For a single mom, money may help put food on the table, but it can’t buy family time and physical interaction with her kids.
Note: all stats pertain to the United States, unless otherwise specified.
-Among adults 25 and older today, more women than men have finished high school.
-Female enrolment in post-secondary education had surpassed male enrolment by the early 1980s.
-Due to decades of female dominance in post-secondary participation, 20.1 million women now hold bachelor’s degrees, compared with 18.7 million men.
-Among adults 25 and older in the US, 10.6 million women now hold master’s degrees or higher, compared with 10.5 million men.
-In the US, 57% of students in post secondary education are women.
-As of 2009, 58% of all bachelor degrees were earned by women.
-60% of students enrolled in advanced/graduate programs are women.
-In America’s largest cities, single, childless women 22-30 out-earn their male counterparts by 8%.
Everything’s coming up roses for women. Woot! You go, grrrl!
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Okay, here’s something else to think about: Men employed full time work more hours per week, on average, than women. Many experts insist this disparity reflects that “responsibilities for child care and other unpaid household work are still unequally shared among partners.” In other words, women would work more, if they could. You know, if they weren’t stuck at home with the young ‘uns and all, changing diapers and scrubbing toilets.
However, in countries such as Sweden, where generous paid paternity leave is granted in conjunction with maternity leave, men tend to take only about 20% of their entitlement, and where possible, transfer the remainder of their leave to their wives/partners.
Consider this: when my ex and I were first together, and discussing the kind of life we wanted to have, we agreed that we both wanted kids, and that we didn’t want our kids raised in a daycare center. We both worked in the same vocation (we actually met at work), and I had enough experience in the job to demand the same wage as he did. Still, I wanted to be the one to stay home with the kids for the first few years. That time at home gave me time to enjoy my children, to watch them grow and develop, and to give them the intangible things that money can’t buy. It also gave me the time to get enough work done around the house that when my ex got home, he got to enjoy the children too. As a couple, we sacrificed half our income so we’d be able to see family time as something wonderful, rather than something onerous. It also gave me time to add to the million words of crap conventional wisdom says all writers must get on paper before they get any good.
When I went back to work–when my older two were 3 and 4–I pulled 16-20 hour weeks compared to my ex’s 40 hour weeks, with us working opposite shifts so someone was always home. This was also largely my choice–no way was I going to work outside the home if it meant I had to hand over half my pay (or more) so someone else could raise our kids for us. In our low income bracket, between the savings I could generate by cooking from scratch, hunting down deals, and not hiring out home maintenance work, it would have made better financial sense for me not to work at all, if we’d had to pay for child care. When all the costs of working were tallied, the moment daycare got added into the mix, I “earned” more by staying at home.
As a single parent, I still only work part time outside the home. Between the 20 hours/week I wait tables, royalties from my four published books, and rental income from the house I still own in BC, I earn about $40k/year. My kids and I live very lean, but we’re getting ahead month by month. I could, and arguably should, work full time–it would add over $20k to my yearly income if I did–but if I did that, I’d barely see my children. With two of my kids in their teens, domestic labor is not a serious consideration–they can and will do their part to keep the house tidy and get themselves fed, watch their younger brother, keep the grass cut, and they don’t need anyone to cattle-prod them into doing their schoolwork. The only thing stopping me from working more is that I value my time at home and with my children more than I value money.
Other mothers can and do feel the exact same way. If men in Sweden are handing over their paternity leave to their wives…why are they doing it? Is it because they don’t want to stay home and change diapers? Or is it because their wives DO want to stay home and read stories to their kids, cuddle them, rock them, bond with them, watch them take first steps and hear them speak first words? Is it because these women feel stuck at home, or is it because they want to be home?
Consider my sister. She’s a medical doctor working in administration. She earns a fuckton of money, as does her pilot husband. They have four children and a full-time nanny/housekeeper to take the majority of the domestic burden off of them. My sister has consistently made career decisions that limited her income, advancement, and seniority level in her job in order to have a balanced life that sees her spending more waking hours at home than at work. She opted not to specialize in plastic surgery (as many advised her to do), because it would mean years of eating, sleeping and breathing surgery, only to have her biological clock start clamoring at the exact moment she’d be finishing her residency.
Even in administration, she has declined promotions that would likely have seen her earning 50% more at this point than she does now, but would also have required her to spend weeks at a time overseas, and 3+ hours more per day at work when she wasn’t abroad. Even though, in her ginormous income bracket, the cost of hiring additional domestic help would be more than offset by the increased income she’d have received by making her career her top priority.
