“The Matriarchy Up North”: Why Women Should Run
Renee Loth wrote a fantastic editorial in the Boston Globe today about New Hampshire’s woman-led legislative leadership. NH is the first women-majority state legislature, and it’s shaping the public policy emerging from the state legislature. For example, the Granite State has finally approved state-funded kindergarten. Loth writes,
“First, the New Hampshire House of Representatives voted to raise the state’s gasoline tax by 15 cents over three years. Then the House approved a bill allowing the use of medical marijuana, by a vote of 234-138. Next, it voted to repeal the state’s capital punishment statute. The House wrapped up March with a vote to legalize same-sex marriage, and the Senate followed suit yesterday.”
“It’s as if there was a bloodless coup of the state’s political establishment in November, and women were the avatars of change.”
Why?
“I do think gender has affected the way we discuss issues,” says Exeter Democrat Margaret Hassan, the Senate’s president pro tem. “Women tend to see problems in a much less segmented fashion, and that has allowed us to connect the dots in different ways.”
There’s been a lot written about why women don’t run. Often, political scientists use network theory to show that women don’t run for office as often as men because women don’t benefit from the kind of social and professional networks that encourage (and fund) electoral quests. From my brief view of NH state politics, women do now have a strong place in the local political network, and they’re using it to gain office and positions of leadership once in the Legislature. It’s a snowball: once women are in the pipeline for local and state offices, the networks just grow automatically.
My esteemed blogger colleague and friend Jill Zimon is a perfect example of a woman who’s running for the right reasons, with the right resume behind her. It seems to me she, too, is well-networked in her Ohio community and among the state’s party movers and shakers at large. I’ve seen her network grow just in the past two years. She has invested in growing the network online and offline, a smart move that I hope will pay off come voting day.
MomsRising post: Flexible work in the recession
My first post on MomsRising…hat tip to Cali Yost
Maria Shriver announced that we now live in what she calls “A Woman’s Nation.” She wrote on the Huffington Post last week:
“For the first time in our nation’s history, women now represent half of all workers and are becoming the primary breadwinners in more families than ever before. These two facts have far reaching consequences to government, business, faith communities, women and even men. “
The “mancession” means women are gaining economic responsibility for families across income and professional levels.
“For the first time in economic history, the male unemployment rate has surpassed the female unemployment rate. The December 2008 unemployment rate for men was 7.9 percent, versus 6.4 percent for women. The U.S. economy lost 2.956 million jobs in the last year, and a full 82 percent of pink slips have been handed to male workers.”
As Heather Boushey, economist at Center for American Progress put it, “Families will increasingly rely on women’s earnings, which are typically lower than men’s and are less likely to come with health insurance.”
My question is: what impact will the new labor force shift have on women’s ability to negotiate roles at work that allow them to be caregivers? Women in power often have to contend with the “ideal worker” stereotype. We’ve always idealized the hard-striving, dominant man with a wife at home to take care of matters outside the office. Now, as many of those ideal workers are losing their jobs, women have an opportunity to redefine what an ideal worker is. But we have to play it carefully.
A new survey from Cali Yost at Work+Life Fit finds 94% of employees are willing to change their schedule or cut their salary to avoid layoffs, but 47 percent of workers are less likely to voluntarily leave the workforce for a period of time. Women (56%) were significantly more likely than men (40%) to say they are less likely to voluntarily leave the workforce to take care of a child or elder, for example. Does this mean, if women hold the majority of jobs, but are less likely to leave to assume the child and elder care responsibilities they traditionally hold, they’re forced to negotiate with employers to make it work?
Yost’s survey finds that employees are willing to work more flexibly (in the guise of reduced hours) to save their jobs and help their employers reduce costs. She found “nearly 8 in 10 employees would be willing to work a compressed work week, while nearly 60 percent would take additional unpaid vacation days or furloughs (several weeks off without pay). Nearly half would share their jobs with colleagues (48%), or take a cut in both pay and hours (47%). A little more than 4 in 10 would take a pay cut but work the same amount of hours or switch to a project-based contractor employment status (41%). Just under a third say they would take a month or more unpaid sabbatical.”
