesn't work. The reason is that the particularly dangerous occupations are not especially well-paid overall, certainly not when compared to the relatively safe environment of corporate boardrooms. And it's in the latter places that men earn large incomes.

This also doesn't work because the number of men in the truly dangerous occupations is not large enough to have any major influence on the overall earnings differences by gender.

The connection Nemko tries to build here is akin to arguing that because (relatively poorly paid) fishermen suffer from a high risk of death at work the guys who run the financial markets deserve to get paid a lot. That's pretty weird but not uncommon in this particular line of thought.

Two further comments on the higher occupational mortality of men: First the reference to military death rates is quite fascinating because women have traditionally been excluded from the military and are still mostly excluded from combat roles. This gender-based exclusion is now counted as an advantage to women! Or at least a reason why they also deserve to get paid less.

Second, as I have written before, prostitution just may be the most dangerous occupation of all and it is a predominantly female one. But because it is an illegal occupation it is not listed in those risk statistics.

What have we got so far? Nemko argues that men are discriminated against, in the sense of reverse discrimination. He also argues that women earn less than men for reasons that are to do with the valor, bravery and hard work of men. Or that is how I interpret the examples Nemko chose there.

So what comes next? Policies about childcare and pregnancy leaves and such are also discrimination against men!

In honest conversation, most people will agree that, on average, men are more often willing to do the things it takes to get promoted, for example, to make time to take advanced technical courses by forgoing recreation such as sports or shopping. Men are more likely to be willing to move to a God-forsaken place (Montgomery, Alabama, anyone?) for a promotion, and, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to work longer hours.
Most people will also agree that, on average, women are more eager to have children and to be deeply involving in their upbringing. So women's committees and caucuses, with the help of outside advocacy groups with close ties to the media such as Catalyst, NOW, and AAUW, have pressured workplaces to institute programs for employees' children, for example:
• On-site child care, which diverts money from all employees' salaries and/or raises company products' prices, which ultimately costs jobs.
• Formal or informal policies that allow parents to leave work early, for example, to attend their kid's soccer game, leaving non-parents of both sexes to pick up the slack. And those non-parents, especially men, dare not raise a peep of objection lest they be dubbed sexist, which can hurt their career.
• Women's advocacy groups also were successful in pressuring the government to create The Family and Medical Leave Act*, which allows employees to--usually with minimal verification of need--take up to 12 weeks every year(!) to care for a relative, with a guarantee that their job will be held for them until they choose to return. (Women take the majority of FMLA days.) Now those advocacy groups are pressuring employers to make FMLA days-off paid days.
• For parents (again, disproportionately women) who wish to take years off to raise their offspring, many corporations have established on-ramps to help them get their career back despite having lost their technical and Rolodex's currency, and now often being less committed to work than are their non-parent coworkers.

Notice how nasty the text got in that section? Notice the sly reference to "shopping" as the activity women might prefer to the hard task of taking advance courses! A particularly odd argument given that Nemko began with the female dominance in education. And finally, have a look at how angry he feels at those horrible parents who return to the labor force despite having lost their skills and their commitment!

It's a Catch-22 for women. No, they can't have parental leaves or on-site daycare. And no, they can't come back after taking time off to care for children in other ways. All these policies amount to a bias against men!

I don't know about you but this was the part in my reading where I thought that the Atlantic Monthly must have gone crazy to let this guy in through the door. He's not just opposed to what he calls affirmative action for women. He's opposed to anything at all that might let them ever leave the house, and he assumes that any policies which help workers with children are policies which only benefit women. Presumably men do not have children or families in his world.

I wonder what would be required for Nemko not to regard the US economy as biased against men. The forceful removal of all women from paid employment?

At this point in my reading the article the wind was out of my sails. Nemko is just too, too weird. For example he wants men who work long hours to be called not workaholics but heroic. By whom? Presumably by their wives or someone dependent on them for money. But I don't quite see why the term "heroic" should be applied to total strangers just because they work long hours. How is not doing that an economic bias against men? Besides, I'm a heroic workaholic myself.

