What I’m doing while I’m not at BlogHer
I’m not going to the BlogHer conference, the first time almost since it started. I’m really sad about it, in a way I haven’t felt since high school. I feel like there is a big party and I am grounded. Even though I could have brought the baby…I had a scheduling snafu.
For those who say online community doesn’t measure up to offline groups, what’s the explanation for this feeling? And I know I’m not alone.
There are a fair amount of posts under the topic, “I’m sad I’m not going to BlogHer.”
Anyway, I’m going to try to distract myself from feeling left out. I’m going to:
- Make a healthier red velvet cake (courtesy of my amazing client, the American Cancer Society. The recipe is here if you’re interested.
- Organize the baby’s clothes
- Fill in entries in the baby book!!
- Stay off the internet, because it will make me feel sad
Anyone else? What are you doing when you’re not at BlogHer?
Discovery Baby week- my birth story and others
If you’re into birth stories (an acquired taste, clearly) check out mine and other great women BlogHers’ tales on Discovery Health. And I’ll be watching Baby Week, of which Jenny Lauck says, “It’s like Shark Week… except with babies! Baby Week runs Sunday, June 14th through Friday, June 19th at 8 pm.” (Best title: “Obese and Pregnant”) now that I’ve actually had the baby and can’t freak out.
Catherine Connors, Queen of Spain and Renee Ross, Lindsay Ferrier and others. Awesome.
Catherine Connors: it “was the most awesome experience of my life. It was the most terrifying experience of my life, and it all started while I was eating a fajita.”
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?
All I can say is…wow
From Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode. Hannah Rosin’s new article on breastfeeding:
Rosin spends pages parsing the medical literature (with online links to all the original studies) and then goes on to examine the downside to breast-feeding; not for all women, but for many. Using an analogy that is already generating sparks in the blogosphere, she wonders if “it was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound.”
The debate about breast-feeding takes place without any reference to its actual context in women’s lives. Breast-feeding exclusively is not like taking a prenatal vitamin. It is a serious time commitment that pretty much guarantees that you will not work in any meaningful way. Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.
sched.org for family scheduling
Everyone is obsessed with sched.org- but I want to use it for family scheduling! In interviewing women who have mastered the act of a content work and family life, one theme comes out loud and clear: know your weekly schedule, share it, confirm that your fellow caregivers know it, and keep the schedule public. Sched.org would allow the family to view events details quickly by just mousing over, view on iPhone, and vote what’s popular (trips to Petsmart? Doctor’s appts?).
One IBM executive I spoke with spends and hour updating her schedule every Sunday night. She then sends it to her husband, team, sister, kids, and other family helpers.
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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