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This is the second in a series examining issues raised by a blog post from Chamber of Commerce Senior Communications Director Brad Peck, where he suggested that women’s interest in closing the gender pay gap amounted to a “fetish for money,” and the subsequent apologies for it by himself and Chamber COO David Chavern. Part 1 and Part 2 at the links.

Seth Godin, a popular marketing author, has written extensively about what he sees as the two key elements of future business success: creatively using the cognitive surplus and participating in a gift economy.

Cognitive surplus refers to the time and mental energy modern workers are supposed to have left over after their regular work that’s represented in volunteer projects like Wikipedia, the online reference site.

Many people have commented on the fact that contributors to projects like Wikipedia are overwhelmingly male. Maybe it has something to do with what the AFL-CIO found in a 2008 survey of working women, that nearly half reported having less than an hour a day to themselves.

If a person has less than an hour of time to themselves per day, it’s the extraordinary individual who has any surplus to give.

Making it worse, household and caring tasks are thoroughly seen as women’s work. So much so, that men who do their own family’s laundry, or cook meals they’re also going to be eating, or spend time with their own children are said to be helping out. Which is to say, helping their female partner do ‘her’ work.

Often, a woman who has a steady, male partner may find that it means having an extra person she’s expected to take care of and clean up after for no pay.

Which brings us to the idea of a gift economy. Godin suggests, and I think he means well, that a gift economy is something like an exchange of acts of great art and generosity without expectation of return. He suggests that it creates a virtuous circle of gift exchange that turns the givers into indispensable people who, in the natural course of things will eventually be rewarded.

What would a gift economy look like? What does it have to do with women’s pay?

In 1995, the United Nations estimated that women around the world generated work for which they were not paid to the tune of $11 trillion, or $15 trillion in 2007 dollars, as Raj Patel notes in his book, “The Value of Nothing.” Patel says that in 1995, “The daily work of rearing children, maintaining a household and engaging in civic work … [was worth] more than half the world’s total output.”

Godin suggests that offering wonderful, useful work as a gift will eventually draw a reward. Yet women’s gifts of necessary work, often microtargeted to the exact needs of a particular family, not only bring little compensation, they’re often barely noticed.

Marilyn Waring, in the 1988 book, “Counting for Nothing,” pointed out that economists made good faith efforts to calculate the economic worth of black market activities men were likely to be involved in, and for which no records existed, in order to estimate the value of their activities and add the approximations to Gross Domestic Product calculations. Yet no similar efforts were being made to figure out what women were contributing to the GDP outside the formal economy.

Thus, Waring said, GDP accounting for national economies had established procedures for estimating how much a man who was a pimp or drug dealer contributed to the economy. But a woman who spent all day turning wild children into productive citizens, or a young girl who spent hours gathering fuel or water for her family and took care of younger siblings, neither of them matter to most economists.

That’s a living example of a gift economy. Women historically, and still, do most of the work of caring for others, cleaning up after them, domesticating toddlers and teenagers for no, or low, pay. And yes, even when that work is done for strangers instead of your own family, it rarely pays a good wage, as noted by economics professor, Nancy Folbre:

… Caring often entails commitments to dependents such as young children, adults with disabilities or the frail elderly who can’t afford to pay directly for the services provided. It doesn’t fit easily into the impersonal logic of fee for service or supply and demand.

Further, caring often creates “outputs” that are not easily captured in market transactions, such as the increases in lifetime capabilities created by excellent kindergarten and preschool teachers.

It’s hard to imagine an explicit contract that could enable a care worker to “capture” the value-added – which extends well beyond increases in lifetime earnings to many less tangible benefits. …

And after all that, when women finally have the gall to ask for the real value of even traditionally paid employment, let alone all the things they do on the cheap with all their surplus energy, work that barely gets acknowledged as work, the Senior Communications Director of the Chamber of Commerce suggests that it’s motivated by something like greed.

I don’t think he knows what that means.

Cross posted from SEIU Early Learning.

“I wish someone would have told me that our job as mothers is not to take emotional pain away from our children but to hold them through it.”

I like that advice. I read it in a recent blog post on Feministing (which, eh-hem, was quite slanted in its leaving out dads…it’s okay…it happens). And then I decided to come up with some advices all by myself, cuz some of my friends are starting to raise kids, like 5 – 10 years after me because I was pregnant and momming before it was cool Heehee. Just kidding. Here goes:

1. Still do what you love. No matter what. It will show your kid how to make oneself happy and not have to rely on others for thrills.