Or his rant about how much more common "Take your Daughter to Work Day" is in Google searches than "Take Your Daughter and Son to Work Day." The latter is the new form of that day, as far as I understand. The former term came about because at the time girls didn't necessarily think that they could work for money in the future, and the day was proposed as a way to change that thinking.

That particular purpose is now outdated and the change to a wider definition good. But if we are to think about what the male version of the initial "Take your Daughter to Work Day" might have been it would have been "Take your Son into the Kitchen." Because sons were expected to work outside the home and not cook or clean at home.

What's sad about Nemko's piece is that the weirdness of the article makes it hard to take any of it seriously:

The media influences how men and women are treated, and how boys perceive themselves relative to girls. Whether in commercials, sitcoms, or movies, even in non-fictional media, men are disproportionately characterized as sleazebags or doofuses shown the way by wise women. Don't believe it? Just turn on your TV. And have you not seen "Girls Rule" tee shirts? How do you think that makes boys feel?

Mmm. I fully admit that the portrayal of men in some commercials and sitcoms is awful. But so is the portrayal of women in much of the media. Tits, tight skirts and so on. Add music videos and Internet pron to that and it's hard to see how women could come out as winners in this game.

The reference to the "Girls Rule" t-shirts is just silly. I have never seen anyone wearing one and I wouldn't like to see one worn, either. But I did recently pass a car with (roughly) this bumper sticker: "Anything that bleeds five days a month and doesn't die must be rotten." Didn't make me feel good to pass the parked car. And no, I did not key it.

I wish that this piece would have been replaced by one which would have actually looked at the reasons why men's average real earnings in the United States are declining among those men who do not have college education.

The main reason is in the loss of well-paying blue-collar jobs due to outsourcing and the globalization of many heavy industries. These disappearing jobs are in male-dominated industries, whereas the new jobs that might replace them are in lower-paying service industries. Many of those have been traditionally female, though there's no barrier to entry for men who wish to enter them. Still, the changes have been tough for certain groups of men and have not received sufficient attention from the powers that be.

I wish Nemko had written about that or the deeper reasons behind the lower percentage of men in college and how to fix these problems. But he chose to go the zero-sum gender wars route where anything that hurts women is good for men and anything that is good for women must hurt men.
----
*I have now been informed that there will be such a post.

The Problem of Uppity Nuns

The Catholic Church is gonna fix that problem. It's the next important topic on their to-do list:

A Vatican investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an umbrella group representing 80 percent of Catholic sisters and nuns in the United States, found serious theological errors in statements by members, widespread dissent on the church’s teaching on sexuality and “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith” a church report released Wednesday stated.
The church appointed Archbishop Peter Sartain of Seattle to oversee “reform” of the women’s organization.
NETWORK, a Washington, DC lobbying group founded by Catholic sisters in 1971 was singled out as “silent on the right to life”; the organization’s head said the group was not consulted during the inquiry. She said that its focus on poverty, immigration and health care stems from its founding mission.
“I think we scare them,” Sr. Simone Campbell, a lawyer who serves as the executive director of the lobby said of the church’s male hierarchy.

No comment necessary, really.

But I'm adding one a bit later because the NYT article on the same topic has additional information:

The Vatican has appointed an American bishop to rein in the largest and most influential group of Catholic nuns in the United States, saying that an investigation found that the group had “serious doctrinal problems.”
The Vatican’s assessment, issued on Wednesday, said that members of the group, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, had challenged church teaching on homosexuality and the male-only priesthood, and promoted “radical feminist themes incompatible with the Catholic faith.”
The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care.

The bishop appointed to reign in the uppity women religious is a man because women cannot be priests. But note that one must also be male to be allowed to be "an authentic teacher of faith and morals."

It is most unfortunate that all this parallels traditional male authority as the only genuine one. Not a random coincidence, of course, but an intended one.

Indeed, the metaphoric value of all this is quite considerable, especially as it comes so soon after the statement by the church on birth control.

After A Very Serious Post. Or on t-shirts

I'm exhausted, knackered, too pooped to pucker and so on. So this post will be about my love/hate relationship to t-shirts. Hate them new. They are hard, cardboardy, trying to stand on me even when I sit, and they are hardly ever available in that deep forest green I want.

