Week 13

Sixty Cents to a Man's Dollar" by Ann Crittenden 1) "Sixty Cents to a Man's Dollar" by Ann Crittenden

While one of the foundational philosophies of the US is equal opportunity for all, but as Estelle Disch writes in the introduction to our unit this week, “equality of educational opportunity cannot produce equality in society […] The economic system in the United States privileges a small proportion of the population with large amounts of wealth and laves a huge proportion with varying degrees of economic difficulty, including brutal poverty” (413). As we have learned throughout this class, our democracy may be based on the theory of equal opportunity for all citizens, but more often than not, equality is more of an abstract ideal than a functional reality. This is especially true in the arena of paid employment, where many people are subject to workplace discrimination on the basis of gender, race, able-bodiedness, sexual orientation, and other factors, not to mention various barriers to employment.

In “Sixty Cents to a Man’s Dollar,” Ann Crittenden examines the employment discrimination against women that has resulted in the persistent pay gap in which the average earnings of all female workers is approximately 60 percent of men’s earnings. She points out that while “[c]onservatives frequently tout women’s economic gains in order to charge that women’s advocates who haven’t folded their tents and gone home must be making up things to complain about” (434), various studies have shown that women workers of similar educational and experience levels and working the same jobs as their male counterparts continue to be paid substantially less.

Additional research by some female economists has shown that the pay gap is even larger between childless women and mothers than between men and women. Among the reasons proffered for this pay gap is the lack of legally mandated maternity leaves in the US. Crittenden relays the shocking statistic that the US is one of only six nations in the world that do not require employers to provide paid maternity leaves. Without paid leaves, some mothers quit their jobs in order to take care of their babies, and find that it makes more economic sense to stay home than to have to pay prohibitively high child care costs. Moreover, women who have interruptions in their employment histories have been found to earn less than women with little to no employment interruptions. Some employers have also been found to believe that mothers who work part-time and/or work from home are less productive and have more “recreational” attitudes toward work, which come with unofficial penalties. In corporate environments, women are judged against the “70-hour-per-week male competitive model” which precludes mothers who want to spend more time with their families.

"Global Woman" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild 2) "Global Woman" by Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild

Women today throughout the world are more mobile than ever before, owing to what Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild call the process of “globalization” in their essay “Global Woman.” Common images of the contemporary globally mobile woman in Western culture tend to feature female globetrotting executives as they easily cross international borders to conduct business, but much less attention has been paid to the phenomenon of female migration from poor countries to rich ones in search of jobs primarily as nannies, maids, and sometimes sex workers. “This is the female underside of globalization,” according to Ehrenreich and Hochschild, whereby millions of female workers move from poor countries to rich ones “to do the ‘women’s work’ of the north—work that affluent women are no longer able to or will to do” due to long work hours and stressful careers (442). “This pattern of female migration,” they write, “reflects what could be called a worldwide gender revolution” in which families in both rich and poor countries are no longer supported by a single male breadwinner and increasing numbers of women have entered the paid workforce. And, as we have learned from our previous readings, the greater numbers of women in the workforce was met in the US with a continuing lack of public child care and mandated paid family leaves. Unlike poor mothers, however, affluent mothers can

afford to hire private childcare and housekeeping services, and thereby elect to continue with their careers.

Ehrenreich and Hochschild use the metaphor of the traditional division of domestic labor to describe roles of contemporary female migrant workers: “The First World takes on a role like that of the old-fashioned male in the family—pampered, entitled, unable to cook, clean, or find his socks. Poor countries take on a role like that of the traditional woman within the family—patient, nurturing, and self-denying” (449). The difference is that unlike marriages, the relationship between the female migrant domestic worker and her employer is frequently invisible to the public and not openly acknowledged—and in this sense, it is more like a “secret affair” than a traditional marriage. One reason for the invisibility of such workers is that they tend to be migrant women of color who are therefore “subject to the racial ‘discounting’” often experienced by migrant workers of color in Western countries. Another reason Ehrenreich and Hochschild propose for the invisibility of female migrant workers—particularly in domestic service—is that the “Western culture of individualism, which finds extreme expression in the United States, militates against acknowledging human interdependency of any kind” (443). Accordingly, affluent careerwomen strive to maintain the illusion of “doing it all” by being a “Superwoman” capable of maintaining a full-time career, a happy spouse and thriving children, and a well-kept home. The reality behind this illusion is that the lifestyles of affluent First World families is made possible by the “global transfer of the services associated with a wife’s traditional role—child care, homemaking, and sex—from poor countries to rich ones” (443).