2. Eat good food. It’s good for you, daddy. And you can’t take care of other people if you only have processed, chemical-ridden, nasty junk running through your veins.

3. Read to your kid. Duh.

4. Read them books you think are well-written and smart. Think about what you read them before you read it to them. Because if they like it, they are gonna want to hear you read it EVERY. DAMN. DAY.

5. Ask your kid questions. Serious and difficult and philosophical ones. Like “Do you believe in a god? Many gods? Which ones?Why or why not?” And “Have you ever wondered where your thoughts come from?” And “What did you dream about last night? What do you think dreams mean, if anything?”

6. Get ready to answer those questions yourself. Honestly. And in words that we all understand.

7. When your kid asks you a question that seriously perplexes you, don’t be afraid to tell her that you don’t know. Uncertainty is certain, mommy.

8. Under no circumstances should you produce more than 8. And I must admit here that I think 3 is pushin’ it.

9. Encourage her to be smart and kind. Encourage him to be the same.

10. If you want to make sure your kid hates you, buy them more toys and games and gadgets and what-nots and disposable bullshit than you had as a child. This will also ensure that your kid will hate herself, and everyone you meet will think both you and your kid are total assholes. The same goes for when you become a grandparent. Spoiling is not cute. It’s annoying.

What about you, moms and dads? Any advice for the future parents of the world? Also, I would love to hear from those of you that don’t have kids, what do you think about parenting?

It takes a village, ya know,

Spring

During the 2008 Democratic National Convention Joe Biden’s son told the story of the death of his mother and the way his family rebuilt itself after tragedy. Halfway through his speech he uttered a line that still plays in my heart, “And then we married Jill.”

I didn’t have the world’s best childhood. The first 13 years of my life were mirthless and often violent. It is with no sense of hyperbole that I say I am lucky to be alive and writing with you today.

But it wasn’t luck, honestly, it was my mother. My mother took me out of a bad situation; my mother literally saved my life. We left hell and we learned to live – on our own—together. She taught me how to be independent; she taught me how to be happy again.

And then, in time, we met Dennis.

My mother started dating Dennis when I was a teenager and their connection was instantaneous. Within months they were deeply in love and I had a father figure that would make Seth Cohn jealous. Like Jill Biden, when Dennis married my mother, he married into a family. The years between then and now are filled with beautiful moments of a family coming together, of a girl learning to trust a father figure and of a man learning to be a husband and father.

Dennis isn’t a white knight; he didn’t rescue us from a bad situation. My mother rescued herself and rescued me. I’d like to think of Dennis more as karmic retribution. We’d been through the worst, so the universe sent us the best.

I’ve written before about my history of abuse and even the dating violence I experienced. Through the lessons of my mother and my friends I’ve tried not to allow that victimization define me. I think it’s so easy to get so caught up in the aspects of hate and victimization — especially if that victimization happens at a young age — that we don’t trust or accept love and happiness when it presents itself to us.

But I’ve learned – and am continuing to learn – about love and how to appreciate it. And I have to credit a lot of that to the love found between my mother and Dennis.

Chamber of Commerce Senior Communications Director Brad Peck decided to commemorate the 90th anniversary of suffrage, the recognition of women’s right to vote, by suggesting last week that women who want equal pay have a “fetish for money,” and recommending that women focus our energies on “choosing the right partner at home.”

His post was titled “Equality, Suffrage and a Fetish for Money.” Instead of quoting at length, I’ll let Peck’s own comments on Twitter, in response to SEIU’s Kate Thomas, give you the shorter version in his words:

No. Point was pay is just one thing of value. To achieve your values need to pick the right job/right partner. (1/2)

Fixating on pay as the only thing of value shows a fetish for money. (2/2)

In the post itself, he approvingly quoted another writer who compared women’s interest in equal pay to the famously greedy, stingy Disney character, Scrooge McDuck.

Peck went on to say that “individual choices” about how much time women take out of paid work are responsible for most of the pay gap. The mysterious reason for all this extra time off that women end up taking? Peck doesn’t say explicitly in his own words, but he’s clearly referring to family responsibilities, as spelled out in the section of the New York Times article that he quotes at length in the body of his post.