Love them old. They become second skin, and any stupid writing they may have once had has long since faded into oblivion. And so have the too bright colors I don't care for. They may be cotton but in their old age they become silk, fiber for the roalty. And me.

Then they fall apart, and we are back into that hate-cycle of the love-hate drama.

What I need is someone to pre-wear t-shirts for me for, say, five years.

T-shirts with messages on other people somewhat worry me. I always feel the wearers expect a reaction. But what is the proper reaction to a really insulting t-shirt? A quick takedown and boot to the head?

Right now I wear a t-shirt which states "Never believe anything I say." But I don't wear that when I go where other people are.

The Hand That Rocks The Cradle: Deep Thoughts About Parenting

Hilary Rosen's comment about Ann Romney and the resulting brouhaha may be emotionally exciting (or angering) to engage in but ultimately not very enlightening. They set stay-at-home-mothers (SAHMs) against mothers in the labor force, they point out that poor mothers on welfare are supposed to go out to work, even though otherwise staying at home with one's children is the most valuable work there is.

But however valuable work child care is (and it is) it is terrible in pay and in benefits (never mind this story, funny money does not count). Women who do it for their own children end up taking a financial punishment for doing so and women who do it for other people's children are among the lowest-paid workers in this country.

Then there's the feminist-bashing arguments. Feminists hate SAHMs! So much that being a feminist who wishes to be one is a daring move. And the truly nasty arguments you find if you dig in the bottom mud of comments threads attached to these pieces: Mothers who stay at home are lazy bon-bon eating golddiggers! Mothers who work are selfish careerists who mistreat their children! Women who don't have children are the worst of the lot because they have refused to carry out their god-sanctioned and biologically determined role in life!

It's all fun and games. But it doesn't bring us one step forward, for several reasons. The most important is that every woman gets equally threatened in these conversations by what are viewed as her "choices." The stories are linkbait for that very reason: Imagine all those shaking fingers typing on all those keyboards, all those gritted teeth, all those churning stomachs, all that unfocused anger!

Add to that mix the very patriarchal commenters who come in to tell women how to mother and feathers will fly.

So let's take a few long steps backwards and look at the very innermost layers of this parenting onion. Forget about the current debacle, forget about your place in this guilt-scenario. Indeed, even forget the planet we are on.

Instead, suspend your judgment and imagine another planet where creatures very much like us have created civilizations. They differ from us in one aspect, however, and that is how they procreate. Suppose that they work that bit out like frogs, that they leave tadpoles behind in ponds and that the children born that way are then quickly filled with all necessary information by some high-tech procedure.

In such a world neither sex would have to be in charge of long years of child care. What would such a society look like, in terms of gender equality? My guess is that it would look pretty close to equal.

Spend some time with that thought. You might ask yourself what would happen if that society decided, for some reason known only to themselves, to meddle with their reproductive system and to change it into something resembling ours, requiring years of hands-on care by at least one adult.

Would they choose one sex to do all the hands-on child-rearing? And if they did, what would that extra obligation mean to that sex's societal equality? How would sex roles change? What beliefs would be created about the proper life roles of male and female parents?

These musings can be enlightening. They lead to several obvious questions, the most important one being the question which underpins everything here:

Is it possible to have hands-on childcare shared by both mothers and fathers, in fairly equal amounts or is it never going to be that way?

This is the crucial feminist question on parenting.

What we have, right now in the United States, is a system where most people believe that it is the mothers who are ultimately responsible for the hands-on care of children.

Some believe that this is a managerial role, that she can delegate the actual care to either other relatives or to paid caregivers but that she is still the one responsible for all the scheduling and the overall performance of the arrangement. Others believe that only the mother herself should do the caring. The latter means, naturally, that she cannot be in the labor force while carrying out those duties. Very few people seem to believe that the managerial role should be shared by both parents (even on the left side of the political aisle), and voices arguing for a wider solution ("it takes a village") exist but get no political traction. Hence the miserable maternity leave and lack of accessible daycare in this country.