Female migrant workers 3) Female migrant workers

Ehrenreich and Hochschild’s work on female migrant workers sheds light on Third World/South women’s employment issues—serving as a corrective to the Eurocentric bias of some strains of feminist thought in the wealthy countries of the First World/North. While we cannot of course discount the struggles of First World/North women workers—including the persistence of the pay gap and the “second shift,” lack of public childcare and paid parental leaves, and welfare cutbacks—it is sobering to learn of the hardships of female workers from the Third World/South, many of whom leave their families behind in order to support them. Some come from home countries with conditions of such grinding poverty and few government supports that they are stuck between a rock and a hard place—they find that they must migrate to work in richer countries or work as prostitutes at home to adequately support their families. In Ehrenreich and Hochschild’s words, these female migrant workers “cannot both live with her family and support it” like their affluent First World employers. One of the saddest parts of these women’s situations is the extraction by their employers of “something harder to measure and quantify, something that can look very much like love,” as in the heartbreaking situation of the nanny Josephine, who showers her employer’s child with maternal affection, as her own children live their lives without a mother in her home country of Sri Lanka.

Looking at the situation of female workers who migrate from poor countries to rich ones allows us to use the most “inclusive paradigm” for analyzing what Chandra Talpade Mohanty (in our previous reading from week 3) the oppressive effects of global capitalism. To reiterate Talpade’s argument, she writes that “It is especially on the bodies and lives of women and girls from the Third World/South—the Two-Thirds World—that global capitalism writes its script, and it is by paying attention to and theorizing the experiences of these communities of women and girls that we demystify capitalism as a system of debilitating sexism and racism and envision anticapitalist resistance” (94). Ehrenreich and Hochschild’s essay is a prime example of this kind of global thinking, for its attention to the experiences of one of the most highly marginalized groups in our society: female migrant domestic and sex workers. Their work shows that by paying attention to this devalued group, we can get a broader picture of the current state of global capitalism. As poor countries become poorer while rich ones grow richer, the governments of poor countries increasingly encourage their women to look for jobs abroad since they often send part or nearly

all of their pay back to their families. Such remittances are a boost to the economies of their cash-strapped home countries.

QUESTIONS 1 "Global Woman" - Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild

Women today throughout the world are more mobile than ever before, owing to what Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild call the process of “globalization” in their essay “Global Woman.” Common images of the contemporary globally mobile woman in Western culture tend to feature female globetrotting executives as they easily cross international borders to conduct business, but much less attention has been paid to the phenomenon of female migration from poor countries to rich ones in search of jobs primarily as nannies, maids, and sometimes sex workers. “This is the female underside of globalization,” according to Ehrenreich and Hochschild, whereby millions of female workers move from poor countries to rich ones “to do the ‘women’s work’ of the north—work that affluent women are no longer able to or willing to do” due to long work hours and stressful careers (442). “This pattern of female migration,” they write, “reflects what could be called a worldwide gender revolution” in which families in both rich and poor countries are no longer supported by a single male breadwinner and increasing numbers of women have entered the paid workforce. And, as we have learned from our previous readings, the greater numbers of women in the workforce was met in the US with a continuing lack of public child care and mandated paid family leaves. Unlike poor mothers, however, affluent mothers can afford to hire private childcare and housekeeping services, and thereby elect to continue with their careers.

Ehrenreich and Hochschild use the metaphor of the traditional division of domestic labor to describe roles of contemporary female migrant workers: “The First World takes on a role like that of the old-fashioned male in the family—pampered, entitled, unable to cook, clean, or find his socks. Poor countries take on a role like that of the traditional woman within the family—patient, nurturing, and self-denying” (449). The difference is that unlike marriages, the relationship between the female migrant domestic worker and her employer is frequently invisible to the public and not openly acknowledged—and in this sense, it is more like a “secret affair” than a traditional marriage. One reason for the invisibility of such workers is that they tend to be migrant women of color who are therefore “subject to the racial ‘discounting’” often experienced by migrant workers of color in Western countries. Another reason Ehrenreich and Hochschild propose for the invisibility of female migrant workers—particularly in domestic service—is that the “Western culture of individualism, which finds extreme expression in the United States, militates against acknowledging human interdependency of any kind” (443). Accordingly, affluent careerwomen strive to maintain the illusion of “doing it all” by being a “Superwoman” capable of maintaining a full-time career, a happy spouse and thriving children, and a well-kept home. The reality behind this illusion is that the lifestyles of affluent First World families is made possible by the “global transfer of the services associated with a wife’s traditional role—child care, homemaking, and sex—from poor countries to rich ones” (443).

