Boston Globe piece: The Day Care Squeeze
Really good, balanced article. But am I the only one feeling guilt here?
And then there’s the guilt. Morra Aarons-Mele, 34, owner of Women Online, a digital marketing firm, tries not to mind when her toddler says his nanny’s name before hers. (Aarons-Mele just had a second baby, by the way, and they’re trying to figure out a raise for nanny Joanna Szukala.)
What really wrenches her gut, though, is an admittedly self-imposed feeling that the high cost is her burden – she preferred a nanny to provide stability for the kids and flexibility for herself and her husband, since they both have demanding jobs that require frequent travel away from the Medford home. “Every time we look at how much child care costs, I feel guilty about it,” says Aarons-Mele, “even though it’s investing in the future for me to work.”
For Women, Social Networking is Serious Business
Cross-posted from the Massachusetts’ Conference for Women site (#Masswomen).
I recently taught a digital skills workshop for graduate students at Harvard’s Kennedy School. A guest in the audience, who was about 45, raised her hand and said, “Well, you’re all so young. What about women like me? Is there a space for us in social media”?
The twentysomethings in the audience immediately supported her with comments like, “My mom is my Facebook friend!” The truth is, the fastest growing demographic group on Facebook is women over 55. And in almost every age group, Facebook is growing faster with women than men. Women are over 56% of Facebook’s audience, and 45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years old or older.
For mid-career women, becoming social network savvy is serious business. Whether you’re working for a large company or for yourself, you need to establish a digital brand. Women Online will be ready to help at the Conference for Women with our interactive session, “Using Social Media to Establish Your Brand.” In the meantime, here is some food for thought about why it’s so crucial you engage online:
- You’ll get access to new networks. Research shows that women’s social and professional networks look different than men’s, and this can hurt us professionally. Women tend to have fewer weak ties, more all-female reference groups, and more contacts who are peers, less who are superiors. As the network scholar Howard Aldrich wrote, after work, “men head for cocktails [or golf], women head for the dry cleaner.” Online media fundamentally changes this equation. You can be at home and still engage in the virtual cocktail party.
- A digital brand is portable and permanent. Women can lose out professionally because most of us take some time out of the paid workforce to raise children. If you take time off to have a baby or opt-out of a career ladder progression, your online presence can still grow and burnish your professional reputation. Your online brand is layoff proof and it can grow with you as your expertise grows. For all generations, jumping in and out of the traditional workforce is “the new normal” according to Ellen Galinsky and the Families and Work Institute. Keeping up a strong professional profile online allows you to stay engaged even if you’re not officially working.
- Establish your expertise and credentials. Digital publishing and creating a strong digital brand allows you to establish expertise in your field while bypassing traditional gatekeepers or barriers to success. Google rank plus links to your work=credentials in the digital age. Again, research shows women feel the need to be more credentialed before assuming positions of power. Strong use of social media allows us to build credentials without breaking into traditional networks (if we’re part of those networks, even better—we can link out to more women).
- Strong community ties. We get by with a little help from them…online friends build social capital, plus they’re a wonderful addition to life. Online community can help busy women feel connected, listened to, and recharged, on our terms and at the time of day that works for us.
Learn more at the Conference: please join my colleague Susan Getgood at “Using Social Media to Build Your Brand.”
Morra Aarons Mele is the founder of Conference Sponsor Women Online, a digital PR and marketing firm (www.wearewomenonline.com). She is an Internet marketer who has been working with women online since 1999. She helped Hillary Clinton log on for her first Internet chat, and launched Wal-Mart’s first blog. She has written for BlogHer.com, Huffington Post, MomsRising and Guardian.co.uk and has covered events from the White House to the campaign trail to Harvard Law School in her role as a blogger on women, politics, and work. Morra is the author of “Women and Leadership in the Digital Age,” part of the upcoming Sage Encyclopedia of Women and Leadership.
Still Team Elizabeth
I’m saddened by Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer news, and sending white light to her. I was honored a couple years ago to interview her for Blogher.com.
Her husband, her story, was so sordid. But Elizabeth Edwards’ is a woman of such articulateness, it’s hard for me to group her in with her slimy husband. I’ve reposted our interview below.
I had the honor of interviewing Elizabeth Edwards last week in Cambridge. I said, “I’m going to interview you for BlogHer.” She said, “thanks for doing that,” and I said “your fan base on BlogHer is beyond” and she said, “these are my people.” So, “people”…
Does the media cover elections as if candidates were Hollywood celebrities, bestowing coverage on who’ll make the best copy and sell most?
Elizabeth Edwards thinks so. When she spoke at Harvard’s Kennedy School last week the thrust of her public address was this: campaign coverage focuses less on substance and more on personality. In a race dominated by two “mega-celebrities,” she used Senator Joe Biden as an example of media slight that created an avalanche of negative effects on one “by any measure a serious candidate.” Biden had but one appearance on the front page of the New York Times. There were more news articles about Elizabeth than about ten of the presidential candidates! The “narrative template” of the media’s choosing was an African American man and a woman. And the media went there, and the result was sky-high ratings for election news.