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According to feminism, my sister’s choices are a big problem. My sister’s choices have led her to earn less than most men in her chosen profession, and apparently my sister has made these choices because she “feels stuck” with an uneven share of domestic and child care “responsibilities” compared to her husband, all because of gender norms.
However, my sister’s husband has also chosen his jobs based on the number of hours he can spend at home with the kids. Rather than a “glory job”, he opted for a stable position where the number of hours, and nights, spent away from home was limited, and which would allow him to relocate as his wife’s career demanded. In other words, he’s made the exact same choices my sister did, for the exact same reasons, and he sacrificed a good portion of his earning potential to do it.
Watching them at home is like watching a well-oiled machine, each of them taking on the chores that need doing and spending quality time in the evenings and on weekends with all four kids. Considering my brother in law earns $20+ every 6 minutes, his hours in the air are worth WAY more than any extra hours he’d have to pay someone to do laundry, cook meals and drive his kids around so the burden wouldn’t all fall on my sister if he chose to work more. But the time he gets to spend with his kids is worth it to him.
I have a few issues with the way feminism weighs career success. 1) It assumes the only conceivable way to measure career success is through earnings. 2) It assumes any pay gap owing to women making different choices than men are a result of women feeling “stuck” with child care. 3) It assumes any pay gap owing to men making different choices than women are a result of men “being free” to make their careers their #1 priority. 4) It reduces children’s relationship with their working parents down to a single characteristic: the obligation of domestic labor.
KIDS ARE MORE THAN WORK. For fuck sake, what’s the point of even having them if you don’t get to watch or help them grow up because you’re working all the time?
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Blaming women’s tendency to choose to spend more time at home on the fact that “responsibilities for child care and other unpaid household work are still unequally shared among partners,” means feminism sees kids in only one light–as a burden on parents, rather than a joy. According to feminism, women work fewer hours because they feel they HAVE to be home more, when I’d argue that women work fewer hours because they WANT to be home more. Participating in your children’s childhoods isn’t a goddamn chore–it’s a privilege, and one not everyone gets to enjoy.
Especially men, who often feel that putting their careers first IS the only socially acceptable way of putting their family first.
Warren Farrell coined the term “success object”, and for many men, this is what their value in the sexual marketplace and in their own families boils down to. Feminism believes men have freedom and privilege because they earn more than women. But according to Farrell, “men often feel obligated to earn money someone else spends while they die sooner–and feeling obligated is not power.”
Back in Sweden, where men tend to opt out of their own paternity leave after only a few months, one needs to ask why? If they simply chose to forfeit their leave and go back to work early, one might argue they wished to escape the drudgery of being housebound, changing diapers and scrubbing floors. But men in Sweden don’t forfeit their leave–they transfer it to their wives. From this, we can assume that women not only want to stay home longer with their children, but that they feel it is socially acceptable for them to do so. And that even men who may wish to stay home during their children’s first months of life, still feel pressured to go back to work ASAP, to not allow their careers to stagnate while they spend their days rocking their babies and smelling the tops of their heads and enjoying all the other intangible benefits that are not measurable by feminist standards, but which many parents consider to be worth more than dollars and cents.
And now to circle back to my original statistics. The feminist contention is that women make the career choices they do because they feel “obligated by gender norms” to spend more time at home, while men have the “freedom” afforded by gender norms to put work first. I would argue that it is the opposite–that women make the career choices they do largely because of the freedom current gender norms give them to make choices that are right for them, and that if men consistently put work before family, it’s often out of a sense of obligation owing to those same gender-based expectations.
And what does that have to do with women’s overrepresentation in post-secondary education? Well, if women make the choices they do because it’s what they want…well, in Canada, we already have problems with shortages of physicians in many communities. How will that shortage be affected when 60% of the doctors graduating today take a year off work to have a child, and when they do go back to work, opt not to spend 60 hours/week in the office, but to spend more time with their families because they have the freedom to do so? If we can’t get more men into post-secondary education, many professions will be in for a shake-up.
In medicine, everything from the number of available spots in med schools to the number of physicians licensed by provincial Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, is largely dependent on a traditional male “work-first” ethic that is going to have to change if we don’t do something to eliminate the gender gap in post-secondary education. If male physicians tend to work more hours than female ones, it follows that the larger a percentage of women there are earning medical degrees, the more doctors we’re going to need to provide the same services.
According to feminists, this problem is easily solved by collectively guilting women into making the same choices men typically do. But is this fair to women? Is it fair to kids?