The message seemed clear enough: if women chose not to have children, they didn’t have much to worry about. Only someone with a “fetish for money” would be concerned about the rest of the pay gap.

After his post was roundly bashed on other blogs, Peck added a sort-of apology, and the next day David Chavern, the COO of the Chamber wrote a post walking Peck’s statements back. But this is cold comfort, because the Chamber has lobbied for years against legislative efforts to reduce gender disparities at work, particularly fighting hard against accommodations for pregnancy and motherhood.

The market has failed women, failed their families. What’s truly offensive is that neither Peck, nor Chavern, nor any of their colleagues will acknowledge it. Chavern pretends complete ignorance of the well-documented reasons why women do better in environments “they create for themselves.” Presumably, environments women create for themselves don’t regard their experience as parents as a trivial annoyance causing mental incapacity.

Thanks in part to the efforts of the Chamber of Commerce, laws against pay equity have been delayed and are still insufficient. Thanks in part to the efforts of the Chamber of Commerce, the US is alone in industrialized countries without paid leave for new mothers.

They can’t apologize sweetly enough to make these assaults on the financial security of America’s working families less damaging.

Photo courtesy, Julien Haler on Flickr, Creative Commons licensed, 2009.

Cross posted from SEIU Early Learning.

About two years ago I attended a NARAL event at received a t-shirt that read, “I Heart Pro-Choice Boys.”

I’m not one for clothing with a message, but I wear that shirt with pride. Pride not only for the organization, but for the concept the shirt relays: anti-choice boys need not apply.

The other day I wore it in front of my parents for the first time.

“Love it!” my dad exclaimed. “How do I get one that says, ‘I heart pro-choice girls?”

My mother cringed at his suggestion. While she loved my wardrobe choice, the idea of a man wearing a shirt with a similar sentiment was a trigger. It was a reminder of a time in her youth when men saw abortion as a form of birth control and potentially forced their partners to seek this medical procedure.

My family is firmly in the “Men are Feminists too,” camp, but my mother’s reaction got me thinking. How does a man publicly show his support for a woman’s right to choose without triggering less-than-stellar associations of the past?

(Image via NARAL, an organization I truly love)

Cross-posted at Small Strokes Fell Big Oaks blog for the series on feminism and relationships. Long-distance relationship. What an odious term.  I’ve always disliked it, and what it represented – long hours on the phone, suffocating logistics of weekends and holidays shared here and there, that persistent pang of missing someone, and that distinct feeling of [...]

Well, here’s some research that can’t possibly be misconstrued: a new study published in The Lancet has documented an association between the amount of weight a mother gains during her pregnancy and the birth weight of her infant. Since birth weight can be used to predict adult BMI, cue the ZOMG! Obesity! commentary. “For babies, studies are just now beginning to show that the effects of tipping the scales at birth may linger throughout life. Many experts suggest that excessive nutrition in pregnancy creates an abnormal uterine environment that permanently changes the baby’s brain, pancreas, fat tissue and other biological systems, said a co-author of the study, Dr. David Ludwig.”

(A note: some of what follows may be triggering for people who have experiences with eating disorders.)

And, of course, since the womb is a baby’s first environment, this is one more thing that pregnant women can be policed on. “As more and more Americans struggle with obesity, the role of early prevention is key [and] early prevention may also extend to the development of the fetus,” said Dr. Jennifer Wu, an obstetrician/gynecologist. William Callaghan, acting chief of the maternal and infant health branch of the CDC added The Lancet paper “just adds more fuel to the fire that [managing weight gain] is an absolutely critical part of preconception care and prenatal care.” Of course, the doctors both go on to mention the importance of good nutrition and and exercise, serving once again to conflate weight with health.

When I was pregnant with A, I became highly attuned to the ever growing list of things I was and was not supposed to be doing. There were the obvious things (drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, using various controlled substances), and the less obvious things (not eating cold cuts). But the list went on and on and on. Restrictions on fish, cheese, processed foods, sprouts, spinach, caffeine, sugar substitutes, hot tubs, any activity where I might fall down, sleeping position, you name it. And every time I casually mentioned that I would give anything for a blue cheese burger and a beer, I would get a very stern “But the baby! You don’t want to risk it!” response.