I wondered, is this desperation under the guise of flexibility, or is it employees being willing to sacrifice money for extra time and flexibility and using the recession as an opportunity to do so? Why do I feel like women would be the first to consider flexible options and a pay cut, and this may not be a great thing for women at work? But I asked Yost about this, and she said,
“For the past twenty years, flexibility such as reduced schedules, sabbaticals, job sharing has primarily been driven by employee-need. What this survey says is employees understand that these same flexible ways of working can also be led by business-need….
“After studying and writing about this issue for over a year, I believe the willingness of both men and women to sacrifice pay and schedule to manage through the recession with their jobs intact is less desperation than pragmatism and shared sacrifice. I see this as an opportunity for flexibility to finally come in from the “nice thing to do, perk and benefit” wilderness and become part of the way the business operates, and the way people manage their work and life in up and down cycles. “
I asked Yost, if she worried flexibility is coming at the expense of opportunity for advancement for women, or is this not a gender issue?
She said, “I think this finding will have ramifications on the advancement of women and will, ultimately require an even more effective use of flexibility in the future… More women will remain employed for longer more consistent periods of time, but the inevitable reality will arise—yes, they are working BUT they need flexibility to continue to care for their families. They aren’t leaving as they might have in the past, so how to we make flexibility really work for everyone.”
Here’s the light at the end of the tunnel part: as more women become breadwinners, our visibility increases and so does our collective bargaining power. Is now the time the ideal worker model becomes less important than the flexible, practical worker?
I don’t know the answer. Would you propose a reduced or flex schedule to your employer right now? Does feel less, or more risky than before?
Google profile is going to change everything
The search engine literally turns into the world’s Facebook
Exploring the Gendered Web
Cross posted from Berkman Center at Harvard Law School Gender and Tech blog…I’m playing with this one. Thinking about how to best get research started….
I’m not a technologist and I can barely find my way around a piece of code. But I’ve been working on consumer-facing websites targeted to women on and off since 1999. In 1999, when I worked at the young website iVillage.com, our pitch to advertisers went like this, “Women make 80% of purchasing decisions. Women are online, talking to each other about everything from relationships to health to their favorite diaper brands (except at this point, it was on message boards, not blogs or social media platforms like Twitter). Clients, who were mostly consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, bought ad space on iVillage to reach these influential, chattering women, in hopes that online users would buy, and talk about their products.
Today, the sales pitch on major social media platforms that cater to women is very similar, and now, women drive 82% of purchasing decisions. Some of the language is new: marketers want users to have “conversations” about their products, they want “brand evangelists,” and mostly, CPGs hope not to get slammed online (see the Motrin Moms case for a prime example). A big change is that while women on message boards in the 1990’s used handles or chose to remain anonymous, today’s online media stars use their real names and identities. Even more, many have become brands in their own right. But ultimately, the marketers’ goal is the same.
So enter social media, Web 2.0. Women and men use social media in equal numbers. Online social networks for women such as Twittermoms.com, Momversations, or MomsExtraordinaire on LinkedIn provide women safe and engrossing places to gather. Twitter users skew female, and according to TechCrunch, 60% of US Facebook users are women. For many women, participating in a gendered version of the social web brings them access to new networks, professional opportunities, and self-realization. It also gives women power….
So the web has become a place where women can flex muscle, even as leadership roles for women in the corporate and political realms remain scarce. But what kind of power does the web afford these women? Has the rise of the social web reinforced traditional gender roles? It seems to me the social web has created a space where girls are more girly, boys will be even more like boys, and moms are uber?
At the Gender and Tech mini conference, law professors Dena Sacco and Diane Rosenfeld stressed how the ubiquity of online porn has a profound effect on how men see women, especially on how young men view young women. Does a nation of mommybloggers and giggling girls on MySpace also reinforce traditional gender stereotypes? We’re comfortable with women being outspoken on matters close to home. But while plenty of women bloggers write with intelligence and wit about everything from the economic crisis to foreign policy, they get rewarded (with advertiser money or media coverage) when they do stick closer to home. I don’t see that changing as social media becomes more ubiquitous; I see it being reinforced.