And is it fair to men, who might make different choices in their careers if they didn’t feel socially obligated to become “success objects”, because everyone, including feminism, is telling them that money is everything and nothing else matters?
Originally appeared at Owning Your Shit.
—Photo neelaka/Flickr
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Could the statistics source be included?
In the United States, we also incarcerate at least half of our minority men before they reach 25. That has a LOT to do with slowing rates of men in higher education, and a lot more to do with race (and gender intersectionality) than with gender alone.
girlwriteswhat your my hero. every minute i got to spend with my daughter was precious and worth any lost income. I milked a sick and holiday pay backlog for 6 months to spend time with her with no income. I was delighted to do it. I suspect its a conspiracry of the matriarchy.
GWW:
I do wonder if men’s addiction to female beauty might be a better basis for male disposability than the usual argument you make about women being valued for their ability to produce children. Just thought I’d throw it down here; good a place as anywhere….
Eh? Not all women are exactly… beautiful. A lot are plain ugly. Or just plain. This doesn’t bother me much, and, at a guess, I’m a 5 on the handsome scale.
The fact is no matter how much you value your fellow man he still cannot give you a family of your own.
One reason that there’s so much focus on childrearing as “unpaid labor” is that many of the academic variants of feminism come from a Marxist, Marxian, or materialist perspective, in which gender roles have very clear economic roles. They sometimes think of “social reproduction” (giving birth and raising children) in a similar category to industrial production. Also, there have been close ties between those advocating for women’s rights and for labor rights, so there’s been some cross-pollination over the years. But the “missing out on earning money” focus has to do with a lot more things than feminism. At the… Read more »
Marx didn’t have anything to say about child birth or “unpaid labor” or any of that stuff. It’s not Marx’s fault. Leave him out of it.
I have a radical idea. How about the working world adjusting itself a bit so it’s more possible to have a serious career and be a parent at the same time, for both men AND women, instead of GirlWritesWhat blaming everything on feminism, or implying that women really don’t deserve to have serious careers because most of them will plan their work around mommyhood anyway? How about both men AND women saying “We would both like to be involved parents without our employers looking askance at us, as if we are not really devoted to our jobs if that is… Read more »
Agreed. Such a refusal to compromise makes me want to move to Europe where their weekly hours are shorter, but the employees are far more productive than employees in America who have more weekly hours. Plus, Europeans are statistically more satisfied with the quality of their lives than Americans are, and this is because they value both work and play, so to speak.
Here’s a radical idea. The working world, in those top positions–politics, partnership in a law firm, etc–generally go to the one who puts in the most. Those positions will never be amenable to the 30 hour work week. They just won’t. Anywhere where a job isn’t homogenized and regulated, where it is based on competition, those who put the most in will go the farthest. I’ve heard a prominent feminist (I can’t remember who it is at the moment) state that women should not be allowed the choice to prioritize motherhood, because if they are allowed to do this, most… Read more »
The prominent feminist you are referring to is Simone de Beauvoir. Her exact word on the topic is “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”
Actually I feel pretty good about it.
(referring to your last paragraph).
Come back and tell me the same thing when you have to wait three weeks to see your GP.
Ah, Socialized Medicine. This is what the citizens of the U.S.A. have to look foward to with “Obama Care”.