Return to our imaginary society, after the genetic manipulation, and assume that now the female adults of that species are responsible for child-rearing, either because they were genetically manipulated to want that role or because the society decided on that for some other reason, such as them now breast-feeding the babies. Assume, moreover, that the society decides not to help the female adults in that task in any other way except by decreeing that the fathers of any children should give her bed and board while she is raising children.

How would a mother in that society look back at the history of her planet, at the roles of the past? Would she be content with the changes and the obvious costs to her? How would her male partner view the situation? And what would the society do, to ensure the reproduction of the next generation under these conditions? What myths would be created, what arrangements would come about, what laws would crop up?

The answer is probably unfathomable and would depend on how strongly the female parents would wish to undertake the task they have been assigned and on other power-related questions in the society. But it's hard to see how such a society could have political or economic gender equality, without very conscious changes to ensure just that.

And those required changes are few on our planet or in this country. Hence the question I bolded above.

If, one day, fathers participate in hands-on childcare in roughly equal numbers or at least as a sizable minority, then gender loses much of its discriminatory power. Employers would no longer try to shy away from promoting women just because they might quit soon, to stay at home with children. Men would be equally likely to do that, you see. There would be more women among the political decision-makers because women who wanted such a task could do so by marrying a man who was more focused on the family. And, perhaps most importantly, questions about how to cope with children would have stopped being questions that only have to do with women.

Is this trend feasible? I don't know but that is my hope, not only because it would decrease gender discrimination in the labor markets and even out the earnings differences between men and women but also because it would offer a more balanced and emotionally richer life for all. Ultimately.

Current feminist economic and social activism makes sense if it is based on that implicit assumption about the future. But if this trend is not going to happen, the kind of feminist activism we need is quite different, consisting of attempts to get salaries and retirement benefits for SAHPs, of affirmative action for parents who return to labor force after taking care of children, of fights against seniority and work experience as a basis for promotions (when they are not equally available for both fathers and mothers) and possibly of political quotas for mothers. Continuing to fight for better and affordable daycare would continue but it would remain a women's issue.

These have been deep thoughts on parenting, not in their wisdom but in the depths I have plunged here. It makes sense to drill into the very center of the gender onion. It even lets me, at least, get a better handle on the question why the mommy wars rage so very easily: Parenting is seen as what "mothers" do, "mothers" are seen as an undifferentiated mass from the undifferentiated mass of "women", taking care of spoonfuls from the undifferentiated mass of "children" there is only One Correct Way To Mother And If Your Way Differs From Mine Then One Of Us Is Wrong.

And fathers are invisible elephants in the room.

Happy Pay Equality Day!

I still recommend my gender gap series (available at the website shown at the top of this blog. The empirical data in it is a bit old by now but the arguments are as fresh as ever.

Bryce has written a nice piece on seven steps which would reduce the gender gap in earnings. The first:

1. End salary secrecy. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, about half of all workers are either prohibited or strongly discouraged from talking about how much they make with their colleagues. And it’s pretty hard to sue an employer for pay discrimination without first figuring out what everyone else rakes in. So, easy task: just force all employers, public and private, to let anyone talk freely about how much they make. Americans should quickly get over their queasiness about discussing money, and employers shouldn’t care if their lower paid employees start salivating over six-figure salaries.

I can't help noticing that out of that list of seven FOUR steps (3, 4, 5 and partially 7) are directly linked to the fact that women do most of hands-on child-rearing. If that societal chore was equally divided, those steps would no longer matter for gender equality in earnings*.

This does NOT mean that women "choose" to earn less, in the sense of choosing chocolate ice-cream over vanilla, say. What it means is that policies about parental leaves and childcare are essential if one wants to fix the gender gap. Changing expectations about the role of mothers, fathers and others are also necessary.
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*Gender segregation would not completely disappear but it would be greatly reduced because women would no longer need to pick occupations on the basis of how flexible they are for temporary exits and re-entries or how long the working days are. These are among the reasons which make women choose occupations where knowledge does not depreciate fast or where the expected hours of work are not above eighty hours per week. Occupations which offer the necessary flexibility also offer, on average, less pay.