Gender equality? Not really

Read Victoria Shannon's report in the New York Times here. She reports on a Pew Research Center poll, conducted in 22 nations in April and May, about gender equality. The poll found "that in both developing countries and wealthy ones, there is a pronounced gap between a belief in the equality of the sexes and how that translates into reality." Here's the story's lede:

People around the world say they firmly support equal rights for men and women, but many still believe men should get preference when it comes to good jobs, higher education or even in some cases the simple right to work outside the home, according to a new survey of 22 nations.

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In nations where equal rights are already mandated, women seem stymied by a lack of real progress, the poll found.

“Women in the United States and Europe are shouldering major responsibilities at home and at work simultaneously, and this makes for stress and a low quality of life,” said Prof. Herminia Ibarra, co-author of the 2010 Corporate Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum.

No relief on work-family front--even for super-privileged professional golfers

Even professional golfers--even professional women golfers--are expected to be what Joan Williams has called "ideal workers." Read Karen Crouse's New York Times story about Cristie Kerr, age 32, here. She is the number 1 female golfer in the world, following the retirements of two other high profile women who retired to start families. An excerpt from the story follows:

For Kerr, the impediment to motherhood is golf, and there is no automatic relief. A woman’s athletic prime and her peak child-bearing years are like carbon copy pages in her reproductive calendar. A woman’s fertility peaks in her mid-20s and declines sharply after the age of 35, a real conundrum for golfers, whose games, like the courses they play, take years to mature.

Michael Whan, the LPGA Commission is quoted as saying that it's “a tough, aggressive, highly paid career path, and people struggle with what kind of competitor they want to be and what kind of mom they want to be. ... We try to make it possible to be a mom and be competitive, but we can’t make it where nobody leaves because, quite frankly, that’s personal choice.”

Women and work, at different ends of the privilege spectrum

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine ran this item by Lisa Belkin about the anticipated presence of three women on the U.S. Supreme Court, two of them single and childless. What, Belkin asks, has changed since mothers like Justices O'Connor and Ginsburg ascended to the high Court? Are women making progress? Have women's paths narrowed, even as they have ascended? Belkin writes:

Expectation brings obligation, and Sotomayor and Kagan were of the generation facing new tradeoffs. Pursue the career and sacrifice the family. Have the family and ratchet back the career. True, the stigma of not marrying or having children waned for this younger generation, making it more of a deliberate choice for some. But still, roads had to be chosen. There would be no taking five years off to stay home with your children [as O'Connor did] if you hoped for a seat on the Supreme Court.

So, there's a not terribly uplifting report from the more privileged end of the work-life(family?) conundrum.

At the other end are the working poor, like Alexandria Wallace, featured in today's NYTimes front-page story headlined "The New Poor: Cuts to Child Care Subsidy Thwart More Job Seekers." Wallace, 22 and a single mother, has left the work force because state cuts to subsidized child care have put her 3-year-old daughter on a waiting list for that care--along with 11,000 children. Here's an excerpt from Peter Goodman's story, which illustrates how the recession and associated cuts to state budgets have turned welfare reform on its head:

Despite a substantial increase in federal support for subsidized child care, which has enabled some states to stave off cuts, others have trimmed support, and most have failed to keep pace with rising demand, according to poverty experts and federal officials.

Goodman notes that cuts to child care subsidies challenge "the central tenet" of the 1996 welfare reform legislation: "low-income parents were forced to give up welfare checks and instead seek paychecks, while being promised support — not least, subsidized child care — that would enable them to work."

The story continues:

Now, in this moment of painful budget cuts, with Arizona and more than a dozen other states placing children eligible for subsidized child care on waiting lists, only two kinds of families are reliably securing aid: those under the supervision of child protective services — which looks after abuse and neglect cases — and those receiving cash assistance.

These reports show the landscape for working mothers to be rather fraught with pitfalls--regardless of the socioeconomic stratum into which they fall.

Ninth Circuit rules 6-5 to permit class action against Wal-Mart

Read the report by Steven Greenhouse in the New York Times. The lede follows:

In a closely watched case, a sharply divided federal appeals court on Monday ruled 6-5 that a sex discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart could proceed as a class action for more than a million women. The suit is the biggest employment discrimination case in the nation’s history.

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“Wal-Mart tries to project an improved image as a good corporate citizen,” said Brad Seligman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “No amount of P.R. is going to work until it addresses the claims of its female employees.”

The lawsuit, brought in 2001, accuses the retailer of systematically paying women less than men, giving them smaller raises and offering women fewer opportunities for promotion. The plaintiffs stressed that while 65 percent of Wal-Mart’s hourly employees were women, only 33 percent of the company’s managers were.

This ruling came after a "decade of pre-trial maneuvering," and Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has said it will appeal.

Women and the backyard chicken-keeping phenomenon

According to Peggy Orenstein's essay in yesterday's New York Times magazine, The Femivore's Dilemma, women--mostly stay-at-home moms--comprise the majority of folks who have become urban chicken keepers (at least in Berkeley, California, where Orenstein lives). Orenstein observes that the locavore movement has provided an alternative for well-educated women--an alternative, that is, to the standard "break the glass ceiling" or "accept the gilded cage." Here is how she sums up what she calls "femivorism."

Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food — who these days can’t wax poetic about compost? — it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly.

An interesting perspective--very idealized, I'd say. Maybe Orenstein is correct that this is a "good" option for women who have left paid work, but I am reminded of this earlier post regarding the added burdens that locavorism and the slow food movement have put on many women, including those working outside the home and already burdened by the second shift.

Indeed, at the end of her essay, Orenstein comes around to a similar point, concluding "if a woman is not careful, it seems, chicken wire can coop her up as surely as any gilded cage." Be sure to read the rest of the essay to see how she gets to that conclusion.

Thought Provoking Interview with Former Dominatrix on NPR

On Monday night I listened to this interview on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124369913

At first I was just listening to the charming voice of Melissa Febos, and her brand of warm and psychological take on the four years she spent as a professional dominatrix, while she put herself through college, used and then quit using heroin. But then it got me thinking about how much she dared to open up and risk her now-professional career as a creative writing professor. Certainly, I have my own emotionally charged issues with pornography and sex for sale, which are probably grounded in my own insecurities about my body and image thereof. The interview, on the other hand, made me admire Ms. Febos, at the very least for her kudos and for being able to use her experiences and talk about them publicly, even write a memoir about them. Which is altogether problematic for me, because as a feminist, I should take a definite stance against the exploitation of women in any form whatsoever. I suspect there is a difference between the rejection of all forms of prostitution and the acceptance of individuals' extraordinary life stories, but the line, I fear, is a thin one to draw here.