Morra Goes to Washington
This Monday I am traveling to DC to sit down with Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. I will be traveling on behalf of BlogHer.com’s community journalism initiative. I’ll be asking questions from the online community- as well as a few of my own. Please, submit a question by visiting BlogHer.com. You can also watch my interview live online at BlogHer on Monday morning, Dec. 21, at 9:30 am Eastern.
The goal of our community journalism initiative is to foster a frank, open, and civil discussion surrounding the current health care policy debate. We all could use a little more of that right now, so please help me out by entering a question.
Visit BlogHer and submit your question- many thanks!
http://bit.ly/4DY5z1
My prep reading list:
Atul Gawande
Ezra Klein
Julie Pippert
RH Reality Check
David Sirota
The Corner
James Chartrain and the new women’s movement…about work
Cross-posted from MomsRising:
A single mom needs work; she’s literally thinking about applying for welfare. As she writes on her blog, “I had been looking for a better job, but there were none to be had in the low-income/high-unemployment area where I lived. And I couldn’t get a full-time job anyway — I was still on the waiting list for a spot in daycare.”
She starts working freelance, from home. This suits her schedule as a mom. But “I was treated like crap, too. Bossed around, degraded, condescended to, with jibes made about my having to work from home. I quickly learned not to mention I had kids. I quickly learned not to mention I worked from my kitchen table.” But she gets the hang of things, and it starts to work. She earns more money as a freelance writer, gets steady work.
And yet, “…I was still having a hard time landing jobs. I was being turned down for gigs I should’ve gotten, for reasons I couldn’t put a finger on. My pay rate had hit a plateau, too. I knew I should be earning more. Others were, and I soaked up everything they could teach me, but still, there was something strange about it . . .
“It wasn’t my skills, it wasn’t my work. So what were those others doing that I wasn’t?”
She found out when she decided to adopt a male pen name and things got so much better fast. She became James Chartrand.
This is an old story. But it’s also a story of the Internet age, of a prominent blogger who “came out” today online to tell her story. That this is a story of a digitally proficient, virtual knowledge worker somehow surprised me.
If women still need to take men’s names to earn as much as men do, then surely we need a new woman’s movement. And not one centered solely around reproduction and abortion politics, which I fear is what people think of instinctually when they hear the word “feminist,” now.
As if to provide us with new reasons to organize into a new women’s movement, in yesterday’s Washington Post historian Dorothy Sue Cobble wrote this call to arms, “Feminism today should concentrate on the economy and the workplace — and on the huge transformations that are needed there to get greater equality and security. These are issues that can unite women across class and culture and allow feminism to speak to the fears and concerns of everyone.”
Punished for taking too long a maternity leave? Who do you blame?
On BlogHer, I wrote about this incredibly vexing survey, which comes as no surprise to anyone, really: “The blogger Well-heeled brought my attention to this new study with the stunning question: “Could the U.S.’s lack of policy mandating paid maternity leave actually help women’s careers?” In the UK, this issue is getting tons of press because of pending legislation that would pay for a year’s maternity leave. Some are suggesting employers will avoid hiring women of childbearing age if a year’s maternity leave is standard.
I asked Nikki and Nick Bartlett, who run Maternity Unlimited in the UK, to comment.
To a certain extend these results hold some truth. The challenge for a working woman during the transition to becoming a working mum involves numerous changes in that individual’s identity. The longer a person has to embed the new identity of being a mum the harder it becomes to recognise and relate to the “working” identity that they once held. The trick is to insure that women have the chance to “plan” for their return before they leave to have their baby. The gap between intention and actual behaviour widens if a women goes on maternity without having a plan to return to work in place. They are unprepared for the changes in identity and therefore swept along with experience rather than having a date/goal/objective to aim for.
In April 2011 UK women will be able to share their 52 week allowance with their partner allowing them to go back to work at the 6 month stage with the partner taking over childcare responsibilities. This will mean that families will have to be even more organised and the emphasis on responsibility is firmly on the organisations to give their employees all of the tools and time they need to plan if they expect to retain their parenting employee population.
Put that way, it really makes sense, no? And if both parents can share a year, surely that would lessen the notion that employers will shy away from hiring women. It’s not as if employers can avoid hiring parents.
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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