I see a role here for practitioners to engage with their patients about eating habits, in no small part because pregnancy is enormously taxing on your body and it’s good to make sure you’re getting enough vitamins and drinking enough water. (I’m actually surprised that this isn’t already a part of what practitioners talk about with patients.) However, I do not recommend the strategy one of the midwives took with me early on in my pregnancy, which was to lecture me about my BMI and losing weight. (Keep in mind here that I’m on active duty: my job requires working out 5 days a week, passing regular fitness assessments, and maintaining either a specified weight or body fat percentage.) Ultimately, I gained very little weight during my pregnancy, and lost it all rapidly after delivery owing to some truly horrific medical complications from the delivery. When my daughter was two weeks old, I went back in for follow up and mentioned that I was really worried about how much weight I’d lost. In two weeks, I’d lost all of the weight I gained during the pregnancy plus another 10 pounds. The doctor laughed. “Oh, women don’t normally worry that they’ve lost weight after a pregnancy.” I glared. “I don’t care about that. I’m asking because I am worried. Losing thirty pounds in two weeks isn’t normal, even if you’ve just had a baby.” “Oh, well, I think you’re fine from a health point of view, but let us know if you keep losing weight. You’re really lucky.” In case anyone was wondering, being hospitalized for eight days and having hideous medical complications makes a girl feel really lucky that at least she lost weight.

I’ve got concerns about two different ways this could go. First, there’s even more pressure on women than there was before about losing weight, dieting, and the moralizing and guilt that follows. It’ll just be amplified when it comes to pregnancy: “Well, it’s fine if you want to be selfish and overweight, but think of your baby! Dooming a child to a life of being overweight!” We already live in a world where the word policed doesn’t just mean social pressure and stigma for some women for conduct during pregnancy: it means criminal prosecution. This has the potential to become just one more thing where pregnant women are judged, shamed, and guilted about not providing a perfect uterine environment. (As though there is such a thing and that women are able to control it like that. Environmental exposures, anyone?)

The study’s authors conclude “In view of the apparent association between birthweight and adult weight, obesity prevention efforts targeted at women during pregnancy might be beneficial for offspring.” Well, yes, it might, if done in a way that’s constructive, understanding of the fact that significant and sustained weight loss is not a realistic goal, and focuses on good eating habits as part of a healthy pregnancy. But I’m not particularly optimistic that’s how it’ll shake down. You’re likely to wind up with people saying truly asinine things like “The idea that a big baby is a healthy baby, and a crying baby is probably a hungry baby who should be fed, are things we really need to rethink,” Dr. Birch said. Spoken like someone who’s never had an infant.

In publishing Daniel Indiviglio’s article “Why Working Mothers Fall Behind,” The Atlantic once again demonstrates its lack of understanding of women’s experiences. The article is a response to Tuesday’s New York Times piece, titled “A Labor Market Punishing to Mothers.” Indiviglio says of the working women’s plight, “But calling this a problem is analogous to [...]

look. i am not abusive to my kid. not even close. and neither is her father.

she is a happy, healthy three year old. she speaks three languages, loves to dance middle eastern style, and explains to strangers that ‘mama is from america’ but she is from bumblebee (the name of her preschool).

but, us american society, history, government is abusive to black children.

and egyptian society and government is abusive to black children. i know this cause i worked with sub saharan african refugees in cairo. i worked with ex child soldiers and teenage sex workers from sudan, refugees from eritrea and ethiopia. they are stuck here in limbo, cairo, legally segregated from the rest of egyptian society, not allowed to attend public schools, hospitals, racially profiled by the police, making 150 dollars a month is a considered a good job, living in ghettos, and struggling to either be repatriated or moved to europe, the usa, or australia.

they have been my teachers, my students, my friends.

some of them are mothers, and many of them didn’t have a real choice in the matter.

a lot of them look like me.

a lot of them don’t have the luxury of child free spaces, because many of them are children, themselves.

i know what abuse is. i grew up with it, day after day, year after year. and there are times when i would rather have my daughter with me at a bar, than with a babysitter that i barely know.

i work really hard so that my daughter knows that she is a person. because it is rare for black girls or women to be allowed to be people, a full fledged person, in this world.

 It’s World Breastfeeding Week sponsored by the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA), a global network of individuals and organizations concerned with the protection, promotion and support of breastfeeding worldwide. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “breastfeeding contributes to a lifetime of good health. Adults who were breastfed as babies often have lower blood [...]