Do you agree with Ehrenreich and Hochschild’s argument that the lifestyles of affluent First World families are facilitated by female migrant workers and their assumption of services associated with a wife’s traditional role? What do you think about the invisibility of female migrant domestic workers and the pressure American careerwomen feel to “do it all”?

2-

"Sixty cents to a man's dollar" - Ann Crittenden

One of the foundational philosophies of the US is equal opportunity for all, but as Estelle Disch writes in the introduction to our unit this week, “equality of educational opportunity cannot produce equality in society […] The economic system in the United States privileges a small proportion of the population with large amounts of wealth and leaves a huge proportion with varying degrees of economic difficulty, including brutal poverty” (413). As we have learned throughout this class, our democracy may be based on the theory of equal opportunity for all citizens, but more often than not, equality is more of an abstract ideal than a functional reality. This is especially true in the arena of paid employment, where many people face workplace discrimination on the basis of gender, race, able-bodiedness, sexual orientation, and other factors, not to mention various barriers to employment.

In “Sixty Cents to a Man’s Dollar,” Ann Crittenden examines the employment discrimination against women that has resulted in the persistent pay gap in which the average earnings of all female workers is approximately 60 percent of men’s earnings. Crittenden's article was published in 2001, so the numbers have improved since then, but have still not reached full parity, with full-time salaried and waged women workers' median earnings being 83.1% of men's in 2021 (according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics--you can check out their website here for more detailed comparisons of men's and women's earnings by 300 different occupations). Crittenden points out that while “[c]onservatives frequently tout women’s economic gains in order to charge that women’s advocates who haven’t folded their tents and gone home must be making up things to complain about” (434), various studies have shown that women workers of similar educational and experience levels and working the same jobs as their male counterparts continue to be paid substantially less.

Additional research by some female economists has shown that the pay gap is even larger between childless women workers and working mothers than between men and women. Among the reasons for this pay gap is the lack of legally mandated paid maternity leaves in the US. Crittenden relays the shocking statistic that the US is one of only six nations in the world that do not require employers to provide paid maternity leaves. Without paid leaves, some mothers with babies and young children quit their jobs in order to take care them, and find that it makes more economic sense to stay home than to have to pay prohibitively high child care costs.

Moreover, women who have interruptions in their employment histories have been found to earn less than women with little to no employment interruptions. Some employers have also been found to believe that mothers who work part-time and/or work from home are less productive and have more “recreational” attitudes toward work, which come with unofficial penalties. In corporate environments, women are judged against the “70-hour-per-week male competitive model” which precludes mothers who want to spend more time with their families.

Do you think that the pay gap between men and women, as well as between childless women and mothers, support the idea that US society is in need of additional reforms in favor of gender equality at the workplace? Have you experienced gender discrimination in the workplace or observed it among people you know, and if so, how has it been manifested?

3- Covid set back women's workforce participation

COLLAPSE

Note: this prompt is not associated with a reading, but rather with a set of facts regarding the pay gap compiled by the U.S. Department of Labor.

The U.S. Department of Labor found that the Covid pandemic set women's labor force participation back over 30 years. As of February 2021 (the latest available data from the Dept of Labor), women's workforce participation rate was at a 30-year low of 55.8%--the same as the rate back in April 1987! The labor participation rate of women of color and those in low-wage jobs decreased even further. A number of factors have been proposed for this 30-year low labor participation rate, including: some working mothers with young children quit work to care for and sometimes help with their childrens' remote education; the prohibitive cost of child and elder care; increased domestic work for working women even if she has a male partner or spouse.

What do you make of women's low labor participation rate in February 2021? If you are in the workforce, have you personally or know someone who quit or wanted to quit work during the pandemic, and why? What do you think of the factors listed above that have contributed to more women leaving the workforce? Are there additional factors that might be contributing to women's low participation rate?