I don’t want to turn this into yet another piece debating the merits of mommyblogging (see Joanne Bamberger for that). I want to know:
Scholars, are you researching the gendered web and its affects on offline gender relations? Users, what impact do you think the gendered web has on gender relations?
Bloggers and those who participate as themselves in social media environments tend to act as their real selves, if not using their real names, at least assuming their real gender. At the Gender and Tech mini-conference, danah boyd referenced the early Internet scholars’ belief that the web would allow users to reject their everyday identity, including their real gender, in favor of a disembodied and free identity. In the 1990’s, Sherry Turkle and others pointed to the powerful impact of the Internet as a place to reconstruct gender and identity to suit one’s fancy, not reality. This didn’t happen. In fact, the opposite did.
As Vanessa Grigoriadis’ recent piece on Facebook notes: “Facebook’s relentless emphasis on literal representation…turns out to be the weapon to quell the web’s chaos. Now online life is a series of Victorian drawing rooms, a well-tended garden where you bring your calling card and make polite conversation with those of your kind…” To really use social media, we have to be real, but we can also be a little detached, a little less conscientious than we are in person. We also revert to behavior that comes naturally. Women like to talk a lot (see Susan Herring’s research on this) and men often use the opportunity to act like they’re on a bachelor weekend. Sexism comes too easily.
Social media spaces heighten the importance of gender, as we tend to congregate in places online with like-minded folks, and in places that feel safe. I can’t tell you how many progressive women I know who refuse to participate in the DailyKos.com community because of the sexism of its commenters. Instead, these women choose to congregate in a more female, safer space. In a 2001 article, boyd wrote, “the reliance on sex as a marker of identity online has encouraged a certain kind of re-embodiment of users (as sexed beings), with an attendant sexualizing of cyberspace.”
Mommybloggers, feminist bloggers, and others who participate in the online community as a gendered being would proudly say, “exactly,” in response to boyd’s claim. But does this gendering of online spaces simply further traditional, limiting gender roles? Or is it an extension of natural social life? Or even worse, a reaction against the threat of bad behavior on the Internet?
Working women are hot
It’s no secret the US has crummy public policy to support working families. I had breakfast this morning with Miriam Hollstein, a German reporter writing about working families. As I bitched about $30,000 infant day care, I prepared myself for the inevitable jealousy one faces when hearing from a European colleague about work and family issues.
Sure enough, in Germany, good day care costs no more than 300 Euros a year. New moms get a year’s paid maternity leave at 76% of their salary. Dads can take 2 months paid (I think- need to research this one). Should mothers choose to leave their jobs to take leave, their job, or an equivalent, is theirs for up to three years (FMLA is three months). Dream public policy for working families, no? And yet…Miriam said that in Germany, women still tend to work part time to cover child care, or they work part time because they feel guilty. Women still advance less than men professionally, and hold fewer leadership roles.
This issue goes beyond public policy. It’s so thorny. That’s why I’m so excited to see what comes out of A Woman’s Nation, a new effort from Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress. According to the press release, the project “will take a new, empirical look at American women who for the first time in our nation’s history make up fully half of all workers and are becoming the primary breadwinners in more families than ever before.”
“We will take a hard look at how women are doing in the United States today and consider the central question of the role government, business, and faith organizations, as well as individual women and men should play in supporting women’s role now in the workforce and the U.S. economy,“ said John Podesta, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress.
Also, the “Woman’s Nation will report its findings to the nation, Congress, and President Obama, who recently signed an executive order to establish a council to coordinate the federal government’s efforts to address the needs of women and girls.”
Hallelujah!
About Me
Morra Aarons-Mele utilizes social media strategies to help employers, employees and communities connect. She also consults with leading organizations on how women can use the internet for professional and personal development. In her spare time, Morra enjoys blogging about women and politics. Read her full bio >>
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