“Who got to decide this?” she asked about the media’s anointment of certain candidates over others. “Whoever decided this probably also decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate for president.” She pleaded for less Britney Spears, who even graced the Atlantic Monthly’s cover, and more dissection of critical issues like health policy. Instead we get “strobe light” journalism to make the sound bite. You have to craft a “zinger,” she noted. Mrs. Edwards can master the zinger but she is a truly thoughtful person and I wish she were running for president. So much for journalistic objectivity, there, but I’m no journalist.
I wanted to talk to Elizabeth about civic life, since she is a true civic leader, not just a political leader. I asked her, “what happens after Election Day? We’ve seen it before- there’s a huge surge, excitement, people vote and then…what would you say to young progressives about how to keep people involved”?
One of the things that John and I tried…OneCorps. As you’re working, you’re out there, meeting with the other volunteers. We need to think about this post-Election period and where will people turn their energies. Our hope was that people would turn their energies to their communities. We hoped people would turn towards a potential candidate, great potential candidate… say “how can we help them” In particular try thinking about it outside the progressive community- thinking, ‘I’m gonna do an anti-poverty project and I’m gonna go to that Baptist Church and see if they want to do it with us and build the bonds there’…and maybe doing something else that would appeal to another group. People get used to working with one another to make the communities better and stronger. We try to do it through OneCorps, it helps, people feel like they’re part of a bigger network if we have something [formal]. Whoever is the candidate, win or lose, one of the things they should do is build that operation into something that’s more civic-minded. The problem is that the way you do that is you use your email list, and the email list is a commodity that civic organizations are unable to afford. One of the things I want us to be able to do is to donate the list to OneCorps…
Politicians have a political agenda, so it’s important to incorporate those who aren’t running again. But “if people understood their own power and their own ability to change their communities…. It’s especially important if McCain wins the election because he’s against government activity that supports the work of organizations like OneCorps.
Let’s talk about why women don’t run for office, and how moms especially can get engaged in civic life so we can start thinking about running?
I think one of the reasons- and not having considered running- or not seriously considered running myself- I think money is really important. EMILY’s list is really important. We are unlikely to have-this is historical- the donor base that men are likely to have. I know we’re used to juggling home and work, and politics is more demanding than most jobs, in terms of the time it’s going to take, at least to do it well. It often also requires being in Washington [DC] away from family, or being in the State Capital. Your family has to be ok with that…The women who are in Washington have launched a move to Washington, particularly the ones with children. Men, it’s much more split. McCain is an example…very often the wives and the children stay at home in the home district or the home state and the official moves to Washington. Women have a much bigger family decision to make.
Me: Is there any solution or is that how it is?
That’s how it is. I think there are just some things we have to say, that’s how it is. ….the way I’d like to improve it is I’d like to see the men to feel the same responsibility! I don’t want it to move in the other direction…I kind of think families ought to live together- that’s one of the things that makes us a family. Certainly as much as our blood makes us a family, living together makes us a family.
I don’t think we feel hesitation anymore whether we can be effective advocates, whether we can be effective candidates. I think it’s lifestyle that keeps us from running [for office]….If we had public financing we’d have a lot more people engaged.
We talked a lot about the effect of money on our elected officials.
There are certain things you wish you could do sort of “candid camera” and we could follow people around congress…to everything…they could go to the bathroom themselves but that’s it. And people couldn’t arrange their schedule…to meet with “Mothers of Dead Soldiers” or things like that all day long. The distance we now have from them, the lack of transparency, we don’t have that connection. We get it back maybe a little bit during campaign season but…
[after Election Day}
“But everyone goes home. I think that’s what it’s gonna be. Even if Obama wins…Hillary has exhibited a toughness that has quieted some people’s concerns that she’s a woman. Obama has appealed to people as this gentle, thoughtful man. People want to see the toughness too.
So I asked her about the role of soaring rhetoric in this election cycle:
“It’s getting people excited and that’s really great. It’s also raising people’s expectations perhaps unrealistically. Jimmy Carter was a really nice man, with a really good heart…but what he didn’t have was the capacity to change the rhetoric of his vision into action. And as a matter of fact, the sort of naïve way in which he had approached it meant he faced even more hurdles than someone who was practiced
What do you think of the whole “bitch is the new black” approach- is that an effective strategy?
“No…I am concerned with the way in which the percentage of women voting for Hillary, the percentage of African Americans voting for Obama, will change. I’m afraid—as many Democrats are—of disaffection in these groups when their candidate is no longer in the race. Because the appeal has been made— not so much by the candidates— but certainly by surrogates and others—this pitch has been made that this is important, for your gender, for your race. In a way it is important for them. But I’m concerned about the disaffection when the candidate is no longer in the race. That’s the real argument for the forced marriage between them, is the possibility of disaffection.
I actually disagree with Elizabeth on this point. I don’t think if Hillary doesn’t win the nomination that women voters will feel disaffected. I think new precedents have been set and the bar’s been moved. Do you? I do wish for a ticket with both Obama and Clinton.
I closed with asking Elizabeth about her civic role in coming years. She said until she can’t make anymore contributions, people will keep hearing from her. I know she said she hasn’t seriously considered running for office but I encourage her to re-think. We need her.
For more recent Elizabeth Edwards news:
Kate Phillips covers Elizabeth’s speech at the Kennedy School, including her fantastically moving answer to the eternal question about criticism about having cancer, young kids, and staying on the campaign trail: New York Times Caucus Blog
Click here to watch Edwards’ public address and Q and A.
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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