Socialized medicine isn’t the problem, really. I mean, the US and Canada both have ways of limiting access to health care. In the US, it’s money. In Canada, it’s wait times. Either way, health care is simply going to be more expensive now that we have more than Aspirin, penicillin and x-rays, right? One of the biggest generators of wasted money in health care is liability–a patient insists on an MRI even when it isn’t necessary, and they’re getting one in order to avoid the 1% chance they did and a doctor and hospital and everyone else within 10 miles… Read more »
TRU: “I have a radical idea. How about the working world adjusting itself a bit so it’s more possible to have a serious career and be a parent at the same time, for both men AND women, instead of GirlWritesWhat blaming everything on feminism, or implying that women really don’t deserve to have serious careers because most of them will plan their work around mommyhood anyway?” Good point. We should all advocate for paternity leave for fathers in the USA equal to the maternity leave currently enjoyed by mothers (along with harsh government penalties against companies that hassle or fire… Read more »
what i find interesting is that no one mentions a common goal for many women to earn a higher income….they want to avoid domestic abuse. i grew up seeing women abused verbally and physically and saw that the way to escape that abuse was to earn enough money to have options. thus i cam now a single woman in my early 40’s earning 200k+ a year. this salary allows me the freedom to walk out if a man slaps me, if he verbally abuses me or cheats on me. i walk out with no financial down-side what-so-ever. i know enjoy… Read more »
Um… you really don’t need $200k/year to leave an abusive guy. I managed with three kids and no child support on what is essentially a full-time food server’s pay. It is interesting that women often prioritize financial security when choosing to stay in abusive relationships, since men seem more likely to prioritize a sense of obligation to a partner when they opt to stay (a coworker of mine: “What am I supposed to do? I can’t just put her and her kid out on the street!”), or the protection of their kids, whom they can’t realistically take with them. It’s… Read more »
GWW, I think you over-estimate how concerned feminists are with middle-income advancement. Most feminists are aware of the typical female middle income profile. Initially women advance measurably faster than men. Later, the majority of women pull off the express-way to make room for family life. I have argued with fellow MRAs that the female early-career rocket-stage is evidence that women in their 20’s already know that they will slow down in their 30’s (so they try to cram a lifetime into a decade). I think this explains the fact that “single, childless women 22-30 out-earn their male counterparts by 8%”… Read more »
No the figure is not comparing like with like so it doesn’t show any discrimination. it’s just a very global men vs women figure. I think this explains the fact that “single, childless women 22-30 out-earn their male counterparts by 8%” (most MRAs think this is evidence of reverse discrimination). It’s education. The numbers DO NOT equate for education level (or anything else) and women are 60% more likely to go to college when a college graduate of course earns a lot more money on average. If you were to equate for college level you’d find the usual very small… Read more »
In America’s largest cities, single, childless women 22-30 out-earn their male counterparts by 8%
This is just the average, and it is from data from 4 years ago, I think. I am sure the advantage is even greater for women today. Of course, you don’t hear many people talking about this, or saying it is a problem of men being oppressed.
I think this was actually a very good article!
It’s the consequence of the 60% higher rate of attendance at college of women (in the USA).
60% of college graduates, 60% of masters degrees, heck, 60% of high school graduates are women. I read not too long ago that in the UK, some ungodly percentage of men under 25 are considered *unemployable*. Can’t recall the actual figure, but it was ghastly. Guess those education reforms they brought in in the 80s and 90s really helped, huh? What’s crazy is that those reforms in things like language arts were brought in to help girls. And they did help girls, relative to boys. To put it simply, on a scale of reading comprehension and writing ability, boys were… Read more »
GWW: I read Hoffsomers the war against boys. That is my understanding too: Overall worse teaching methods were implemented specifically because they were known to resonate more with girls. The bad news is that boys and girls are actually learning less, but girls are whomping boys. In the USA the AAUW released a study (but they only published the talking points of the report. The actual report was only given to media outlets if they weren’t looking at the methodology) called Short Change Girls Short Change America. It was pure advocacy research, hardly any of it was true. IN 1996… Read more »
I would love a world where humans could each have more time with their kids. Some of this is planning and deferring gratification (something Americans don’t always seem prone to do ;<) and some of it is currently how our economics seem set up. Not an economics expert so I can't speak to that. I had a job that paid more and my husband was in school. He parented the children more than did I. Then I parented more than he did. And the kids have had grand[parents too and then preschool and so forth. They called us "mommydaddy" or "daddymommy" interchangeably at one point and I thought that was kind of cool, as if that was our name, nothing separated from it. Both of us were equal parents and always have been. Both of us have careers and goals and want retirement money and insurance. I don't see that changing either.
A couple I know got around this in an way. While she was making 2x his income, which was still an decent amount of money and pre-kids, they did their best to try to set up their lives to live on his income and save the rest. Needless to say they couldn’t do it 100% but when they finally had kids neither had to work full time for about 3 1/2 years. Financial planning and being responsible for what you can bring to a family from both partners allowed this to happen.
Blanket blaming all of “feminism” for less than perfect thinking is a horrible way to go about pointing out how men and women have begun to share the responsibility of loving and caring for their families.
How about just blaming gender feminists and lifeboat feminists? It’s certainly not as sexist as blaming masculinity for violence like we see so often on this site and other feminist sites.
I don’t think offending feminists matters much anyway because feminists aren’t a useful demographic that will ever be concerned about he plight of men.
I think the blame fits. The movement as a whole has a certain way of looking at these issues and they are really quite deceitful in trying to frame the issue so as to create the impression of women oppressed and men having power when the opposite is true. As the article says children are a plus not a minus and the role of earning money is a minus not a plus. There is NOT a range of opinions on this topic within the movement. Not that I have ever seen. On other issues there is some variation and disagreement… Read more »